Hinduism and Caste

[want to be hindu]

There was actually democracy in ancient India, it was the first to create a demoractic system, but it is not democracy as we understand it, it is democracy within the caste system, within a monarchy.

Most people dont know about the that much of the American system of Goverment was taken from the Iroquoi Indians ( Native Americans )

The Iroquois Confederacy was governed by the Iroquois Great Council. Each Iroquois nation sent eight to fourteen leaders to the Council, where they agreed on political decisions through discussion and voting. Although these politicians were called "chiefs," they were actually elected officials, chosen by the clan mothers (or matriarchs) of each tribe. Each individual indian nation also had a tribal council to make decisions. This just like how American states have their own government, but all are subject to the greater US government. I believe that democracy was known in the ancient world more then we think.

 

[.lava]

I can not see how anything about the caste system today is positive. In fact the caste system today is worse then ever. I believe that todays caste system is a mix of the english class system and the indian caste system. I find it all very ugly.

where is this corruption coming from exactly? it has to be written somewhere else. Sharia of Islam for example is not applied correctly and it is because there are thousands of fake hadiths and they believe in them. if caste system was good for people, how did it become satanic laws that torture 250 million from their birth to their deaths?

when i defend Sharia i have Qur'an to talk about it. when i critize wrong doings, i have fake hadiths to show and how it contradicts with verses of Qur'an. what do you have to defend caste system and critize wrong doings?


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[Hema]

The caste system shows that we all have different roles to play for the proper functioning of society. We are not confined to those roles forever and one is not higher than the other. Atman is equally present in all and God loves us equally. Look at Sevari in the Ramayan...she received Shri Ram's blessings although she was labelled as an outcaste by society.

 

[.lava]

The caste system shows that we all have different roles to play for the proper functioning of society. We are not confined to those roles forever and one is not higher than the other. Atman is equally present in all and God loves us equally. Look at Sevari in the Ramayan...she received Shri Ram's blessings although she was labelled as an outcaste by society.

problem i have with that idea, sweet Hema, is that i can not accept people were given those duties because of their birth dates. everyone has free will and therefor equal. everyone has his right to chose which career to follow. nobody was born to clean dirt of others. if lower caste and highest caste could exchange their position every month, then both would understand how it feels like to be in that caste. i don't know, maybe that caste system you talk about is an utopia.


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[Hema]

problem i have with that idea, sweet Hema, is that i can not accept people were given those duties because of their birth dates. everyone has free will and therefor equal. everyone has his right to chose which career to follow. nobody was born to clean dirt of others. if lower caste and highest caste could exchange their position every month, then both would understand how it feels like to be in that caste. i don't know, maybe that caste system you talk about is an utopia.


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Well this is how it should be. I think the way the caste system is practised in India is because of people's misinterpretation. In my country, there are lots of Hindus but we do not practise the caste system here like in India. None is higher than another.

This is what Swami Vivekananda said about the caste system, from this link:
Caste Problem in India

"It is in the nature of society to form itself into groups; and what will go will be these privileges! Caste is a natural order. I can perform one duty in social life, and you another; you can govern a country, and I can mend a pair of old shoes, but that is no reason why you are greater than I, for can you mend my shoes? Can I govern the country? I am clever in mending shoes, you are clever in reading Vedas, that is no reason why you should trample on my head; why if one commits murder should he be praised and if another steals an apple why should he be hanged? This will have to go."

 

[Makaveli]

If the government did that, wouldn't it actually make you a bad neurologist? Workers who feel exploited and force usually don't work very well.

I think you're right that there ought to be freedom to decide to operate outside your own best fit in terms of ability. But that said, I think the example that want to be hindu brings up of people happily accepting their fate because they aren't presented with choices is a good one. I think most people would be perfectly happy to have their lives planned out for them a little better than we get in the West today. And if those few who want to resist the societal planning are free to do so (like the prostitute's son who became a Brahmin), then the system would be fine, right??

Yes, it would make me a bad neurologist, because as you said people who feel exploited don't work well, or even do an intentionally bad job in an attempt to get back at "The Man" as it were.

