Talk:Hinduism/Archive 4

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THE LAST WEEK

I can safely say that for about a week, I have completely dedicated myself to the overhaul of the Hinduism article. When I nominated it for Featured Article on Sunday (the 10th), I had an extra-crazy three days of work. Things accomplished:

• Completely new intro (with help from KRS)
• Greatly Slashed origins and Six Philosophies sections
• Addition of seven pictures for which I acquired proper approval
• Overall editing of prior 70K to 30-33K (it vacillates)
• Melding of culled sections into inter-wiki articles to do with Hinduism

I hope others come to give ideas and rework the article into even more finely honed prose; if (God willing) this article survives objections for another five days and achieves Featured Article Status, we can work on making its prose truly Brilliant to the point of Blinding Luminescence. I am archiving dialogue prior to today (since new discussion pretty much ceased almost a week ago); I think it's appropriate to mark a new chapter in the life of the Hinduism article. AUM Tat Sat --LordSuryaofShropshire 02:55, Apr 14, 2004 (UTC)

Hinduism article is now Featured! There's plenty more work, however, that remains to be done. While inactivity has reared its disfigured head, I will continue trying to cull this page to a more modest size. --LordSuryaofShropshire 13:14, Apr 19, 2004 (UTC)

Image Use

Images on Hinduism, for example Image:Sadhu(www.kamat.com).jpg, are not under the GNU Free Documentation License. Image page says: "This image is not licenced under the GFDL. It is under a non-commercial-use only licence." Doesn't this prevent republishing Wikipedia? Tero 16:02, 2004 Apr 24 (UTC)

See Jimbo's pronouncement on the mailing list. In short: Yes, the images need to go by June 30, or they should be declared fair use (in which case fair use needs to be justified according to the process on Wikipedia:Fair use).--Eloquence* 17:21, Apr 24, 2004 (UTC)

This is a major problem... I squeezed through with permissions, and now this. Heh. That's life. Well, I hope anyone who can will provide pictures, preferably similar to those already online, to replace the soon-to-be-nixed licensed ones that are on right now. I'll try to get my hands on a camera and scanner some time, so perhaps I can contribute. We need to get on this pronto : ) --LordSuryaofShropshire 22:10, Apr 24, 2004 (UTC)

Comments, questions, criticisms

What a good article! The author really must be commended. Not only is it well-written, it is an article really giving information- it generally free from apologetics or polemics, yet it manages to give an "insider's" view to those who are not knowledgeable about Hinduism. I certainly learned from it. Kudos!

Still, there are a couple comments I woudld like to make, if the author would bare with me:

1) Even with the message below, I still don't know if Hinduism is the oldest great religion or not, but since this issue seems settled, I won't dwell on it.

2) Being involved in the sciences, I would object to calling Hinduism a science and linking to an article describing science. I am religious myself, and I love and resepct religion. Also, I am also aware of the movement among Hindus to present their religion as science. Nonetheless, Hinduism isn't science anymore than Philosophy is science.

3) In addition to Buddhism and Jainism, Sikhism also came out of Hinduism as a way to find compramise between Moslems and Hinuds.

4) Forgive me if this causes you any offense, but... there was no mention of caste. I know that modern Hindus don't want to dwell on it (and perhaps for good reasons), but it still does play a role in determining some aspects of many Hindus' lives, such as whether or not the Hindu is vegetarian, whether the Hindu can become a pujari, and (in some cases still) who the Hindu will marry.

Thanks for listening.

Regarding 2), modern science is based on the principles of theory, experiment, and verification of results. Seen that way, Hinduism can be considered the science of consciousness, with yoga/meditation as the experimental part. Hinduism is not a belief system, you are not forced to believe anything, you can personally perform an experiment (meditation as an experiment with consciousness), and can either verify the theory or discard it as false. --SV 02:57, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

---

--- oldest religion? what about judaism? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosh_Hashanah

I asked about that too when this was nominated as a featured article. I was told that the Jews date their years from the time they think the world started, not the start of their religion, which (again as I was told) began circa 2000 BC.

It's possible that Hinduism is the only surviving development of the Indo-European religion pushing back its origin to 4000 BC or earlier. -- Derek Ross 22:37, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Oldest Religion : Vedic culture goes back at least to 2000 BCE. The tracing of Judaism is based not on their calendar but on the appearance of Abraham. The calendar dates Creation as being aroud 3760 BCE (some such date). That is the creation of the world, not judaism. Judaism as a faith is traced to Abraham, who came around 1900 to 1600 BCE; scholarly consensus is mostly in accord with Vedic/Early Hindu culture predating Judaism.

