Ex-Hindu tells it all

Doreen Virtue strikes again…

Here, she interviews an ex-Hindu named Sandeep who converted to (evangelical?) Christianity about five years ago. While the interview is interesting, I nevertheless gasped at somewhat irregular intervals. As when Sandeep attacks Hindu worship for its blood sacrifice to Kali and some other deities. Sandeep has converted to a religion which is *literally* based on a human sacrifice to a wrathful god! Christianity, remember? And in the Jewish Temple, they sacrificed animals to God. Jesus and the apostles worshipped in the Temple, indeed, the apostles “praised God” in the Temple even after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus!

And speaking of the Temple…

Virtue mentions that the Old Testament prohibits idol worship, God declaring that He is the only object of worship. She forgets to mention that the Israelites themselves broke these commandments by having two graven images in the Holy of Holies of the Jewish Temple! And while the Bible never says so, there are suspicions that the two cherubim are really Yahweh and his heavenly consort Asera – how is this relevantly different from a Hindu god and his shakti, or even Krishna and Radha and in their eternal love play?  

Going back to Sandeep, he attacks the Hindu gods and the Buddha for having a bad family life, but what about Jesus condemning his family, or indeed everyone´s family? Sure, the Hindu or Buddhist scriptures are frequently peculiar or even somewhat bizarre, but what about all the strange stuff in the Old Testament, or even in the New Testament? (Fill in your favorite examples here.) Sandeep also attacks Hindu polytheism, but if he had wanted a consistently monotheist religion, he should have become a Jew, Muslim or Sikh! How is the Trinity and worship of Jesus (a kind of Christian “avatara”) really different from polytheism, indeed from a polytheism claiming that all gods are really one and the same?

It´s not entirely clear to me what attracted Sandeep to Christianity, but he does mention a couple of points on which he believes (perhaps rightly) that the teachings associated with Jesus were unique. For instance, Jesus told his followers to love their enemies. He contrasts this with Krishna´s admonition to Arjuna to fight at the battle of Kurukshetra. Leaving aside for the moment that the NT never prohibits Christians from fighting in wars (but sure, those are secular duties in the NT, not religious ones like in the Bhagavad Gita), how is the advice to love your enemy and don´t resist evil practical at all? 

I also get the impression that Sandeep didn´t see any escape from samsara and its never-ending cycles when he was a Hindu, and that he found Hindu ritualism absurd. Salvation by faith and grace is presumably “easier”, but how is the idea of everlasting hell for the unrepentant “better” than never-ending cycles for everyone? Sandeep also believes that there is historical evidence for Jesus, but hardly any for Krishna and absolute zero for other Hindu deities. But even if we accept this (some don´t), what is the historical evidence for Abraham, Moses, Joshua or even king David?

Once again, Sandeep´s conversation with Doreen Virtue (who is a former New Age believer) is interesting (I had no idea that certain yoga postures were associated with the Hindu deities), but I can´t help feeling that both of them have a blind spot for the problems of their own chosen religion…