IMO — There is no such thing as "independent" churches. It's a very big ecosystem, an ecosystem that has forced us to invent the word "Secularism". Not sure if you have forgotten...
Why is the church indulging in criticism? Who are they? What right do they have to do that? How do they know that the officials are corrupt? How do you know that is the only thing the church did, if they even did that? How do YOU know for a fact that the official was corrupt? Too many questions & you seem to be naive enough to take everything at face value. Again, why does the church interfere in such things? Isn't that why the word "Secularism" was invented??
We need a church ... christianity free world. There is nothing but death & destruction we have gotten from these desert cults.
That is happening. The Church is extremely powerful & extremely rich. They are also a minority, which is Hindu majority India is a gold medal. Minorities are kings. I hope Christians will stop persecuting Hindus by playing victim at the drop of a hat.
The church is known to fund the Naxalites, which has been a big terrorist force in North & North East India.
I can understand why you may find it suspicious. The problem is the abundance of the rather fake history about the dating of the great Indian events & epics. For a very long time, the narrative was monopolized by people who believed that the history of mankind (or life?) is not more than 5000 years ago, (mainly because of the bible or something else)? Therefore, when the British & other Marxist historians found something older than the purported 5000 years, they had to adjust every event in Indian / Hindu history to match it. Too many things have been "adjusted" in this way, unfortunately.
When modern human species evolved approximately 200,000 years ago, it should not be so far fetched to imagine that advanced civilizations existed 10,000 years ago?
A google search provides many good resources & links that I will just fill up my comment to provide. These resources have documented many many proofs, events more than 3000 years ago cannot be treated the same as events 500 or even 1000 years ago, because the archeological remains would not survive that long unfortunately. Please try this: https://www.google.com/search?q=dating+the+ramayana
I think the research done by PN Oak & Dr. Koenraad Elst would be most pertinent. I am assuming that you are not limited or prejudiced by the timelines provided in the bible or something else.
Ramayana predates Mahabharata. I think that's what you meant.
But even Wikipedia estimates that Gilgamesh himself lived between 2500 BC and 2000 BC. The authentic date of an existing record of the Gilgamesh epic is only from 700 BC. The Mahabharata on the other hand, is from at least 5000 BC. The Ramayana is even older, from 7000 BC.
Yes, that may be true, because Buddhism for all practical purposes has teachings that are a subset of what Hinduism / Sanatana Dharma is. Some people may not like it because that hurts their sensibilities, especially if they were Buddhists or have a soft corner for Buddhism. So it has been a debate & Buddhism is simply lacking in providing any novel concepts other than what Hinduism already provided. At least the path of Islam / Christianity of "Extinguish" at the point of a sword was not practiced.
No other line of thought has been criticized, marginalized & ridiculed as much as Hinduism has been. Buddhism escaped all that criticism only because of Hinduism being the bigger target. This is also the reason why many people in Western countries resort to Buddhism & not Hinduism when they want inner peace or want to understand meditation. This is going on even now. You'll be amazed at the words used by Christian missionaries, they call Hindu beliefs as evil, the gods as satanic. Muslims? They just try to kill you if you're a Hindu, desecrate & vandalize Hindu temples, forcibly convert young girls through kidnap & rape and worse.. and I am talking of all this happening today, now and will happen tomorrow. Why? Because Hindus are a soft target, they have never harmed anybody. History is evidence to this.
Matter of fact, there is sufficient evidence that Buddhism tried to do exactly that to Hinduism & Jainism "Embrace, Extend & Extinguish" and it was successful in Afghanistan, Kashmir, SE Asia etc, but could not survive in the face is Islamic violence. Look up these regions' history if you do not believe me.
Gravity is just a theory which happens to not fail whatever limited tests we have done so far. I mean everything is a theory for science which is great & how everything should be, except when that theory came from Indian / Hindu rishi's about the consciousness of the universe or any of the studies & accomplishments which got appropriated into Western culture as their own. That is what I am calling out on. Many glaring examples of such dishonest appropriation exist, but we choose to ignore them.
