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Hi Vivek, nice to meet you!
(Leaving aside the arguments made within, this came across as rather fawning to me.)
At any rate, he'd have my vote if I was in a position to do so, he seems saner than the overwhelming majority of Republican candidates, and I think his claim to believe in God is one of those useful lies to the voter base rather than anything he sincerely believes in. If we were to ding politicians for being slightly two-faced, we'd have to elect only those who had half their face mauled by a pitbull to compensate.
This is the second time I've seen this idea expressed. It's been funny both times because both times the commenters were praising Ramaswamy while they dismissed his statement realpolitik, not realizing they, you, are insulting the man. There's a reason he said "God exists" besides actually believing it, it's the idea he could have said without lying: "The Christian Church was foundational to modern civilization and remains the moral basis for all popular discussions of ethics, including those among individuals on the left whom espouse belief in obligate Christian treatment of others and not only sin but original sin and the perpetual atonement thereof. I forever reject their Godless branch of Christianity."
His religiosity would remain ambiguous, and were he an atheist it would mean he is not the sort of man to open a key political statement with a lie. "I'd totally vote for that [not-too-clever grifter]" isn't much for praise.
I'm no proselytizer, I'm not the right material for it and this isn't the place, not with its certain decorum. Decorum like I must be charitable, that I must take your comment as made in earnest and good-faith and originating from reason. Good-faith enough, yes, but the problem I face reading so much of the by-atheist, on-atheism comments here, like you saying Ramaswamy couldn't possibly be religious, is they do not originate from reason. You say this of Ramaswamy because of the solely emotional importance apropos your self-concept that intelligent men ought not be religious. Yet it takes little searching in our past to uncover rich fields of brilliant and highly religious men; it takes no searching at all to see the greatness of western civilization, directly resultant from biotruths Christianity identified and curtailed where degradative and saw flourish where beneficiary. What else is this but the final testament of transcendental intelligence? What would someone counter with, "appeal to tradition"? It worked then, it doesn't need to now, because now we "know better"? Okay--for its know-better Godless Christianity, Western Europe and the UK have maybe 25 years before war returns when the movements that rose a century ago rise again for bloodshed that will only be stopped with whichever side achieving permanent victory. At least we knew better.
I didn't claim he couldn't possibly be religious, I'm only claiming that based on what I know of him, I find it rather unlikely.
A white lie (you can't get much whiter, since if he becomes president he's legally obligated to not mix religion and state beyond the tiny extent that's become normalized, like swearing on the Bible and saying "One Nation Under God" and the like) doesn't make him a grifter in my eyes, and overall his policy positions align with my classical liberal with libertarian sympathies better than any other candidate I'm aware of.
I claim he's no more genuinely religious than Trump, or even Obama. That's functionally atheist but for a few lies to the proles as far as I'm concerned.
Leaving aside oughts, the more intelligent simply are less religious. I have my own reasons to think that religion is a waste of one's currently limited time under the sun, but that's a fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence#:~:text=In%20a%20sample%20of%202307,and%20fundamentalism%2C%20but%20not%20spirituality
A high IQ UMC Tam-Brahm first gen immigrant is pretty unlikely to be a strong or even real believer in any religion, and I can forgive the fib needed to make the the Republican base not lose their shit over electing a Hindu, at least by birth.
Aw man, cmon, what is the western culture war but a religious schism? Those high IQ people--specifically those within who would describe themselves as ideologically congruous with the modern American left--don't believe in God, transubstantive atonement (exactly) or afterlives as such, but they believe in sin, original sin and metaphysical moral obligation. They are Godless Christians, they view the world with fundamentally Christian moral framing, they act essentially as Christians act, insofar as they are Godless, they judge others for their failing to behave as what they consider proper of Christians. They have holy days, religious celebrations, sacraments, saints, martyrs, heretics and blasphemers (and the punishing thereof) and excommunication. They are recognized by the state and they hold tremendous power within the state. I am not being strict with terms or pedantic; in fact referring to them as "still technically irreligious" would require severe equivocation.
The relevance of this is in rebuke of the idea that "greater" intelligence relates with a proportionate decrease in religiousness when the evidence shows firmly it does not. They still take the impossible as possible in faith, they still need and yearn for religion and the moral guidance it provides. You're a smart guy, all of this is an understanding I know you're capable of reaching through reasoning. Why then doubt this of Ramaswamy?
