Summary of your religious beliefs

[Kleine Scheiße]

This is a very basic and imperfect, incomplete guide to my beliefs. I will avoid giving too many definitions of terms because doing so tends to distract from the point of all this, and I am not a sufficient authority to try and actively espouse my own convenient definitions for some of these terms.

Religion: The most accurate term is sanatana dharma, but in discussion, regardless of self-identification, the term "Hindu" will inevitably be used at some point. I would call myself a Hindu as a religious label but I do not claim to represent "Hinduism" in either a cultural or religious sense.

"Denomination:" I have in the past identified myself as either vishishtadvaitin or advaitin. The development of my beliefs and practices has in large part been influenced by the distinctions between these two terms. The most succinct answer to this is probably "advaita vedanta," but there are different understandings of what that term means depending on who you ask. My beliefs, practices, and answers here may not be representative of most vedantins. To my understanding, my thinking is in line with the Smarta tradition, but again, I'm not claiming to represent any viewpoint but my own.

Why do you follow this religion: I thought for a long time about this very pointed question and the very pointed answer I came up with is "because I believe it is true." I believe in the supremacy of the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Brahma Sutras, and I also draw from Shankaracharya, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Ramanuja, and Aurobindo. I was raised in a functionally agnostic household, but most of my family are antitheist.

God: Brahman is all, in every sense, and is manifest in infinite, innumerable faces and things. I could be called a panentheist. All is and are manifestation of Brahman. I believe in the divinity of Jesus, Muhammad, Gautama Buddha, Krishna, Zoroaster, the Talmudic prophets, etc., and look on them as either avatars or holy teachers; an exhaustive list would not be possible. Some seem to believe that advaita vedanta is atheism by another name, or that it rejects worship as illusory or only of symbolic importance. This is inaccurate. Dualism and nondualism are complementary and not contradictory. Vivekananda: "[a]ll of religion is contained in the vedanta, that is, in the three stages of the vedanta philosophy, the dvaita, vishishtadvaita and advaita; one comes after the other. These are the three stages of spiritual growth in man. Each one is necessary." I practice jnana yoga but believe that bhakti is also absolutely necessary. Others could or could not find other practices more useful.

Afterlife: Look at "life," both in the sense of "every individual life" and in the sense of "life itself," as a stage in a process of stages. "Afterlife" doesn't fully apply. After this life I could return as anything, or I could not return at all. Regardless, given enough "time," it is a mathematical inevitability that "I" will return -- both in the sense that this exact moment will occur again and again as infinitely as every other moment; and in the sense that I, a purported individual (in the current "reality" paradigm we are apparently all experiencing), am embodied as jiva, which will either inhabit a new body after this one is gone, or will be released from the cycle (until all other possible "realities" play themselves out and we loop back around as mentioned earlier).

Prayer and Worship: Haven't been to temple in a while, since COVID-19 started. I have a Ganesha murti at home and I have attended other, public puja, events, and festivals in the past. I pray and meditate.

Ghosts, spirits, angels, and demons: I'm not sure how to best answer this. It depends on how these things are defined.

One True Path: My religion is true, and all other religions are true. All beliefs within and aspects of the human experiential dialectic are equally valid, but this does not mean that all beliefs and aspects are used or interpreted properly or to productive end. My response to this question is an analogue of Stirner's answer to the question of why one should be an egoist: it is already true, whether or not you are aware. It is simply more advantageous to acknowledge this, and everyone everywhere is constantly in the process of coming to this acknowledgement, in eventuality.

Spiritual objects: See "God." By living and participating in "humanity," we are operating within a certain framework. It is not an ultimately authoritative framework, though it is part of the grand authoritative framework. Our mode of existence is a dialectic; other modes of existence for other beings (both other types of beings and other individual "humans") are other dialectics. They are all internally true, and collectively they all point toward a universal truth because they compose that universal truth but do not yet realize or actualize this.

Religious law: I personally avoid eating beef. Actions are sins for people for whom they are sins and they are not sins for people for whom they are not sins. The universal moral law is "love God and be happy." Try to have fun defining what that looks like. This is not self-strangulating strawman postmodernism; in the parable of the blind men and the elephant, the elephant is not unreal, but simply unknowable to any one man alone. The nature of the elephant's existence is debatable, but it would be foolish to deny that existence itself.

Spreading the word: Sharing the beliefs is perfectly fine, even good, but aggressive evangelism and attempts to "convert" are not compatible with pluralism. I have recommended the Bhagavad Gita to many and have loaned out my copy of Vedanta: a Simple Introduction too many times to count; and it is both pointless and contradictory with this to approach doing such as an attempt to "save" anyone or get them to reach any particular conclusion. The extent of interest in actively "converting" anyone is that eventually, everything will flow into truth. Truth is known by many names. "Reality is one, yet wise men speak of it variously."

At some point if people are interested in hearing more about my practice, I'll go more in-detail, but my laptop battery is currently on 4%.

[Kleine Scheiße]

God: Brahman is all, in every sense, and is manifest in infinite, innumerable faces and things. I could be called a panentheist. All is and are manifestation of Brahman. I believe in the divinity of Jesus, Muhammad, Gautama Buddha, Krishna, Zoroaster, the Talmudic prophets, etc., and look on them as either avatars or holy teachers; an exhaustive list would not be possible. Some seem to believe that advaita vedanta is atheism by another name, or that it rejects worship as illusory or only of symbolic importance. This is inaccurate. Dualism and nondualism are complementary and not contradictory. Vivekananda: "[a]ll of religion is contained in the vedanta, that is, in the three stages of the vedanta philosophy, the dvaita, vishishtadvaita and advaita; one comes after the other. These are the three stages of spiritual growth in man. Each one is necessary." I practice jnana yoga but believe that bhakti is also absolutely necessary. Others could or could not find other practices more useful.

