But the solution is not to “get around these stubborn, disturbing facts” of astronomy by smugly dismissing them as testimonia non grata. Nor to decla… - Koenraad Elst

At least he is not being misled by gross mistakes, as would be the case with the many flawed contributions on easily the most-consulted source, Wikipedia. That might be a decent source on neutral topics like physics, but on Hindu subjects it is emphatically not recommended by the specialists. Nor is any contributor to the Encyclopedia of Hinduism grossly biased; they are truer to its scholarly ethic of being a neutral and non-controversial source of information. This, again, will come as a pleasant surprise for those who rely too much on Wikipedia, where many topics of serious debate have been hijacked by one of the contending parties, shutting the other’s party’s version out or ridiculing it. In the present case, we are dealing with a real scholarly work.

Christian missionaries as the most strategically savvy part of the secularist coalition just love the fragmentation of Hinduism. Instead of a potentially solid enemy, they would find a string of separate sects ready to be swallowed each on its own terms. Most Indology Departments share this strategic vision, though they are less explicit about it.

The reductionist interpretation as “nothing but” sexual symbolism is simply wrong and shows the limited framework of psycho-analysis. The smaller cannot contain the greater, and psycho-analytical models cannot grasp the vastness and complexity of Hindu cosmology.