Friday, October 17, 2008

Razib says

in comment 34 of Communal Violence in Orissa: Trying to Get a Balanced PictureNews:
"the proper response to evangelical obnoxiousness coupled with material inducements is to offer mainstream hindu outreach with material inducements."
Sounds sensible to me. He also says in comment 71 "btw, you do know that muslims in indonesia can convert to christianity and hinduism, right? hundreds of thousands of javanese muslims converted to hinduism afte 1965." A quick google check confirms that conversion to Hinduism have been taking place in Indonesia.
Razib Khan blogs at Gene Expression and Gene Expression Classic on Evolution and Genetics. I occasionally read the posts like his recent rebuttal of Steve Jones view that evolution has stopped in humans. If he has any views on fast evolution views of John Hawkes of which there is a recent exposition in the Seed Magazine article How we evolve,I missed them. He seems to be one of the most erudite bloggers to come out of the subcontinent.

7 comments:

Biswajit said...

Excellent stuff! I do have a few gripes with Razib's points though.

Given that Hinduism is not an organized religion, I don't see a route by which it can compete with organized Christianity. It can try to become an organized religion and thereby become a clone of Christianity. A case in point is the the Brahmo sect.

While I was growing up in the north east in the early 1980s, one of the taunts that our Christian classmates used on us Hindus was "Name one rich Hindu country. End of argument." The notion was that everything Western was good and caused by Christianity.

The point of view that seems to come across quite often in Sepia Mutiny is that Hinduism should be discarded by civilized people. I disagree.

gaddeswarup said...

Thanks. I worked in the North East India in the seventies. Some used to say 'you Indians' and some said that they felt more affinity for South east Asia than India. But that was long ago and I was there for only one and half years.

Razib Khan said...

Given that Hinduism is not an organized religion, I don't see a route by which it can compete with organized Christianity. It can try to become an organized religion and thereby become a clone of Christianity. A case in point is the the Brahmo sect.

it's an organized religion in indonesia. who are you to decide from indonesian hindus that they can't be organized under the agama hindu dharma?

While I was growing up in the north east in the early 1980s, one of the taunts that our Christian classmates used on us Hindus was "Name one rich Hindu country. End of argument." The notion was that everything Western was good and caused by Christianity.

your neighbors were certainly retards :-)

also, i blogged adaptive acceleration a lot last year. john and greg are friends of mine, though i will also offer that there will be some work that comes out in the near future which will suggest that might not be right (it is still an open question).

Razib Khan said...

a quibble:
He seems to be one of the most erudite bloggers to come out of the subcontinent.

this is obviously technically true, but i'm american. the erudite part, i have no quibbles with :-)

gaddeswarup said...

Razib,
Thanks for dropping by and the links.

Biswajit said...

I still don't see why Hinduism, as practised in India, is an organized religion in the sense that Christianity is. The closest approximation to organized Hinduism is the Bajrang Dal and similar groups. I would rather do without such organization.

I don't know enough about the form followed in Bali, and don't see how that's relevant.

Keep writing more about math.

gaddeswarup said...

Biswajit,
It seems that you have been following this blog off and on and probably my views are fairly clearly by now.They are fairly close to the views expressed here.
Thanks for the advice about mathematics. I have retired now and am trying to learn other things. But once in a while, I will write about mathematics; I still have a couple of papers to complete.