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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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Sikhism is an interesting one to me - I wasn't terribly familiar with it until the first time I visited a gurdwara and heard a lot from a Sikh community in themselves. I already had some academic and practical knowledge of both Hinduism and Islam for context, and as they explained their history, doctrines, and practices to me it felt blazingly obvious what Sikhism is.

That is, and with apologies to any Sikhs here, to me Sikhism reads as what you get out of a Hindu reform movement in a place where there is a lot of Islam already in the water supply. There's a lot of it that feels midway between Hinduism and Islam, or as a kind of hybrid. If you come from a Hindu background (as Guru Nanak did), become convinced of the oneness of God in a way that goes a little beyond the soft-monotheism of a lot of Hindu theology, and are surrounded by Islamic influences but are not interested in just becoming Muslim yourself... well, it's fairly intuitive where that ends up.

Anyway, I don't think I would be convinced that Abrahamic monotheism ultimately originates in Zoroastrianism? I think there are Zoroastrian influences in the mix in places (the magoi Matthew references, famously, but also the Zoroastrian influences are especially visible on Islam), but the genealogy is too hard to trace through ancient Judah, I think. I find it more plausible that monotheism independently evolved in several different places historically - after all, if you glance at anything from Hinduism to European paganism to even Chinese traditional religion, I'd argue there are a number of proto-monotheistic trends that often seem to appear. Most of them didn't get to full monotheism the way that Zoroastrianism and Abrahamic religion did, but Brahman or Heaven or the Stoic vision of God or what have you are enough to make it plausible to me that concepts of a unitary divine can just evolve independently.