Science: No one was calling Hinduism a science. It was called "science of consciousness" and the idea is clearly that of followers and believers of the faith. The article mentions several times that Hinduism is a religion and by using the word science was merely speaking of the Hindu belief that rational spiritualism can lead one to liberation. It is not an objective encyclopedia's contention that Hinduism is science, and most Hindus would agree.

Sikhism Most Sikhs disagree that Sikhism came as a molding of Islam and Hinduism. They say that while it neccessarily absorbed much of both cultures, it was a separate movement. But I would think that someone knowledgeable, perhaps even you (the anonymous commenter) could write on that a bit.

Caste Caste is mentioned and spoken about, and a rather exhaustive article on Caste is given a direct link within this Hindu article page.

--LordSuryaofShropshire 22:46, Apr 24, 2004 (UTC)

Great article! As for the "oldest religion", at the very least it is a controversial statement. Even the "oldest surviving religion" can be challenged. It is almost certain that there was something that could be called "religion" in the Neolithic, much, much earlier than 2000 BC; see the temples in Malta and the megalithic culture, for example. It is often hard to tell when a religion ends and a new other begins. The African, Native American, and Siberian shamanistic religions may be survivals from that era. The Shinto (spiritist) religion of Japan also may have had its origins in the Yayoi culture of 10,000 years ago. Even closer to home, the Sumerian and Egyptian religions may be older than 3000 BC; and Judaism may have evolved from the Canaanite religions that existed before 2500 BC. -- Jorge Stolfi(forgot to timestamp)

The problem with all these 'may-haves' is that they are as of yet unsubstantiated. It is clear that there is a continuous root in the Vedas and the later more Classic Hinduism. If we're talking about all these may haves, then Hinduism may have its roots back to 4000-6000 years BCE, based on recent and on-going archeological discoveries and contentions of continuity by (some) modern scholars. As for Yayoi culture, scholarly consensus doesn't seem to give nearly as much credence to this more vague connection than to the much more clear roots of classical Hinduism in the Vedas. Also, by oldest we mean continuos and age-wise. A loose string of beliefs in Neolithic times in a vague afterlife is just belief and spirituality, not a religion. A religion (goes for Yayoi) implies a level of organization, certain code of ethics, beliefs (or lack thereof) in eschatology, soteriology, ethics, sacerdotalism, etc. Also, Sumerian and Egyptian beliefs are not alive today, and besides, those are may-haves that can be countered with may-haves of Aryan continuist theorists.

Ultimately, general scholarly consensus holds that oldest continuous religion, where religion is some sort of organized belief held by a reasonably large community, is Hinduism. Controversy implies that there is a relatively outspoken group of (reasonably) unbiased scholars who disagree as to this matter. Citing the parochial beliefs of people who believe their religion has been around snice the dawn of Creation whose dating is itself dubious by encyclopedic standards possibly isn't enough. As for positing obscure may-haves and maybes as fodder for controversy, I personally don't see that as convincing enough to remove a statement of a much more widely held opinion.--LordSuryaofShropshire 05:55, Apr 25, 2004 (UTC)

Personally I would not object to your statement, but I still think that it is a case of POV - it is true under your definition of "oldest" and "scripture" but others may chose other definitions. As such, that sentence is just an unnecessary magnet for polemics (as you can see 8-).
As for the scholars's consensus, I presume that most of your references are from scholars who specialized in Hinduism, if not Hinduists, so their opinions are not altogether impartial. (I happen to think that computer graphics is the most important branch of computer science... 8-)
As four your "sheer mass" criteria for deciding what is a religion and what is not, they are not only POV but frankly prejudiced. Who says that those things are necessary for a religion? IIRC, druids had a religious taboo against writing - their knowledge had to be passed by word and committed to memeory. Does that make druidism a non-religion?? One could well argue that the more paraphernalia that a religion acquires (scriptures, priests, temples, prayers, gods, exegesis, theologies, etc.), the farther it gets from God and Man. Indeed, all the things that you cite as assets of Hinduism are definitely liabilities to a Protestant, to whom even a Pastor may be too much organization. Or one could argue that any reform in a religion, no matter how small, makes it a new religion.
You may also be surprised to now how complex are the African religions, which are claimed to go back to 6000 or 8000 years (and it may well be true).
The deluge story in Gilgamesh, which seems to have been cognate or ancestral to the story of Noah, may be as old as the flooding of the Black Sea. And...
Well, never mind, it is a great article anyway. All the best,
Jorge Stolfi 07:45, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)

PS. The "AUM" image in mid-article seems rather poor - why in Latin letters? Why not use the one at the top of the article?

