Donating = Loving
Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
Log in or create an account to join the discussions on the Atheist Republic forums.
Donating = Loving
Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
Donating = Loving
Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
FREE E-BOOKS
Get the book "Why There Is No God" and one more book for FREE!
Sign up below for the Atheist Republic Newsletter to get the books.
Record Your Message!
Record your voice here for it to be aired on the Atheist Republic Voicemails Podcast.
Send us your views and opinions, your personal stories, messages of support, comments on recent news, or any comments you would like to share about your part of the world.
Note : By clicking record you are allowing us to broadcast your message on any of our platforms.
Affiliate Disclaimer
Links to atheist related books, shirts and movies and other atheism related products are affiliate links.
All proceeds will go to keeping the Atheist Republic website up and running; providing resources, advocacy, community tools and encouragement to atheists all over the world.
Zero difference in the atheism part. Hence my surprise at the lack of understanding from the mods of this site
I cannot speak for the facebook site. I am not a participant of the AR FB page. So, atheism we have in common! We have other Hindu atheists here also. Also Arabs, Jewish folks, gringos, etc. I hope you feel welcomed and challenged on this forum.
Namaste!
thank you for the welcome. Namaste!
Your an Atheist, which means you have a lack of belief in any gods right? It's great you have your hindu culture.
Yep. There are plenty of Hindus out there who don't believe in a God or any of the Gods either.
Do not know why you got banned on the FB part of AR, I do not participate there. At least on my end, you are welcome here to discuss what you like no matter your religious/non religious affiliation as long as you follow the forum rules.
Correct me if I am wrong, but perhaps a better way to state things to clear up confusion is:
You are atheist. You are also: involved in a lot of Hindu culture, and that is a big part of your identity as well.
You just do not believe in any god(s), you do not pray, and you take the Hindu holy book as a: fictional book. (Is there a holy book? Or collection of them? Forgive my lack of knowledge of Hindu religion and culture.)
hindus theists don't really have a holy book. Most modern-day hindu theists draw their morals from Ramayana and Mahabharata. The latter contains the Gita, which is the only piece of 'revealed literature' in Hinduism. The former is a straight-forward story of good triumphing over evil and has a 'good guy vs bad guy' storyline with faint parallels to Helen of Troy story.
The latter (Mahabharata) is an exercise in relativism, as the book really re-inforces the notion that there is no absolute good/absolute bad and that to do a little bad for the greater good is preferable than doing a little good for the greater bad.
Beyond them, there are the vedas, which are divided into Rig,Athar,Saam and Yajur. Rig Veda is the oldest continuously used piece of Indo-European literature, dating from atleast 1500 BC, if not earlier. Its a collection of hymns and prayer/sacrifice ritual to practically every God imaginable. Atharveda is a collection of hymns for health & full of ancient 'remedies'- mostly dabbling in magical properties of stuff to remove curses/spells, etc. Saam veda is about musical incantations- its essentially a book on music, instructing on the proper meter/form etc. on reciting mantras. Yajur Veda is a veda on health & medicine. Its the veda from which Ayurveda (Indian folk & herbal medicine) comes from and its in this Veda does one find the Yogas.
Beyond this, there is the manu-smriti,which is the closest to '10 commandments' of hindu life, but more like a thousand commandments.
What further complicates the picture, is that Indic philosophers/texts themselves/preachers divide their literary corpus into 'Shruti and Smriti' - Smritii is that which is a collection & can be changed, the Shruti is unchanged from the beginning, retaining every syllable where its supposed to be. In Hindu literature, only the Vedas are Shrutis, the rest all are Smritis- despite the fact that the Mahabharata contains the Geeta portion, which is 1st & 2nd person conversation between the ultimate God avatar (Krishna) and his mortal, demigod devotee (Arjun). But the Vedas, especially the Rig Veda, which is the most important of the Shrutis, are irrelevant to Hinduism beyond the ceremonies, since it is quite literally a collection book of prayers to particular Gods only.
So Hinduism is a bit relativistic due to this reason and there is no one book thats completely relevant to being a theistic hindu.
Pages