I think that would be a fine system, as long as social mobility remains in effect. I believe Suraj has made the point in other threads that the caste system used to be this way in India but was corrupted into what it is today over the millenia. Humans are short-sighted creatures, and I think it is likely that the system, while honest in theory, will in practice become corrupt, and lock people into their roles with no social mobility.

If that is the case, it would be better to face economic hardships, poverty, and social dysfunction than it is to be bereft of freedom. Liberty is the highest virtue, and those who lose it are unlikely to regain it.

 

[Makaveli]

There was actually democracy in ancient India, it was the first to create a demoractic system, but it is not democracy as we understand it, it is democracy within the caste system, within a monarchy.

I think it should be clear now on this forum that the castem-system isn't a rigid system which has no social mobility. It is, however, a system that many people have agreed with for thousands of years. It has given people structure in their lives and helped preserve many knowledge traditions. If it were not the Brahmanas in the caste system the Vedas would not have been preserved. Many people have preferred being born into their caste and having the rest of their life planned out. Their education begins as soon as they are born.

My point was about the first modern democracy; this thread isn't about the ancients, though I don't know enough Indian history to make a judgment on it if it was.

It's a fine system if the option of choosing what you want to do with your life is available. I don't want to see a system of social structure fall to the overwhelming burden of human error and fallacy, and liberty pushed to the side for effeciency and structure. It's better to be free and starving, then in chains and fed.

Then do you think you should get away with your selfishness? If everybody starting being as selfish and saying, "I am good at carpentry, but I want to be a popstar", "I am good at maths, but I want to be a counsellor", "I am good at at counselling, but I want to be in the army" then society would be anarchic.

Simply put, society cannot function with individualism. There is a place for individualism of course, but only within a wider collectivist framework. Not complete freedom; but limited freedom. As Philosophers of the 20th century of shown the human being is as much governed by impersonal and rational determinsitic forces as are natural things and notions of free will, individual and freedom are simply not true.

The philosophy of individualism is based on a faulty premise which says we have free will and that we should fulfil our desires. The truth is if we all went about doing that society would be a mess. Thus, a happy medium has to be struck in which an individual has enough freedom to move up the socio-economic ladder, but enough constraints to ensure social harmony.

Yes, I do. Not everyone says, "I am a neurologist, but I want to be an outdoorsman," and does that. The vast majority of people say, "I am a neurologist, I am good at neurology, I make a lot of money doing this, I'm sticking with it." You're using an either or fallacy when things aren't just black and white; it's not going to that either everyone goes into their role, or everyone doesn't, there are a large people that do, and a small amount that don't, so it's not a good comparison. I do not have a Kantian perception of life where everything must be absolute to be true.

Society cannot function if everyone was an individual and catered to only his or her own desires, but that has not and will never be the case. People are social animals, and the tyranny of the majority forces everyone to conform to its societal will. The tyranny of the majority is so pervasive that no one in society can escape it unless they opt out of that society, and the society as a whole is preserved. As humans are animals, they too are founded on rationale and instinct more than lofty notions, but should we just accept our animalian tendencies, or should we strive for greater things?

You do not believe in free will? That's interesting. The tyranny of the majority already serves to keep society in line with it's collective desires, we do not need to restrict freedom by law to do so when the mind is a more powerful motivator. Your system is already in place, it's already enacted in our own heads, but the freedom to be an individual should always be there. Like all things, society is as impermanent as the bodies we inhabit, and we should not sacrifice our liberty to preserve a beast that will inevitable die as it always does. We should instead strive for progress based on our individual liberty.

Is it functioning well though? Most people complain of their life being empty. The highest value in society today is hedoninism and materialism, depression and stress is higher than ever. The family unit is dysfunctional and divorce is very high; Selfish lifestyles in the west have lead to environmental problems and economic problems in the world. America is on the brink of economic collapse; the third world is reeling from centuries of economic exploitation by the west. Most of the words population lives there and lives under poverty and corruption. Geopolitically a third world war could erupt anytime in the next 50 years.

Is this what individualism has brought us?

