Hinduism

We talked about Hinduism on Tuesday. So far, our quizzes have been a bit challenging because of the details that I couldn't quite remember. However, on the first two our professor gave us a "freebie" at the end of each one. The one on Hinduism was a short-answer on something we found interesting about Hinduism. I wrote about karma, but I was really tempted to write about the Kama Sutra. I wimped out though. When we were discussing the paths to enlightenment we learned that you can either go the way of asceticism or of pursuing pleasure. He said that the path to pleasure had some "real raunchy stuff" and he kept trying to say "Kama Sutra," but he seemed unsure about the pronunciation. I helped him out.

I wrote to a friend that it is possible that my prof wasn't just playing dumb on this one. Perhaps I'm just a bit more worldly since I was not raised in the church and used to be addicted to porn.

We also learned about the new Hindu temple in Cary. It seems that they start off by digging a hole and burying something that will represent the god they want to worship. He asked us what we thought was appropriate for Cary. After some silence I said, "prosperity," which was the right answer. It seems that they buried a box with jewels, cash, etc and then they put the idol over where the box is buried. After a pause I asked, "They don't have a god of uniform architecture?" You have to live in Cary to get that one.

At any rate, it's been a good class. We had some good discussions as we tried to understand the various faiths more. One thing that has become quite clear is that we think like Westerners, which means that logic is important to us. This is not the case for followers of many of these eastern religions.