(September 21, 2012 at 4:55 am)greneknight Wrote: And why would Hinduism be atheistic? What happened to Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu? What about the Taoist gods and goddesses? How does one read these gods and goddesses? Would apophenia step into a Hindu temple and tell the priests there that the Hindu gods and goddesses didn't exist?
Obviously, you can be atheistic about Hinduism by looking at the gods and goddesses as mere representation of something else - maybe goodness or truth. You look at Hinduism through a metaphorical lens. If you can do that to Hinduism, why can't you do that to Christianity? The church disallows that? But so do Hindu temples, I'm sure. Which church disallows that? That depends on the church, surely?
The classification of Hinduism as a religion is a western concept. In fact, if you know the native Indian languages, you'll realize that they don't even have a word for religion. Unlike Christianity, which is scripturally rigid in regards to belief in god, Hinduism consists of all sorts of philosophies which accept or reject the scriptural authority. Here's an excerpt from Wiki:
"Atheistic doctrines dominate Hindu schools like Samkhya and Mimamsa. The Sāṁkhyapravacana Sūtra of Samkhya argues that the existence of God (Ishvara) cannot be proved and hence cannot be admitted to exist. Samkhya argue that an unchanging God cannot be the source of an ever changing world. It says God was a necessary metaphysical assumption demanded by circumstances. Proponents of the school of Mimamsa, which is based on rituals and orthopraxy states that the evidence allegedly proving the existence of God was insufficient. They argue that there is no need to postulate a maker for the world, just as there is no need for an author to compose the Vedas or a God to validate the rituals. Mimamsa considers the Gods named in the Vedas have no existence apart from the mantras that speak their names. To that regard, the power of the mantras is what is seen as the power of Gods."