Is it functioning today? Absolutely not, society is utterly dysfunctional, but it is not the fault of unbridled liberty, it is the fault of humanity's fallacious nature and the fact that our culture today is defined by business. All the music we hear, is because business thought it would sell well. All our clothes, because business thought they would sell well. Everything we are, our entire culture, is not derived from the people but from the market. Business is not the individual, it is the antithesis of the individual. What we need is not a regulation of liberty and individualism, but a regulation of commerce to make it serve the people, not the other way around.

The current system provides 'seductions' people are tempted by occupations they are not suited to by such things like money and fame. Not many people actually do jobs today because they are good at them, they do them for selfish reasons. I remember talking to a guy recently studying geological sciences, which sounded really boring to me(but I'm not a gelogist ) and he tells me he doesn't like it either, he's doing it for the money. In his country geologists get paid loads. This is a common seduction - ahem - incentive.

If everyone was put it into a job harmonious with their nature and which they themselves loved to do, then that would be an alright system. But if people are taken at birth and trained in something their whole lives, they're going to enjoy it simply because it is all they ever knew. Sparta trained its children in combat from the age of seven onwards, and by all accounts the thousands of Spartans loved their frugal, austere, militaristic existence. If these people were raised in Athens they would have loved commerce, material pleasures, philosophy and other things characteristic of that city state. In this day and age, no one is trained from birth to be something, they go through twelve years of instruction that every other person receives and they grow up knowing what they want to do, or at least what they enjoy doing. What we need is not a drastic reorganization of society, what we need is support of the people who are unsure of what they want to do. It would be nice to remove the incentives and have people just do the jobs they want without seduction, but that is a hope and not a reality.

The above example only goes to show how selfish the Western mindset is compared to the Asian one. The western mindset is about succeeding at the expense of others, and the Asian mindset is about the success of the collective.

We need to shift to that paradigm in Western society ourselves and start acknowleding the existence of society and work towards ensuring its optimal health. This is why we need the caste system in its original avatar.

At the expense of others? No, that is the government projecting American interests onto the world stage, and we merely benefit from the immorality of this perpetual exploitation of the world. If you ask anyone their mindset, they won't answer "To trample on the hands and feet of the third world" they will likely answer some quasi-moralistic nonsense they probably do not believe in. We ought to change our government as well as society.

If the caste system remains in line with liberty, than I could see how it would be beneficial. Freedom must not be eroded for the most efficient system to function.

 

[Surya Deva]

It's a fine system if the option of choosing what you want to do with your life is available. I don't want to see a system of social structure fall to the overwhelming burden of human error and fallacy, and liberty pushed to the side for effeciency and structure. It's better to be free and starving, then in chains and fed.

I think you envisage a collectivist system to be like a hive or an ant colony. The caste system is not like that. It recognises we are human and structures society according to human needs not an ants needs, whereby society will remain prosperous and humans too will be able to develop. At the heart of Hinduism self-development is the highest value. Therefore the caste system is suppose to be a system that strikes a balance between individualism and collectivism.

Yes, I do. Not everyone says, "I am a neurologist, but I want to be an outdoorsman," and does that. The vast majority of people say, "I am a neurologist, I am good at neurology, I make a lot of money doing this, I'm sticking with it." You're using an either or fallacy when things aren't just black and white; it's

I do not believe I am using an either or fallacy. I am simply presenting reality as it is today where people do things that they are not fit for. For example the NHS(UK) is full of nurses and doctors who have no compassion at all for their patients, and yet they are nursess abd doctors. The leaders in the world have no sense of righteousness, fairness and regard for society, and yet they are leaders. Education is today a market/business like any other, no longer an institution of knowledge and learning. The world is upside down due to the mess we have created with individualism and alllowing people into occupations they are not fit for.

It is very important that there is strong segregation between the various occupations so that people who are not qualified for the post cannot get into them. This is what the caste-system does, it allows there to be segregation between all the posts, so that there is no corruption of the occupational divisions.

Society cannot function if everyone was an individual and catered to only his or her own desires, but that has not and will never be the case. People are social animals, and the tyranny of the majority forces everyone to conform to its societal will. The tyranny of the majority is so pervasive that no one in society can escape it unless they opt out of that society, and the society as a whole is preserved. As humans are animals, they too are founded on rationale and instinct more than lofty notions, but should we just accept our animalian tendencies, or should we strive for greater things?

