The Complexity and Simplicity of Hinduism
Preached on 1/04/2015
By Reverend Tom Capo
First let me share a few interesting facts about Hinduism. (Hindu.BZ.com and hindu facebook)
1. More than 10,000 years ago the institution of marriage was founded and put forth in practice by Hindus.
2. The Rigveda, one of Hindu's holy scriptures, is the oldest literature known to humanity.
3. According to the Vedas, lending money on interest is a bad Karma. We will talk about Karma later.
4. According to the Vedas, Om, Hinduism's most sacred sound, is the sound which was present at the time of creation of universe.
5. Parents, teachers, and food are considered next to God. That makes sense to me somehow.
6. Because of the usefulness of rivers, they are highly revered in Hinduism. People call them mother.
7. Hindus believe that we get the human body when our soul passes through 8,400,000 species of plants and animals.
I could go on with interesting facts or tell you about the gods and goddesses of Hinduism, or the social caste system--the societal level that each person is assigned based on their birth; or I could talk about the various ways that people practice their faith, or all the religious texts and their meaning to various sects of Hinduism; or I could talk about the various rituals, holidays, and pilgrimages. If I chose to talk about even one of these in detail, we would be here for a very very long time. You see Hinduism is a collective term applied to the many philosophical and religious traditions native to India. In a strict sense there was no 'Hinduism' before modern times, although the sources of Hindu traditions are very ancient. And Hinduism has no definite starting point that anyone has been able to discover. The traditions which flow into Hinduism may go back several thousand years and some practitioners claim that revelation in Hinduism is eternal; sound familiar?
