Limited Time Offer
Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.
Great debaters like Yajnavalkya or Shankara would not be proud to see modern Hindus fall for anti-intellectual soundbites like “equal respect for all… - Koenraad Elst
" "Great debaters like Yajnavalkya or Shankara would not be proud to see modern Hindus fall for anti-intellectual soundbites like “equal respect for all religions”. Very Gandhian, but logically completely untenable. For example, Christianity believes that Jesus was God’s Son while Islam teaches that he was merely God’s spokesman: if one is right, the other is wrong, and nobody has equal respect for a true and a false statement (least of all Christians and Muslims themselves). Add to this their common scapegoat Paganism, in India represented by “idolatrous” Hinduism, and the common truth of all three becomes unthinkable. It takes a permanent suspension of the power of discrimination to believe in the syrupy Gandhian syncretism which still prevails in India. The Mahatma’s outlook was neither realistic nor Indian. Not even the Jain doctrine of Anekantavada, “pluralism”, had been as mushy and anti-intellectual as the suspension of logic that is propagated in India under Gandhi’s name. It could only come about among post-Christian Westerners tired of doctrinal debates, and from their circles, Gandhi transplanted it to India.
English
Collect this quote
About Koenraad Elst
Koenraad Elst (born 7 August 1959) is a Flemish right wing Hindutva author, known primarily for his support of the Out of India theory and the Hindutva movement. Scholars have accused him of harboring Islamophobia.
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Elst, Koenraad
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Koenraad Elst
But then a conflict arose between the Vedic Indians and the Iranian tribes. Two highlights are decribed in the Rg-Veda: the Battle of the Ten Kings (7:5 and 7:18), named after the western alliance facing the Saraswati-based Vedic king Sudās, and a few generations later the Vārsāgira Battle (4:15 and 1:122:13), named after the patronymic of its commanders on the Vedic side. In the latter battle, one of the enemy (and allegedly defeated) kings is called Istāśva, the Sanskrit equivalent of Vištāspa, the royal patron of Zarathustra. It is highly plausible that the emerging opposition between Devas and Asuras, with the former worshipped and the latter demonized by the Indians and the latter worshipped but the former demonized by the Iranians, finds its origin in this war. Thus, we can imagine that both sides invoked the storm-god Indra before the battle, but that he awarded victory to only the Indian side. The Iranian side, instead of looking for an explanation for their defeat in their own ritual or ethical shortcomings (as religious people tend to do), squarely blamed Indra and broke off their relationship with him. This way, a mundane event led to a whole theological construction of an enmity between two classes of gods, and ultimately to the dualism of cosmic good and evil that has been deemed distinctive of Mazdeism for most of its history.
Loading...