It’s not about respect for religion
[Machine-translated from Dutch] Sacred determines what profane is; it is not about respect for religion. The film Innocence of Muslims has turned cities around the world upside down in the…
Read moreSelf-reflexivity of Religion
It would be interesting to answer the question of whether or not The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) is a religious story by testing against ‘religion is an explanatorily intelligible…
Read moreIs Worship a Human Invention?
1. Let us assume that the Church Fathers (or the Apostles or whoever else) planned to introduce an eschatological doctrine and some mode of worship. (Let us further assume that their reasoning…
Read moreDefininition vs hypothesis: religion
1. One confuses between a definition and a hypothesis. Definitions tell us how we use a word and which objects it refers to. In the case of the term ‘religion’,…
Read moreHow do we understand the concept of Communal Violence?
[Originally published at cultivasian.org on Feb 2007] We all agree that events like the Gujarat riots are tragic and terrible. But what is the role of intellectuals in avoiding similar…
Read moreNeurobiological Theory of Religion
You ask whether ‘in principle’ a neurobiological theory on religion could “account” for the experience of the believers. The answer depends on what kind of an account you are asking for and…
Read morePrinciple of Charity
Before deciding about whether or not Vivekananda was ethnocentric, jingoistic or even plain intolerant, one has to understand what Vivekananda was saying. In doing so, the interpretative “principle of charity” requires…
Read moreReligion ‘sui generis’?
When a religion claims that it is the word of God and that the word is unconditionally true; and that, further, the word is about the Cosmos: everything that was,…
Read moreWhat exists in India, given ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’, etc. do not exist
1. The first thing is that my book is about the western culture and a specific religion, which brought the former forth. It is only indirectly about India because I interrogate the…
Read moreWhy Understand the Western Culture?
Let me begin this contribution, the third piece about our culture and traditions([1], [2]), by sharing something you are familiar with. Very often, I have heard the NRI parents in…
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