You are right individualism is a myth. As soon as you leave individuals to pursue their interests a natural order emerges, where a domiant class emerges and this group gains more power than others. That is the reality of the world today: capitalism. In capitalism only an elite minority own the capital of the world, they own the resources, the means of production and exploit the rest of the world. So in reality there is no individualism, it simply cannot exist.

The system of capitalism is maintained by ideology. The idea that we are free, the idea that capitalism and its brand of democracy is a fair system, the idea that materialism and indescriminate fulfilment of desire is the natural way of life.

There is a natural order of things always so whichever system you adopt is going to have a natural order and a dominant class. There are really only four main classes in society: labourers, merchants/traders, civil service/admin, intellgensia. Each of these classes have their own values:

The value of labourer is survival
The value of merchants is profit
The value of admin is power
The value of intellgensia is knowledge and truth

If you give power to either of the classes the following kind of governments and social systems emerge 1) Labour - Communism; 2) Merchants - Capitalism 3) Admin - Despotism 4) Intelligensia - Science. We are not really living in a scientific age, we are living in a capitalist age, where all classes have subverted to their values of profit generation. All areas of society reproduce this value. But we know intrinsically that science is the most valid value in society. It actually produces real knowledge which can be used to enhance society and the individual life.

The caste system is the only system of society that acknowledges this by placing the intelligensia(Brahmanas) as the dominant caste in society. They are the ones that guide society. The scientific knowledge they reveal is used to structure society so that society is in harmony and the individual can fulfill themselves.

The caste system also has checks and balances in the system to ensure that the castes do not become corrupted. As the Brahmans highest value is knowledge they do not deserve luxuries, thus the Brahmans being the dominant and educated caste is also the most economically poor caste. Each of the castes have different standards of life and different provisions. In early Hindu law, a same crime commited by a Brahmana and a Shudra, would have much greater punishment for the Brahmana, because the Brahmana is a role-model in society.

How succesful this system was can clearly be seen by how well it has preserved Hindu society for thousands of years, despite invasions. No other society has been able to preserve itself so well. All others have perished and our current mode of society -Capitalism - last days have arrived. The economic collapse of America will spell the end of capitalism.

You do not believe in free will? That's interesting. The tyranny of the majority already serves to keep society in line with it's collective desires, we do not need to restrict freedom by law to do so when the mind is a more powerful motivator. Your system is already in place, it's already enacted in our own heads, but the freedom to be an individual should always be there. Like all things, society is as impermanent as the bodies we inhabit, and we should not sacrifice our liberty to preserve a beast that will inevitable die as it always does. We should instead strive for progress based on our individual liberty.

The mind is a fickle thing it cannot ensure stability of anything because it itself is not stable. Today society has been left at the devices of the mind's desires and this is why society is in a mess called post-modernism which has no fixed laws and values. Your body is as impermenant and perishable as society, so why do you care for your body? Simple, because you need a healthy body to develop. Likewise, if you don't have a healthy society, how are you going to develop? If others took your line of thought in the past then we wouldn't have many things we take for granted today like human rights, womens rights etc. We have a debt to our ancestors which fought to win these rights for us. It is our duty as social beings to ensure society is at its optimal health both for our own development and the development of future generations.

Is it functioning today? Absolutely not, society is utterly dysfunctional, but it is not the fault of unbridled liberty, it is the fault of humanity's fallacious nature and the fact that our culture today is defined by business. All the music we hear, is because business thought it would sell well. All our clothes, because business thought they would sell well. Everything we are, our entire culture, is not derived from the people but from the market. Business is not the individual, it is the antithesis of the individual. What we need is not a regulation of liberty and individualism, but a regulation of commerce to make it serve the people, not the other way around

I think you are equivocating here. The main value of capitalism is a free-market economy where the individual has freedom to amass wealth. If you regulate this commerce then you have to comprise the most major value of capitalism: liberty.
It is is unbridled liberty which has lead to todays problems by giving the individual absolute power. Giving the individual absolute liberty is like giving the mind absolute liberty, whats invariably results is a mess.

