Check Balu’s paper on comparative theology, and in particular Francis Clooney’s: Translation, interpretration and culture: on the disingenuity of a comparative theology

“We shall not cease from exploration …” The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, the West and the dynamic of religion (The ebook (pdf file) can be had from here ; hardcopy costs about US$25.) Do all roads lead to Jerusalem?: The making of Indian religions ( Manohar Publishers. For more on this, check this post .) Reconceptualizing India Studies ( OUP India; costs about $21) Europe, India and the …

Please direct your comments to raindoctor@gmail.com This website contains articles of many kinds: published papers; ideas that are yet to be developed in a form of theory; posts that help to clarify/understand the research program “Comparative Science of Cultures”. If you have questions, post it here: https://groups.io/g/TheHeathenInHisBlindness Comments Guest — 2013-07-22 19:40:00 Dear Doc White …

Europe, India and the limits of Secularim (OUP, 2015), by Jakob de Roover The secular state and religious conflict: Liberal neutrality and the Indian case of pluralism The dark hour of secularism: Hindu fundamentalism and colonial liberalism in India Liberal political theory and cultural migration of ideas: the case of secualrism in India Secular law and the realm of false religion On the dark …

There is so much nonsense peddled by well-meaning Indians that (a) one should use “Indian categories” to describe India; that (b) one should not use “Western categories” to describe India, her culture and her traditions; and that (c) one should not translate words from Indian languages, but retain them as “untranslatables”. Such responses indicate the depth of ignorance of these Indians and of …

Do we understand colonialism? On colonialism and the Indian renaissance: a prolegomenon to a project Rehtinking Colonialism and Colonial Consciousness Mantras of anti-brahmanism: colonial experience of Indian intellectuals What is colonial consciousness? Is colonial consciousness hypothesis adhoc? Colonial consciousness: Normative ethics I Colonial consciousness: Normative ethics II Colonial …

What is wrong with the intercultural exchange of categories? Throughout one gets the impression that there is something “fundamentally wrong” with categories shifting in meaning over time or with the introduction of categories from one culture into another culture. But what is important about these shifts in meaning? What exactly is the problem in introducing the category of religion into India or …

If you are new to this site, start with these posts. Majority of these posts are not written for this website, rather they were lifted from the conversations on the defunct sulekha.com, the defunct yahoo group, and other places. (Check this forum for current connversations.) These posts serve three purposes: (a) to help newbies to understand Balagangadhara’s research program called “Comparative …

M. N. Srinivas (MNS) claims that “a caste was able, in a generation or two, to rise to a higher position in the hierarchy by adopting vegetarianism and teetotalism and by changing its rituals and deities.” The first basic problem here is how one can establish the position of a jati in the supposed hierarchy and measure it in such detail that one can see over two generations that the jati has …

Editor’s Note: This article appeared in the Journal of Political Philosophy. Authored by SN Balagangadhara and Jakob De Roover. For an alternative research programme (paradigm) for studying India, Indian culture and Indian culture, study Balagangadhara’s Reconceptualizing Indian Studies, published by OUP, India. There are few places in the contemporary world where the problems of cultural …

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the Journal of American Academy of Religion Abstract The paper attempts a contrast between the process and the structure of the Christian and the Indian spirituality. Drawing attention to their dissimilarities, it attempts to reformulate the differences among the Indian traditions in a novel way. It argues that cultures and traditions are not just different; …

We all agree that events like the Gujarat riots are tragic and terrible. But what is the role of intellectuals in avoiding similar tragedies in the future? Why can’t religion be political? Obviously, the duty of the intellectual is to try and help us understand the nature of the events and the violence involved. In India and abroad, the concepts of ‘communalism’ and ‘communal violence’ are often …

You ask whether ‘in principle’ a neurobiological theory on religion could “account” for the experience of the believers. The answer depends on what kind of an account you are asking for and what you have in mind when you say ‘in principle’. If you mean by ‘account’, whether it could predict or even explain, I do not think so. We know that, at the least, we are made up of atoms. Your question, in …

Many come up with criticisms like ‘Buddhist logics are different’ or ‘one has to follow Indian logics’. These criticisms sound profound! They are damn shallow, unless they answer the following questions. What is their structure? What are their axioms? What are their rules of inferences? What are some some crucial meta-logical theorems (do they all have deduction theorems?) etc.

What does it mean to be an Indian in this time and age? What does India have to give to the contemporary world? These overarching questions that echo in the mind of the post-colonial Indian cannot be truly answered by Western frameworks instituted at the behest of colonialism. This book sets the stage for a reconceptualization of India studies. Clearing away intellectual deadwood, it initiates a …

While re-reading certain passages from Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006), I was so shocked by his combination of ignorance and arrogance. Forgive me for some Dawkins- bashing: In a memorable passage, Dawkins discusses the problem of Trinitarianism in Christianity and extends it to other forms of “polytheism,” such as the cult of the Virgin Mary and the saints in Roman-Catholicism. “What …

People like Scott Atran and Sloan Wilson abuse evolutionary biology to produce ad hoc explanations of an explanandum whose truth they presuppose: the universality of religion. Their explanations are no better than those discussed by Balu in chapter 5 of ‘The Heathen in his blindness: Asia, the West and the dynamic of religion. ’. Paraphrasing Balu, we may say that they consist of ’two quarters of …

It is very disappointing to see how these evolutionary theorists of religion lack knowledge of religions other than garden variety Judeo-Christianity (where they seem to have at least some factual knowledge, as in Scott Atran’s case, they reproduce standard textbook stories about Hinduism that have been left behind a few decades back). If they did a serious study, it would perhaps strike them …

I The Sanskrit word (that I know) that comes closest to the Greek ’telos’ is ‘Sankalpa’. It means ’to mentally determine’, ‘formulation of an end’ ‘desirous of (an end)’, ‘anticipation (of an end)’ etc. It also means ‘Buddhi’ in some contexts. One of the primary properties of religion is that it generates questions about “the meaning and purpose of life”, “meaning and purpose of existence” and …