The ascription of professional competence to oneself when one does not have that. Each is in a position to say what ’the Caste System’ is, what ’ethics’ is, what ‘corruption’ is, what ‘religion’ is, what ‘Hinduism’ is… Why does one need to build new social science, when ’every Hindu specimen’ is an authority on these subjects? I suppose one can also be a physicist, biologist and chemist on these …

It is in the nature of a rhetorical text that the author uses linguistic ’tropes’ (metaphors, similes, analogies, imagery, etc) to persuade a reader about the reasonableness of a specific standpoint. It does not build arguments that systematically lead to a stand point but instead tries to convince the readers (or listeners) by using the abilities built into natural languages. Such texts do not …

Dear Patrick Hogan, It is jolly good of you, as the British say, to contribute to the ’literary landscapes’ column in Sulekha at this particular juncture. I am glad too that you put across some thoughtful considerations without being polemical, and that can only help generate a stimulating discussion among all the concerned parties. However, the way you frame your points make the task an exercise …

The first striking thing is their presumption of knowledge at several levels. Yet, they display abysmal ignorance. (a) Christianity has not just had a two thousand years’ history. It has also had two thousand years of doctrinal development. In the latter, every notion that has been employed here has been continuously discussed, refined, contested and so on. Their meanings, as they apply to …

Imagine that I were to say the following: Christ and Ganesha are manifestations of the same divinity; Christ came about 2000 years ago in the Middle East, whereas Ganesha is how he has appeared in India some 4000 years ago. Now no one can forbid me from saying this and calling myself a Christian. Question: what should a theory about Christianity do? Show how anyone who decides to call himself a …

Criticism: You are spreading hate by citing Deschner’s work–Kriminalgeschichte des Christentumsand ANY idiot knows even the title is stupid. I have not cited a single atrocity that Christianity has committed in order to incite hate towards Christianity. In fact, I have not even discussed any specific theological doctrine of any kind of Christianity, except to speak of the Christological dilemma. …

Question: One thing that Balu says is that propping up legislations against tricky proselytizations reflects the weaknesses of Indian culture needs to be explained though. How is it a weakness? How is it not a strength? In both the theory of rights and in discussions about liberty (or freedom), the following two ways of conceptualizing the issues have been present. One could see rights as an …

Consider the thought that ‘meanings’ (leave aside the distinction between words and sentences on the one hand and concepts and categories on the other) do not exist outside historical contexts. What exactly does this thought say? Begin with ‘historical context’. Either every situation that an individual human being finds himself is a ‘historical context’ (because human beings are always ‘in a …

Let me just focus on one important and one not-so-important claim from Will Sweetman’s article “Hinduism” and the history of “religion”: Protestant presuppositions in the critique of the concept of Hinduism. He suggests that I argue the following. First premise: Christianity is prototypically what religion is. Second premise: Hinduism does not share all (or perhaps any) of the relevant properties …

You say: Thus when one says that many Indian Christians are pluralistic … it cannot be refuted simply by saying, well Christian doctrine fundamentally cannot be pluralistic – because all doctrine ultimately always gets interpreted at the level of the individual. While it is indeed true that, in the last analysis, everything happens at the level of the individual, it is wrong to say that, …

Christians of all hue agree that the figure of Christ is central to the religion that Christianity is. This figure is “the promised one”, the “messiah”, the “anointed one”, and so on. Kindly note that there is a difference between the Christ as a figure and Jesus of Nazareth. The Jews also believe in the Christ figure, but they figure that he has not yet come, and they are awaiting his arrival. …

About the state, state action and the issue of public interest. There are multiple problems here, which I am only slowly beginning to recognize. I will share two such problems with you without, however, being able to concretely spell out the alternatives. (a) Consider the belief that the state ‘ought’ to act in the public interest. This belief makes sense if we assume that it is possible to speak …

Larry Laudan’s “How Reasonable is ‘Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt’?” (published in the journal Legal Theory), shows how the principle of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is utterly unreasonable when one analyzes it in terms of epistemological standards. Laudan’s argument is convincing. The problem is it makes all these judges and lawyers look like fools. Balu was not satisfied by Laudan’s …

One of these so-called secular accounts that are in fact Christian is the belief that all cultures have a religion. It is simply a secularization of the Christian belief that the biblical God gave religion to humankind, which was transformed into the assumption that religion is a cultural universal during the Enlightenment. This pre-theoretical assumption precedes all empirical research and …

Assuming that the distinction I proposed between civic tolerance and religious tolerance is acceptable, let us proceed further to analyze the notion of civic tolerance more closely. (I am simply assuming that it is desirable and that, from now on, we are talking about religious matters.) It is (logically) possible that there could be religious intolerance and yet the believers in such religions …

Can history-centrism cause some religion or the other to be belief-based? The notion of “history-centrism” is too vague to allow a serious answer. In so far as this refers to a “Grand narrative”, and this narrative is either an oral or a written account, it is a candidate for the status of ‘belief’. Consequently, your question takes the following form: Does “believing in” the truth of some or …

Words like “inclusivism”, “exclusivism” etc. are not a part of my terminology. They are not only imprecise but also misleading. They have been used mostly as meta-descriptions of the stance that Christian theologies took with respect to other religions. (To use these loaded notions, even when negatively qualified, to describe the Indian traditions is totally misleading and entirely wrong.) They …

Even if one insists (wrongly in my view) that I am suggesting that Alex Alexander is not a Christian, there are two ways of looking at the object of my assertion: (a) it is about the unique individual that Alex Alexander is; (b) it is about him in so far as he is an instance of the tolerant Christianity that some Indian Churches are supposed to be. I am not discussing (a): I do not know this …

Today, in countries like England, Belgium, Germany, Italy and the United States, many religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and many brands of some of these religions (Catholicism, Protestantism of various shades, Orthodox Churches, etc) coexist. In Belgium or Italy, for instance, the Catholic Christians do not impose their faiths on those who are not Catholics, i.e., they do not go around …

A Christian netizen says: here is within exclusive religions the claim that theirs is the only way to God (that claim can be true or false). There is in inclusive religions the claim that there are several ways to God and that it is quite possible that one of the exclusive ones (or many of them) are also ways to God. Both these statements cannot be true at the same time iff the logical law of …