In the caste system it has been recognised that freedom is not about letting the mind do what it wants it is about self-control. It is about limiting what the mind can do and it is then when the individual is trully free. Otherwise he is under the constant influence of deterministic forces. As Kant would say man is free as long he is is a rational being. He is not free when he is not rational.

Capitalism is an extension of the nature of the mind; selfish, pleasure-seeking, greedy, unstable. The caste system on the otherhand is an extension of the nature of being; rational, harmonious, stable.

 

[Surya Deva]

If everyone was put it into a job harmonious with their nature and which they themselves loved to do, then that would be an alright system. But if people are taken at birth and trained in something their whole lives, they're going to enjoy it simply because it is all they ever knew. Sparta trained its children in combat from the age of seven onwards, and by all accounts the thousands of Spartans loved their frugal, austere, militaristic existence. If these people were raised in Athens they would have loved commerce, material pleasures, philosophy and other things characteristic of that city state.

Yep, and clearly one can see from the records that if somebody is brought up in an occupation they excel in that occupation. If the education begins from birth the childs mind is moulded to that so they become their occupations. There is no stress of them finding their career in life, because structure is present in their life from day one. Their only worry is doing their duties and living.

In this day and age, no one is trained from birth to be something, they go through twelve years of instruction that every other person receives and they grow up knowing what they want to do, or at least what they enjoy doing. What we need is not a drastic reorganization of society, what we need is support of the people who are unsure of what they want to do. It would be nice to remove the incentives and have people just do the jobs they want without seduction, but that is a hope and not a reality.

And I am sure you are aware of the problems youth face in choosing their career. They spend the period in their life which is for education on sex, drugs and rock and roll and what they work for is simply to be employee's of another organization. This is not freedom it is slavery. The youth especially are dumbed down by consumerism, spending their money on things like gadgets, fashion, booze.

Now compare and contrast this to the the caste system. In the caste system from the age of 5 or 7 children are sent of to Gurukul(school) and live a life of brahmacharya(self control and celibay) up until they are 20 years old. They are not exposed to outside society, the opposite sex and castes are not allowed to intermix. What results is the child is moulded into their caste. By the age of 20 they have gained profiency in their subject and have developed a high caliber of character. They are now fit to contribute to society. It can clearly be seen that the caste system produces a much better output than our current system.

Thus the caste systems way of stratifying society is perhaps the best way of organzing society. Not allowing caste admixture; segregating society into occupational divisions and assinging different standards promotes the highest interests of society.

 

[Surya Deva]

At the expense of others? No, that is the government projecting American interests onto the world stage, and we merely benefit from the immorality of this perpetual exploitation of the world. If you ask anyone their mindset, they won't answer "To trample on the hands and feet of the third world" they will likely answer some quasi-moralistic nonsense they probably do not believe in. We ought to change our government as well as society.

It is not the fault of government solely. This is a classic excuse used by people to displace blame. It is the fault of the mode of society we are living in called capitalism. Even before America existed this mode of society was exploiting the world, it lies at the root of capitalism itself. You cannot treat a problem by treating its symptoms. The root of the worlds problems lie in capitalism. Thus the necessity for supplating capitalism arises and the best system for that is the caste system. The reason why capitalism has demonized the caste system is because the caste system is the complete antithesis of it. Otherwise, the caste system is responsible for producing the most advanced civilisations in the history of the world, which has been reigning for most of the history of the world.

 

[.lava]

I think you envisage a collectivist system to be like a hive or an ant colony. The caste system is not like that. It recognises we are human and structures society according to human needs not an ants needs

how genius!!! i wonder how many nations out there who established a society on needs of ants!?


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[Surya Deva]

.Lava, read things in context and you will understand things better.

 

[want to be hindu]

where is this corruption coming from exactly? it has to be written somewhere else. Sharia of Islam for example is not applied correctly and it is because there are thousands of fake hadiths and they believe in them. if caste system was good for people, how did it become satanic laws that torture 250 million from their birth to their deaths?

I see the Caste system the way ancient Indians organised there culture. This is a quote I made in box 4 of this thread.

