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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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and get a better or worse deal based on how evil they were in a previous life?

I thought that was a recent Western invention and Hindus don't actually think that you are earning Good Boy points and Bad Lad demerits and being rewarded or punished suitably in the next incarnation.

Edit: Don't trust whitey, at least not about Hinduism.

There are various sects but the unwritten laws and societal structures are largely same for all unless you dive deep into the texts for various texts.

I'm someone who leans more towards the vedas which are far more war focused than the puranas which are the latest and the ones with most made up stuff.

Also germanics had similar values and an understanding of the world not too far from Hindus. Survivethejive and Arya Akasha are two good sources for this from a western pov and the puri Shankracharya from an Indian pov.

"recent" is relative, but from the Upanishads:

'He's made of this. He's made of that.' What a man turns out to be depends on how he acts and on how he conducts himself. If his actions are good, he will turn into something good. If his actions are bad, he will turn into something bad. A man turns into something good by good action and into something bad by bad action. And so people say: 'A person here consists simply of desire.' A man resolves in accordance with his desire, acts in accordance with his resolve, and turns out to be in accordance with his action.

I've heard college educated white Americans confidently assert my above-mentioned statement.

Turns out they were wrong.

Hinduism in its purest forms is very reactionary and extremely complex since it's a in umbrella term for a whole lot of sects. The common view among most is that you do good deeds and are given a life based on them, those who attain salvation escape life and death.

Now there are absolutely sects that don't believe in re incarnation at all. Remember, Hindus in India follow a more Puranic faith which is the complete opposite of the vedas. Brahmins hard-coded a lot of things to keep society sane as the hbd kept getting worse as the Aryan stock went down and so you go from having hymns in vedas about indra destroying forts of dasyus to prohibition of onion and garlic and some dharmashastras stating that a woman is a virgin after each period.

People in India joke about how every good indologist has to visit Germany since that field I dead here. The actual unadulterated Aryan faith cannot work now, the people back then were different. Vedas for instance are actually compatible with things like evolution, the earth being round and asking people to go out and fight.

For scholars I can vouch for, I'd say Goldman is really good, his ramayana translation is the best out there if you wish to read it in a literary form. @sarker is right btw, though many boomers here definitely don't believe in free will intellectualy, at least the religious ones.

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