I do have a question: how do you reconcile Jesus' claim to be the only begotten Son of God to be true along with competing religions' claims that Jesus was a mere rabbi with no authoritative claim to any special relationship with God (or Brahman)?

There are a number of different ways to address this. Jesus also said "I and the father are one." (John 10:30)

First, a distinction must be made between Brahman and God in this context; the Jewish God is an actor "in a heaven far above mundane existence... so high and separate from the world, so extra-cosmic, so great, so majestic and so transcendent, that no one could approach Him, no one could live after seeing Him face to face. Consequently, there was a wide gulf of separation between God and man, between the Creator in heaven and the creature on earth." This is a different modality from most interpretations of Brahman.

If one accepts this hard dualism and implied active-interference model between God and man, it is only logically consistent to save the "only begotten son" designation for whomever one recognizes as the Christ figure. Judging purely by internal textual logic, the claim is not inconsistent. The reason this hard exclusivity is not present in the Gita for Krishna or within Buddhism for Gautama is that it would be contradictory. It is not necessarily contradictory, however, within the Bible for Jesus. The answer to this question with regard to my personal belief, and not the soundness of any particular tradition, however, starts with controversy surrounding the definition of "only begotten son:"

The passages that have been quoted from the Old Testament like, ‘Ye are the children of God', meant nothing more than the fatherly goodness of the Creator and the implicit obedience of the creature, as that of a dutiful son to his father. They were never meant in the sense in which the Christians understand the divine sonship of Jesus the Christ. Through the paternal goodness of Yahveh, Abraham became the friend of God and Adam became the son of God, as described in the thirty eighth verse of the third chapter of Luke.

Furthermore:

...the word ‘Christ’, like the word ‘Logos’ of Philo, did not at first mean any particular individual or personality, but it referred to the universal ideal type of man, or the perfect man who dwells in the divine mind from eternity to eternity. In this sense the word ‘Christ’ is as universal as the Logos. It is not confined to any particular person or nationality. We must not confound this ideal impersonal Christ or the only begotten Son of God with the historical personality of Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary; but we must take it in its true spiritual sense, we must understand that each individual soul, being the expression of the first-born Son of God, is potentially the same as the only begotten Son of God, or the child of immortal Bliss as it is said in Vedanta. When we have realized this impersonal ideal Christ in our souls, from that very moment we have become Christ-like; and it is then that the impersonal Christ, the only begotten son, will be born within us.

In addition to this commentary and the associated questions about "fatherdom" in the biblical context, there are long-standing debates about the terms monogenes and unigenitum complicating discourse around the "only begotten son" topic, into which I'd prefer not to wade as the specifics of the material are a bit out of my wheelhouse. In general, though, I don't agree with the interpretation that "only begotten son" refers to Jesus of Nazareth being the one individual in all of history who was directly placed on earth by God for the specific purpose of manifesting divinity here, and I don't think Jesus would have intended to claim this, either. The new testament is the story of Jesus and his realization and actualization of his Christ-nature. This realization and actualization puts him into a higher class—joining there Krishna, Gautama, etc. in the oneness of divinity-in-motion. Much like the trinity—three aspects, one God—all of these teachers, awakened to their divine nature, comprise one body with many faces. Jesus (or Krishna, or Rama, or Gautama) does not have to have been born un-divine and become divine at some time on earth for this to be true. We have all always been and will always be divine, before birth as after death. It is acknowledgement of this state of being which brings one into oneness with Christ-nature—Christ-nature of which we all are already composed, but which the majority of us do not actualize.

In short: I don't believe that Jesus was claiming that his body and individual mortal identity was a specifically chosen blessed vessel, but instead that he was in his actualization of divinity one with the sonship-of-God, which is itself a state of being in total, conscious union with Brahman. Organism individuality ("Jesus," "Muhammad," etc.) is not a perceptible factor in this. "I am the only begotten son" does not mean that Jesus of Nazareth was the only manifestation of God, because "I" does not refer to Jesus' mortal being itself—Jesus did not actually have a mortal being to even call "I" in the first place. None of us do. The "I" in "I am the only begotten son" would refer to Jesus' recognition of and identification with the ultimate, the supreme consciousness.

In response to certain similarities between the teachings of Krishna, Gautama, and Jesus, William Jones theorized that in India, "the devil, foreseeing the advent of Christ, originated a system of religion in advance of His, and just like it." Frankly, as laughable as that may be, it contains within it the tacit admission from even an explicit opponent that Jesus exists as part of—if not one with—a lineage; Jones apparently believed that that it was an illegitimate, unholy lineage, and that Jesus was defined in opposition to it, but in relation to it still. I don't believe that any such "devil" intervened to do anything of the sort, should go without saying, but the point is that the very framing of the question about whether Jesus was the exclusive manifestation of God somewhat acknowledges that Jesus exists somewhere in relation to this category of holy teachers. This category is itself the "only begotten son," with no need for further qualification. Jesus is The Only Begotten Son just as much as Muhammad and Krishna are. One could possibly call "The Only Begotten Son" paramatman, in vedanta.

Most quotations are from Abhedananda's discourses "Churchianity" and "Son of God." Again, this is not a guide to vedanta beyond my personal approach, and I am a practitioner, not an expert.