You fired off a comment asserting he's a lying atheist with no effort to substantiate your belief until called on it. If you were seriously considering his religiosity it would be in your first comment and I would have felt no reason to reply. Your initial low-effort is consequent of your belief that he couldn't possibly be religious, something that shows again in your response as you again fail to consider how you could be wrong. I could be wrong for the exact reasons you list, but I understand how this would make him unsuitable for the highest office.
Look at what he's said and find another serious candidate other than Trump who even comes close. There's not one, but the strength isn't just the novelty of those positions from someone with a radically different image than Trump. There's strength in the intelligence his specific words indicate he possesses. Where you see a "white lie" or "fib" I see someone who is deeply considerate of and articulate on many matters save one and your attempt to excuse that one inadequacy is poor.
As I said to another, if his "God exists" statement is a lie, it means he is either unable or unwilling to endorse Christianity in a way so as to not lie. If he is unable to endorse Christianity without lying then he is significantly less intelligent than I assessed, and if he is unwilling to endorse Christianity without lying, all of his positions must be reevaluated within the maximally cynical frame. That he is making a play for pure power and is at risk of shedding all stated positions for political utility. His strength as a political figure comes in honestly presenting himself to the movement that has formed around Trump as of the like mind with them. Any willingness to lie for political gain is a grim indictment of his leadership, regardless of a "protection" against being Hindu-coded.
On that, I can't ding you for having the larger-world image of the United States, but as someone who lives in deeply red, deeply Christian America, the idea of evangelicals still being a meaningful demographic in the electorate is a bad joke. It's insulting, really, every time I've been subjugated to the inanity of unironic usages of the term "Christo-Fascism." The Church has no power. Past that, political lines are swiftly approaching pure "because fuck the outgroup" motivations. If Ramaswamy is on the ballot there is not a meaningful number of Republican voters who would pass on him even if he were known as a Hindu or an Atheist. If he goes all-in on supporting Trump and for whatever reason the latter is unable to run, between Trump's support, the (R) beside his name and being up against Biden as a non-Trump face, he'll steamroll the general with no whit of obstacle from his personal beliefs regarding religion.
There is an extremely high chance he's on the ballot come November 2024. If he is, he will be the next President. That's why this is so important. We're not quibbling over the positions of an obscure candidate, he's the frontrunner after Trump which means after 2024 he also has a very good chance of winning in 2028. Everyone here should be looking as seriously as I am at what the man who has the highest chance of being if not the 47th, the 48th POTUS, is really saying.
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I'm confused here. Are you saying the second statement is what he actually believes and that "God Exists" is a way of representing it? Or that he would just say the second statement if he didn't actually believe God exists?
Yeah that was verbose.
Ramaswamy is a very smart, very successful guy who takes positions like "climate change is a hoax" and "we should give Israel less money." He knows what he's saying, he has a real ethos and speaks from it. Opening a list of tenets with "God exists" is endorsing religion, and since this is the US, it's endorsing Christianity, and he knows this. Why would he lie about what he personally believes while nevertheless endorsing the church when he could just not lie and endorse the church? Unwilling or unable, either would disqualify him.
This is a distortion of what he said, which is that the climate change agenda is a hoax. It's a statement about the policy prescriptions, not temperature measurements.
They're the same statement, his is the more intelligent way of phrasing it. This is my whole point: he shows clear care in framing his positions, meaning he could endorse Christianity without lying about what he believes.
I think there are actually real and serious differences between "climate change is a hoax" and "the climate change agenda is a hoax". Admitting that climate change is a real and serious problem that needs to be fixed and our current solutions won't do the job is incredibly different to "climate change is a chinese lie designed to hurt the US manufacturing industry".
"Hoax" is the critical term. He didn't say "the climate change agenda is profoundly misguided and by design can't solve its claimed problems." He said it's a hoax, a malicious deception, the same "we don't need to do anything about it" as just saying climate change is a hoax. The reason he didn't say "climate change is a hoax" is because he didn't want that floating around as a weaponizable quote but you reading that into his tweet is the benefit anyone could see coming from his particular phrasing, something that is once again my entire point in this line of discussion.
Meanwhile, his stated policy does say he thinks it's closer to the "Chinese lie" side of hoax.
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Yeah I've got to say, the persona strongly appeals to me.
Trump may occasionally say things that I sort of agree with, and say them more directly than most people do, but he's still fundamentally an idiot who is pandering to idiots. He's created too much enmity in the deep state to be viable at all, so he's a lost cause to do anything even if he wins.
