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Re: ARTICLE : conversion ammendment to FAQ
GERALD J. LA CORTE (l23@hopi.dtcc.edu) wrote:
: Hinduism is not a single religion. Hinduism is a collection of religions
: or a collection of faiths from India and the surrounding area.
I have to strongly disagree. The whole is not just a sum of the
parts. YOu have interactions and a whole lot of other things.
Just like a group of cells (blood+muscle+bone...) do not lead
to a human being, similarly, you do not get Hinduism by collecting
various faiths.
Another analogy could be a forest. You cannot just arbitrarily
grow some trees, (of various species), throw some animals in it
and call it a forest. A forest is much much more than that.
Hinduism for me is like an over-arching system, to which various
cultures, people, faiths, rituals, philosophies belong to. But then,
I said it incorrectly. It is the system, as well as also the
constituents. And also something beyond that. It is
more than just a collection of the above mentioned individual
constituents. It is not a mosaic, nor a matrix which binds its
constituents. Without Hinduism, none, repeat, none of the individual
elements will be able to survive. We see it happen in the history
of world. And without its constituents, Hinduism will cease to exist.
Perhaps, the roots of this type of analysis could be traced to
the works of Newton and Descartes, which basically believed in
the "divide and conquer approach" to understand reality. So, they
analyzed parts, and from there tried to understand the whole.
But even they realized that this jump from "parts" to "whole"
is quite a jump.
--
Nachiketa Tiwari