Both. Pyramids, gravity, Indian temples, stone henge, the patterns in the universe, cells etc. Like one simple example near where I used to live - the architecture of the Konark temple where it had a sort of magnet to levitate the "vigraha". The magnet was at least ~50 tonnes. http://www.thekonark.in/konarkfloatingidol.html
You may baulk at these, because your perspective is from probably an arrogant modern scientific outlook, but these buildings & structures predate even the pyramids. Many just too many of these have been destroyed by religious fanatics who cannot tolerate an alternative mode of thought besides Islam & Christianity, so what survives is a sorry remnant of that era, which even so is impressive I think.
> Fundamental understanding
Contingent upon a perspective of ignorance. Is that not correct?
For example, we use light as a form on energy in lasers etc, but only 70 years ago, this would have NOT been a fundamental understanding. The problem is that most of today's people, except the really great people like Einstein, Hawking, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Tesla etc, try to dismiss (& worse appropriate) any sciences that simply originated in the Indian subcontinent, and I am not sure why that is the case. Why do you think every major civilization in the last 500-600 years wanted to find a path to India. Why do you think the American native people are still called Indians? Why do you think strides in Science & Math were monopolized in the Indian subcontinent & it required the onslaught on the Islamic hordes first and then the European / British hordes to stop the progress of all such advancements? You may not be aware that the industrial revolution of Britain & Europe was funded by India & Indian wealth. Anyways, I digress. My point is that "fundamental understanding" is not limited to a set of people, it just requires time & since India is part of the longest surviving civilization (even the face of 80% destruction) there is a lot of understanding we can acquire from what the rishis had accomplished. We should not throw them all away just because we cannot make head or tail of it...
Science has not been able to address every single thing. In fact science is not developed enough to address anything much beyond the most basic things. I'm not trying to disparage science, but I want to emphasize that there is like 99.99% of things we do not know or understand, which is great considering we will all have super interesting times ahead of us. Not a moment of boredom.
I can imagine we had very similar conversations & skeptics when the first design for flying machines were proposed. Today we have lost all those scientific advancements made in those times and in time we will re-discover what was already discovered & lost.
I think you are taking an extremely parochial view of things by calling Vedas as "mythology". I believe I do not have to tell you about "Any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"... You look at the advanced technology that we unfortunately lost and you think it is magic (mythology in your words). Look around you & think of all the insane (to current humans) & incredible accomplishments of humans that our sciences of today still cannot explain convincingly how they were possible.
By the way, Indra was not a god - god, it was a role, the role of the king of gods. Besides the trimurthis anybody can become Indra. And Buddhism, if you have read it is by far very similar to Hinduism sans the gods concept, but it still embodies the concept of isht-devata by making buddha the preferred god. Both + Jainism are what are known as dharmic gods & have a not of commonality between them that the differences are quite obscure.
Finally, there is no such thing as Brahmanism except in the minds of those who felt threatened by Hinduism & its natural concepts and approach to the betterment of humanity in general. In other words, once you remove Brahmins and Hinduism will cease to exist.
Further, there was never a case of obliterating Buddhist monasteries (by Hindus)! Why would that be if Buddha was an avatara? Again these are narratives that want to paint anything coming out of (ancient) India & hinduism in very bad light. It is mischievous at best, please do not fall for such gimmicks & false narratives & do not feed them. There were some fights between Jains & Buddhists for a very brief time, but with Hinduism it was rarely physical because of the (earlier mentioned) concept of Ishta-devata / polytheism.
After that destruction, the cycle starts all over again. It is the closest thing to evolution formulated by the Indian rishis (scientists of their time). It begins with (on a high level) the water based living beings (fish), amphibians (turtle), mammal (boar), neanderthal (Parashuram), the perfect humans (Ram & Krishna) and so on. It is quite interesting.
Another name for Hinduism is Sanatana Dharma - or the Eternal Way of Life.
Orkut was so popular in some parts of the world like India that I always wondered why Google thought it better to shut it down. All those orkut users moved to Facebook & made Facebook a hugely popular platform. I hope the same does not happen with Hello.
Oh my god. This is quite a hurried at conclusion that the "dots-do-not-matter" is a misfeature of Gmail. This feature has prevented so many instances of spam that I cannot count them. Of course, I love the "[email protected]" feature as well, but I can't use that as often because most email field validations prevent the "+" character in email addresses.