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Hah, agreed. When I heard him talk about energy independence I almost stood up and started clapping. He's got the techno-optimist rationalist policy slate down pat.
Was his energy dependence really any different compared to bog standard Republican energy indepedence?
No idea. Are any of them actually pro nuclear? That was the big thing for me.
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Well, except for the spirituality and all the statism.
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Come on now, that's not Vivek, that's his mother writing that 😁
I don't think that's necessarily so; his family is Tamil Brahmin, there's no reason he can't be a Hindu syncretist because there is the tradition that 'all gods are emanations of the one God who is behind all of reality' so yeah, he can say he believes in God with a sincere face and he doesn't even have to deny Jesus because within all the strands and traditions and philosophies that come under the umbrella of Hinduism, Jesus as a divine avatar to the West isn't impossible. Your god is your god and my god is my god, but the Brahman lies behind and above it all.
I don't know his family background so I'm only noodling around based on what is on Wikipedia, but if his family are Tamil Brahmins from Kerala, they could be in the Iyer tradition, and that's founded by a non-dualist (the only reality is the transcendent God, and the 'self' which we think experiences the world is ultimately not different in essence from that God) - I'm just pulling bits and pieces out, I'm sure the real version is a lot more complicated:
So Jesus is your personal god? No problem with that! You believe in ultimate God, I believe in ultimate God, whatever version we worship as our personal God doesn't matter that greatly.
It's quite fashionable these days for many Hindus to Abrahamic-wash their religion, passing off our hundreds of thousands of deities as manifestations of Brahman/God, as you right put it. This is particularly true for the more aggressively proselytizing brand of Hinduism, which smooths over theological differences by saying it's all good, you're just invoking one of the many facets of God when you pray to Shiva or Vishnu.
I still suspect that he is, at heart, an atheist or agnostic. I've heard that it's still taboo for a presidential candidate to be an outspoken atheist, so his protestations to the contrary don't convey all that much information. I suspect that, like most of the PMC/UMC, rich Brahmins are mostly LARPing rather than holding sincere beliefs, especially when you consider the rest of his life.
Not that it makes a big difference, Hinduism is undemanding enough that you can pretty much do whatever you like without the Hindu card being withdrawn, including being a nastik (a sect of Hinduism that denies the existence of gods while still holding other spiritual beliefs). An Atheist Hindu is actually not a contradiction in terms, though I strongly suspect he's just the former.
No way to prove it, of course, but I'd still bet on him just saying the lines that make a nominal Hindu palatable to a Republican audience, especially if using the monotheist doctrine.
My girlfriend is Hindu and told me that the Hindu gods are all manifestations of one god. Is that not a traditional belief? Is that just a result of Christian influence? She put this forward as though it were a standard Hindu belief.
No it is not.
It's one interpretation that's been an around for an extremely long time. Though it might be so that it's popularity in modern times might in some level be a result of the long term influence of the Muslim and then Christian rule over the subcontinent in recent centuries, but much of Hindu tradition and the majority of Hindus are polytheistic in nature.
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I don't think he's necessarily being insincere; we're all judging by a Judeo-Christian template, but I don't see that it's impossible for the guy to be agnostic but spiritual-not-religious or "some kind of great impersonal cosmic force out there, sure". I don't think we can make confident pronouncements on "he's too smart to believe in deity so he's lying to the normies/trying not to spook the Republican Bible-bashers" about someone who comes from the background of a particular sect of Hinduism which is non-dualistic.
You're welcome to disagree, it's not like I have a way to prove my suspicions myself!
Oh, I'm not saying that doesn't play into it, but it's hard to know! How Christian is Obama, really? Happy enough to go along with Michelle and pick a suitable church to attend, or genuinely convinced, or just playing along for the black vote? Without being able to read his mind, who can say?
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When he says ‘god is real’ he means ‘I’m assimilated, not a savage who worships the contents of your dinner plate’. This is very important for someone named ‘Vivek Ramaswamy’ running in a Republican primary.
I think much the same. It's a meaningless platitude to appease the Republican voter base who might otherwise worry about statues of Ganesh in the White House. Being nominally monotheistic lets you brush a lot under the carpet.
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What makes you say this? Plenty of Hindus actually believe in God, as do plenty of American conservatives.
