Posted on 09/04/2006 8:36:21 PM PDT by voletti
To be Hindu in America is much more an intentional choice than it is in India," said Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies and director of The Pluralism Project at Harvard University. "Even if you're first generation, you have to decide if you perpetuate it or if you just kind of let it go.
That reality has created a challenge for Hindus here - and for their temples and cultural organisations - as they try to pass the faith on to a younger generation.
At the Ganesh Temple in Queens, founded in 1977 and one of the oldest temples in the country, there's a community centre that people can use for weddings, performances and other events; education activities from religious instruction to language lessons and academic tutoring; and the youth club that Shivraj is part of.
Those are not elements commonly found at temples in India, said Dr Uma Mysorekar, one of the temple trustees. But in India, she pointed out, they don't need to be - because Hindus are surrounded by their religion.
"We just observed and followed and never questioned," she said.
When Indian immigrants started coming to the United States in larger numbers, in the years after the 1965 revamping of immigration laws, they carried their religious traditions on as best they could, meeting for prayers and worship at one another's homes, or renting public spaces, said Anantanand Rambachan, professor of religion at St Olaf College in Minnesota.
That realisation came from seeing how religion is done in the United States. Here, Christian tradition relies heavily on doctrine, on what people believe, Rambachan said, rather than what they do. In India, the emphasis goes the opposite way, since Hinduism covers a wide spectrum of gods and beliefs, and ritual is very important.
In America, Hindus "are increasingly being challenged to articulate the Hindu tradition in a manner that places more emphasis on doctrine," Rambachan said. "People will ask, 'What do you believe?'" Rambachan said.
Faced with that, temples and cultural organisations that had been working to make outsiders understand more about the faith realised they needed to help young Indian Americans know what they believed, if the religion was going to be passed on.
"If we don't do our part, we will lose these youngsters,' Mysorekar said.
"There was a lot of foundation we had to lay even to exist as Hindus among non-Hindus," she said. "Now it is for us to do the job within our own community."
In Judaism, that is. I can't remember now, but this applied especially to some important temple in Israel. Saw it right here on FR.
Some would say even the Catholics are ritualistic. Whom am I kidding? They are ritualistic...with the kissing of preserved bodies, feet of statues, and blood in vials, and the like.
One of the products of classical paganism was philosophy, which was a kind of criticism of Greek mythology. There were the mystery religions which came out of Persia and Egypt, and then on the fringe, the Celtic and German gods. You may be failing to throw these into the mix. The population of the Empire was probably 50 million people, a good portion of the human population at the time.
Heh...much as Christianity wants to be, it's not that either...though it's still much more uniform than Hinduism.
I know but a little drop of the truths of the Vedas, but what a drop! A drop is enough to drown a small soul in happiness that nothing in the world - not even everything in the world - can give.
It's more of a culture than a religion in the US.
Thank you for the Bhagavad Gita excerpt!
Note to Another: the Gita was spoken 5000 years ago, and the speaker - Bhagavan Shri Krishna - states that He spoke the same truths countless eons ago but the knowledge had become lost.
The historical (western derived) accounts of Vedic history are basically all erroneous; in fact, early British indologists knowingly fabricated recent dates for Vedic history in order to belittle the ancient Vedic based religion and culture of India and make European history look superior.
The truth is just now starting to be understood by open minded historians. The truth being that the Vedic culture is the mast ancient in the world, and predates all others.
Man is both spirit and body. Humanity loves, needs ritual . Singing and group prayers is ritual; the inauguration --the very name tells, us--is ritual. The only Christian denomination that forsakes ritual entirely is Quakerism, which is one reason why there are so few Quakers. IAC, cultic worship tends to neglect /ignore the personal and moral aspect of religion.
There is far more unity of doctrine in Christianity, even Protestant Christianity. than one would infer from the multiplication of sects and the constant argument. We all get it from the Jews and the Greeks who were always squabbling so they had excuses to keep talking.
Yes.
One man's ritual, to another it's superstition, and to the third, vice.
The only "vice" in a ritualistic religion is doing the rubics incorrectly so as to appease the god. If you are an Aztec priest, you must kill victims to keep the heavens from falling.
Then there's the story of Ma-Nu (Noah). You get the "Great Fish" who saves Ma-Nu on Mt. Ararat.
Although the identities of the participants in the story are different, the numbers used are the same, 2&5 together, and 7 souls, and so forth.
Simply amazing stuff.
They didn't just disappear ~ that was not allowed. They moved.
Jews always move.
About half the doctors in India are Jains. They know exactly how the immune system works, but they feel guilty about it ~ if they weren't so heavily tanned you could say they were the original bearers of "white Liberal guilt".
Jainism is part of the Buddhist tradition but they have 24 different Buddhas.
Then, of course, they'll all go to Hell.
No doubt there was a back-flow from Sumer into India, but Sumer was first.
That's akin to deep contemplation ~ and makes it just another fundamentally ritualistic religion.
A comedian -- I think it was Rita Rudner -- posed the theory that they spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness because Moses was too stubborn to ask for directions.
Given that the Biblical "myth" posits that all men are the sons of Noah, common elements are seen as consistent.
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