tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post6498499831145649468..comments2024-02-13T12:50:30.457-05:00Comments on Rants Within the Undead God: The False Synthesis of HinduismBenjamin Cainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-66333871432069874622020-08-20T08:11:23.585-04:002020-08-20T08:11:23.585-04:00Are you sure you shouldn't be working to impro...Are you sure you shouldn't be working to improve your abilities rather than deeming yourself already elite enough to try to tear things down? If the English is too complex for you, maybe you should improve your reading comprehension in English, before telling a highly-educated, native English-speaker how to write?<br /><br />But all you have to do to get the gist of the article is focus on the sentences I emphasize with italics and the bold font. So here's a quotation of the main point: "In so far as it follows Vedic principles (and the initial animistic compulsion), Hinduism commits the naturalistic fallacy of taking factual regularities to be automatically proper. Meanwhile, being victimized by nature and society, ascetic outsiders are more likely to demonize those regularities or to regard them as amoral, as in a cosmicist vision of life’s absurdity. In short, Hinduism isn’t anti-natural, whereas the sramanic traditions are so."<br /><br />Here's another: "Ascetics want to be released from the collective daydream that binds conventional society, and they achieve that goal not by balancing various concerns in the inclusive Hindu manner, getting around to every option in turn, but by abandoning social commitments altogether."<br /><br />In short, I'm saying Hindu eclecticism and inclusiveness went a bridge too far in trying to incorporate the ideas of the anti-worldly ascetics.Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-1288115961051464022020-08-20T00:58:42.868-04:002020-08-20T00:58:42.868-04:00Long wandering rant! Why can you not say whatever ...Long wandering rant! Why can you not say whatever you want to say in plain English? Why do you have to construct complex sentence structure to seemingly show yourself to be knowledgeable, to only obfuscate your message? I have myself studied the ancient texts of India, and lost patience reading a third through.Satyajit Vermahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16279418753477270822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-16643570043418744242019-03-04T07:37:10.991-05:002019-03-04T07:37:10.991-05:00Thanks for your suggestions. I've added a few ...Thanks for your suggestions. I've added a few clarifications to the text. The articles I've written for my blog aren't polished or academic, in that I don't devote much time to editing them, so there are bound to be parts that could be made clearer. Instead of footnotes, I include links to other articles that go into more detail or that explain some technical terms I use.<br /><br />Still, if you're looking for "enjoyable" reading, I'm not sure you should be reading philosophy. <br /><br />The point about "objective and evaluated regularities" alludes to animism and the naturalistic fallacy, which I talk about elsewhere in the article. The point is that nature in the Vedic religion is teleological, as it was for Aristotle. They didn't view natural processes objectively, but projected value and purpose onto them. <br /><br />The point about reality and illusion is that the Buddhist mistakes impermanence for illusion or unreality. Something can be real but lack an independent, permanent inner essence. Reality should be distinguished from explicit fiction, not from temporary or dependent natural constructs such as the self or the sun.<br /><br />The point of the article should become clear by the end (see, for example, the last paragraph). The Hindu synthesis is false in that the ascetic's anti-social and anti-natural (implicitly cosmicist) message contradicts Vedic teleology and acceptance of natural and social norms.<br /><br />Not sure how crucial "a few more minutes" of thinking would be, considering the decade I spent writing this blog and the other decade I spent studying philosophy in university. Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-12540307841307277102019-03-03T12:15:53.908-05:002019-03-03T12:15:53.908-05:00I'm not even through a quarter of this article...I'm not even through a quarter of this article. I am inclined to continue reading it but I nevertheless need write something about it.<br />In some places, it is unnecessarily vague and lacks clarity.<br />See one of the early paragraphs mentioning "subtext":<br />"Thus, the Sanskrit concept of rita conflates objective with evaluated regularities."<br />You may understand yourself but if you want your output to be enjoyable and entice users to think deeper, you do have some serious work to do, starting perhaps with, at the very least, providing more or less detailed footnotes of specific terms and concepts thrown into the text.<br />A bunch of non-sequiturs doesn't help either and other weird claims, such as "But the self and the sun would be illusory in the sense of being unreal only if reality had to be eternal"; an eternal reality does not make impossible finite real elements to live and die within said reality.<br /><br />The whole point of the article is hardly made clear either, barely hinted to in the small early paragraph in italics.<br /><br />As a hot reaction to what I read, I think I could have liked what is written, if only a serious effort had been made on the form and if some claims and ideas had either be clarified to rejected with a few more minutes spent thinking about them.294plejzicnoreply@blogger.com