I am going to preface this with the full admittance that I am slightly prejudiced against Hinduism and here’s why. Not against Hindus themselves, or against Indians, just against the religion.
An Indian minster was recently hospitalized after drinking from a polluted holy river to prove it was “safe”. It is a common belief in Hinduism that their holy rivers, including the Ganges, are incorruptable, and this has been used as an excuse to turn their holy sites into utter refuse bins.
This offends me, greatly. Not only as just a human but as a Pagan. You have a natural holy site, a beautiful expression of nature’s power and its deep connection to us. And then you intentionally pollute the fuck out of it. They then have the gall, the absolute gall, to claim it as sacred. I find this deplorable.
And I will fully admit that it colors my perception of the religion as a whole.
You know what? I feel the same way about Islam. No hate against Muslims themselves, just their bloodthirsty and revenge-obsessed “religion of peace”.
The older folks here may remember a man named Salman Rushdie. He wrote a book, The Satanic Verses, that questioned the legitimacy of Muhammad The Prophet, Islam’s central figure. No big deal, right? Millions of people claim religion is a bunch of crap every day. Well, this little book apparently caught the attention of one Ayatollah Khomeini, a major religious leader in Iran. He declared that Mr. Rushdie must die, and that any who associate with him or his book must die as well.
This was 34 years ago.
Khomeini has been dead for years, and Rushdie is on his way out too (he’s, what, in his 70s?)
People are still hunting him down for what is, let’s be honest here, a HITJOB that is older than some of the would-be assassins!
The reason I bring this up is that Mr. Rushdie was stabbed yesterday. He survived, but may go blind in one eye, lose the function in his left arm, and his liver got punctured in a few places too. The 24-year-old man who did it (what did I tell you?) is, of course, being celebrated as a hero and martyr by many Muslims in Iran and elsewhere.