PPS. Don't assume that everybody will see the page the same way you see it. On my viewer, for instance, the sanskrit text looks the same with or without bold. Given that, it seems more prudent to use boldface sparingly, e.g. only where mandated by the Wikipedia standards.
Jorge Stolfi 08:00, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)

One more thing: is the "Legal definition of Hinduism" section accurate? I am asking because the wording of some items, especially 7, do not sound like the sort of language I would expect from a court of law.
Jorge Stolfi 15:48, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hinduism has been an oral tradition for a great deal of time as well. Frankly, most estimates of the age of Hinduism are limited by modern standards of religion which dictate written scripture as being some sort of standard. even today many Brahmins learn large tracts of scripture by memory, easily as long as half the Bible; in some cases they're still learning the Vedas. many communities in the Vedic age and plenty of sects post-Christ never used written material. I wasn't talking about organized mass. I was talking about beliefs, that there is some sort of coherent belief bringing together even a small community of people in a mutual idea of this life and the after life and how to conduct oneself for both. i think that's a fair idea. Also, if these African religions are surviving and complex cultures, we should research it and bring it out to light. By the way, a lot of the ideas on Hinduism have been molded by non-Hindus, Orientalists, or Westerners; it's a weak and tangential argument to say that those who feel it's the oldest must be Hindu. In that case we can throw all the research on Christianity into the rubbish, burn it, and get non-Christians to do new and 'more objective' research. My point is that the majority of ideas regarding Hinduism assert that it is the oldest. Whether or not this invites disagreement is not reason enough to remove it. In that case, articles mentioning inter-racial marriages should be expurgated since there are large communities wholly against it and who can cite examples of communities where they think it didn't work. By the way, there's no equivalently large section of though in the social studies spheres that is decries Hinduism's age. As for Gilgamesh, it clearly represents religious thought, but where is the religion? Can we call the iliad and odyssey religion? no. We can't even call the clearly religious and philosophical Mahabharata and Ramayana religions; they are part of a larger religious system of beliefs and some sort of discernible lifestyle that differentiates these people.

The green AUM at the bottom was just a neat representation. It shoulds the trishul (trident) of Shiva and has the AUM next to it. It's abundantly clear what AUM is, and since so many people, through Hindu streams of Yoga, are now exposed to AUM in the West, I don't see the harm in also including roman lettering of it.

i don't assume everyone sees the lettering the same way as I do on my computer, but I'm not going to use lower resolution pictures just because I'm worried about a person using lower resolution settings. One optimizing the page for optimal viewing. It looks good bold for people who have the neccessary settings, and it's not ruining the viewing experience of those who don't.

The court statement is the exact one proferred by the Indian court. I also don't see what's surprising about the seventh line, since this is a universally acknowledged fact that there isn't a hard-and-fast set of philosophies that tie Hindus down especially with the proliferation of so many sects and teachings and major philosophical movements under its umbrella. --LordSuryaofShropshire 17:24, Apr 25, 2004 (UTC)

Oldest religion

I respect the current wording of 'generally accepted to be the earliest religion' (I'm sure it is by the secular world). The problem is that faith in God (the God) is held to date back to creation by Judaism and Christianity. Judaism is thus merely a point of progression from the early forefathers, while Christianity would be seen by Christians as a logical progression from Judaism.

As I said, I like the current wording, but if you change it to 'is the earliest religion' I guess there's not much I can do about it!

Zoney 17:50, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)

An encyclopedia is not concerned with the beliefs of religions themselves. That the dating of the beginning of the world is seen by many, including Christians and Jews, as going back billions of years, would negate considering the 'date of creation' of the old testament as valid documentation. Also, the religion of Judaism itself is no older than around 1400 BCE or so, with the writing of the Torah. It may be reasonable to assume, however, that with Abraham came the founding of the religion, sometime in 1900 BCE. But just because one believes in a Creator God means nothing about a stable system of beliefes and codes. One might be hard pressed to call Adam and EVe, if indeed their existence is given credence, Jews.

Speaking as an atheist, I agree with LordSurya's comments on defining the age of religions. While it may be that Hinduism is not the oldest surviving religion, it certainly has a very good claim to the title, to the extent that anyone claiming that it is not, needs to come up with a convincing counter-example. It's not enough just to claim that there may be older religions than Hinduism. That needs to be demonstrated convincingly by the claimant. Until it has been, I see no problem with leaving the "oldest" claim in this article. -- Derek Ross