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 …
What is history? In the first place, it is the subject matter of historiography, which is what historians write. What does historiography talk about? The human past. In other words, there is a distinction to be made between ’the past’ and ways of talking about this past.
If this distinction (between ’the past’ and ‘ways of talking about it’) is accepted, then we can answer the question about what …
Consider the everyday phenomenon of sunrise and sunset. We see the movement of the sun on the horizon and, for a very long period of time, people thought that they observed this because that is the way the reality is: the sun moves around the earth. With Galileo Galilei, two things happened. (a) He argued that the earth moves round the sun. (b) On the basis of this theory, he claimed that we are …
Criticism: I use jargon and twisted arguments on a mundane topic. And that every Swami says that Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life. And so on.
If anything, I have avoided jargon (i.e. the use of technical language) in my book. I would like to know where I use technical language without explaining it. As far as twisted arguments go, I presume you to mean invalid arguments. If you can …
Regarding nonsense. I take it you mean that my claims are false or wrong. In that case, I would like to read your reasons. There is no point in simply saying something like that without telling which other theory of religion does better than mine. Even if there are problems in my theory, I claim that this is the best theory we have in the market place. If you think differently, I would like you to …
Why does one bring up the issue of one’s grandmother’s judgment about a clerk taking bribes as a counter-example? First, what do I say? That he calls it as corruption has to do with western normative ethics. Does it follow from this that the action of the municipal clerk is ethically good? It does not, unless one assumes either (a) I am presenting an alternate moral principle, which will make the …
The universalisability of norms does not mean that the western people all factually follow these norms. Even if everyone were to lie, the ethical statement “No one ought to lie” is a universal moral statement.
The existence of debates about abortion, war, etc. is indicative of the nature of normative rules. Because “one ought not to kill”, debates and doctrines about “justified war” come into …
The ‘corruption’ refers to the social phenomenon in India which makes about 20% of the adult population into immoral people. When I said that I refuse to call the clerk ‘corrupt’ or that the issue I raise is anterior, I am talking about this phenomenon. One uses the word ‘cheating’ (something like the Hindi ‘Dhoka’ probably). One could, for instance, use this word to describe the individual …
Does the notion of “relative ethics” make sense within the context of the western ethics? There are some attempts to develop “ethical relativism”, even though it is not clear what is relativistic about them. One would be a kind of factual claim: different people, different groups, different cultures have different principles which they consider as “morally good”. This does not make for ethical …