Among 2nd generation Indian-Americans, I literally don't know a single one who believes that Vishnu, Shiva, Kali, etc. all exist as separate entities. They're more or less panentheists that sometimes pray to a one of the Devas (usually Shiva or an incarnation of Vishnu) as the personality of The Absolute. Sometimes they don't even do this and their beliefs are indistinguishable from New Age spirituality (which ofc is heavily influenced by Hinduism).
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As far as I'm aware, all candidates for President at least present as religious, even if in practise they're agnostic or atheist. I don't know if it's viable to run as an openly atheist candidate, but I suspect not.
Most UMC/PMC Indians abroad are "culturally religious", without any true belief. This is also true back home, but to a different degree. You can just be a de-facto atheist and pass as Hindu, there's no need to show up to temples on Sunday.
Given everything I know about him, I strongly suspect he's just going through the motions, not that anyone can say for sure.
Still remember the day I "came out" as atheist in my Hindu family and they just shrugged it off as if it was no big deal. I even had an angry 'neo-atheist' phase for a couple of years before realizing that Hinduism just sort of accepted Atheism at face value.
My mom was like, "I need you to visit for festivals, be a good person and just join your hands with the family every once in a while. You can talk to whoever you like in your own head, just don't get angry when I ask my Ganpati to bring you good luck." Hell, I thought my dad was irreligious my whole life, until my mom told me he was deeply religious, but he did not feel worthy of praying to ask a God for good luck ! Turns out he'd pray by himself daily, just in non-visible spaces.
Hinduism is funny that way. It's lack of scripture allows it to be something and nothing at the same time. Yet, when it is around, you can tell. If a group of heterogenous people strongly self-identify under a common umbrella of Hinduism, then who am I to disagree ?
This is an unfair accusation, because it quietly defines religion from an Abrahmic lens. Being culturally religious is what Hinduism is all about. Both Dharma and Karma are defined within a localized context of your profession, family & conditions. So, it is hard to have any uniform optics for Hinduism. If a person lives a Dharmic life with an awareness of Karma, then they're Hindu. Even if it has no ties to a specific God.
Yes, I understand that this means a person who performs Hindu actions with Hindu intentions, will be Hindu irrespective of which religion they follow. Hinduism doesn't require mutual exclusivity in tribal associations. As the head of the RSS (India's largest political Hindu organization) says, "If you are born in India, you're Hindu. You can be a Muslim-Hindu, Christian-Hindu or an Atheist-Hindu. Just gotta align your intentions and actions. A lot of spiritual atheist rationalists appear pretty Hindu to me.
I've been an atheist since the age of 5, I've only prayed earnestly once in my life, and that's to Krishna when my mom was pregnant because I was looking forward to a baby brother.
With how he turned out, I immediately turned atheist /s. (Still love him tho, even if his ADHD is even worse than mine)
My parents are mildly religious, they observe most festivals, visit temples on vacation, and idly contemplate going on pilgrimage to those random ass holy shrines up in the Himalayas (it would probably kill their backs).
Even then, when religion simply didn't take in me, because even at that age I could see that no religion was a remotely good fit for both the world around me and the behavior of its denizens, they never forced me to pray, at most I was dragged along to a bunch of temples and forced to sit glumly during some festivals until I got a little older and refused to attend whatsoever.
Nobody forced me to practise, nor did they care particularly much.
Most Hindus I've met have been entirely chill about it too, nobody has tried to proselytize to me, or made my life difficult in any way.
I'm not aware of any major religion that's more cool with atheism, barring perhaps Buddhism, but that's just a distant cousin.
Does Taoism or Confucianism work, if either count as religions?
I suppose they do, but even if I write a Cultivation novel, I'm no expert on either!
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Did Bernie bother at all? Wasn't my impression.
I don't remember him speaking about it, but that's not the same as being an overt atheist.
In this case, he needs to convince the majority Christian Republican voter base that despite being born a Hindu, he has a relatively palatable theology.
I think he would be in a lot more trouble on this issue if Trump wasn’t such a front runner. Right now there is a significant part of the GOP that would really prefer not Trump but will vote for him. I think this especially includes the big-money backers (Musks/Griffin) and probably mosts of the conservative PMC (I guess like me). Since Desantis has flatlined there is a significant look at whenever gets momentum.
If Trump got a heart attack tomorrow I think this would be a much bigger issue.
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How about Bell's palsy? "It's true, that I speak on one side of my mouth. I'm not a Tory, I don't speak on both sides of my mouth."
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