03.27.09
W. Doniger’s The Hindus
I have started reading a new book, The Hindus, by Wendy Doniger.
It is worth citing the effort to decipher Indian (religious) history because in the oversimplified environment of Darwinian fundamentalism and Dawkins fanatics it is a reminder of the dangers ahead: the complete destruction of our knowledge of the religious past of man, and its replacement with degenerated belief systems based on scientism.
I hold no brief for the many confusions of Indian history, and have protested many times the distortions and myths that pass for historical knowledge, and yet by any accounting the current perspectives here in the ‘west’ are abysmally short of the tools needed for the study of religion.
This isn’t an exaggeration. Generally, the mention of an Eastern religious subject (in academic channels) in this context results in abrupt termination of any discussion, relationship, or further communication.
Doniger’s history raises all over again the issues of the Aryan Invasion question, the exact timing of the Rig Veda, the relationsip of Axial India to the Vedic religion, and the relationship of all of these to the earlier history of India.
I am suspicious all over again of the rightness of my original approach here, as recorded in World History And The Eonic Effect, despite the brevity of the treatment.
That overall context comes through reasonably well in the short world history at: Symphony of Emergence, where the synchrony of Archaic Greece, Israelite emergent monotheism, Indian Upanishadic/Buddhist formations, and Confucian/Taoist China show us an almost unnerving complexity and veiled macroevolution that stands beyond all its Axial manifestations.
Beside this Darwinian evolutionism is a kind of crowing rooster routine, of no account.
This history is important because it raises the question, how can we have a theory of evolution, if we don’t even have a grasp of human psychology, especially in its complexities of self-consciousness.