The Chandogya Upanisad is part of the Hindus most holy book the Vedas. This book was from a very early time in Hinduism (pre buddha). This story shows that a son of a low caste prostitute could become a Brahmin ( the highest caste )


Long ago, in the Chandogya Upanisad, sage Gautama accepted Satyakama (a lad with lowly social status and son of a sudra prostitute) as his student for becoming a brahmin based on certain important qualities, which still remain valid today and can be used for selecting and training present-day non-brahmin priests and temple worshippers.
One day the boy Satyakama came to his mother and said, “Mother, I want to be a religious student. What is my family name?”
“My son,” replied his mother, “ I do not know. In my youth I was a servant and worked in many places. I do not know who was your father. I am Jabala, and you are Satyakama. Call yourself Satyakama Jabala.”
Thereupon the boy went to Gautama and asked to be accepted as a student. “Of what family are you, my lad?” inquired the sage.
Satyakama replied, “ I asked my mother what my family name was, and she answered: ‘I do not know. In my youth I was a servant and worked in many places. I do not know who was your father. I am Jabala, and you are Satyakama. Call yourself Satyakama Jabala!’ I am therefore Satyakama Jabala, Sir.”
Then said the sage, “None but a true brahmin would have spoken thus. Go and fetch fuel, I will teach you. You have not swerved from the truth.”
Note, Satyakama did not hide facts about his family, nor did he try to give any wrong or misleading information. This thing impressed Gautama a great deal. In addition, Gautama (a brahmin himself) was not judgmental towards Satyakama or his mother, and he showed a lot of compassion and consideration towards them by not discriminating against Satyakama.

The Chandogya Upanisad by Swami Prabhavananda

This quote is from the Vedas. I believe that this shows that the caste system was something that people moved around in. Satyakama was a man who moved from the low caste to a high one.Some of the people who wrote the Vedas were born sudra and became Brahmins ( The highest caste )

I have read that many of the people who wrote the Vedas were born low caste.

In the Mahabratata the Great king Yudishtra was asked who is a Brahmin. This is how he answered the question.
"He who speaks the truth, who is patient, and is compassionate, whose character is without any blemish, who gives alms - he is a Brahmin."
Yudishtra then was asked
" What if a Shudra has these qualities?"
Yudishtra replies, "A Shudra who has these qualities is not a Shudra. if a Brahmin does not have these qualities, he is certainly not a Brahmin...the caste cannot be determined by birth alone."

The people to day that are called dalits or untouchables I have not read anything bad about them in my scriptures. Many of the people who are called dalit were tribal people who were outside of Hindu culture. I believe that this problem started with English colonalism.

I am part Cheyenne Indian (native American ) Do you know that 1 out of 3 native american women in America will be raped in there lifetime. This is a fact! All over the world Tribal people (ie in america we call them Indigenous peoples)are being persacuted. Native Genocide was coverd up by christian missionarrys in the 1980s in South America. Tribal people also have had many problems in the Muslim contries of Indonesia and MalaysiaI.I dont see how any of these things are different. Tribal people have been getting screwed all over the world for 100s of years.

when i defend Sharia i have Qur'an to talk about it. when i critize wrong doings, i have fake hadiths to show and how it contradicts with verses of Qur'an. what do you have to defend caste system and critize wrong doings?

Hindus cultures out side of India ( like bali,) do not practice the caste system. I have been a part of 2 different sects of Hinduism, both have never followed the caste system. I dont feel the need to defend the caste system.

 

[Hema]

Hindus cultures out side of India ( like bali,) do not practice the caste system.

Also Trinidad & Tobago.

 

[.lava]

.Lava, read things in context and you will understand things better.

so you have a sense of humor, good for you


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[.lava]

I see the Caste system the way ancient Indians organised there culture. This is a quote I made in box 4 of this thread.

i did read that before. i think i understand your point.

This quote is from the Vedas. I believe that this shows that the caste system was something that people moved around in. Satyakama was a man who moved from the low caste to a high one.Some of the people who wrote the Vedas were born sudra and became Brahmins ( The highest caste )

OK, IMO, in this world there is a worldly hierarchy. it is unavoidable if one is living in a society and it depends on money. on the other hand, in spiritual life there is unworldly hierarchy and it depends on level of one's devotion. the difference between two hierarchies is that if i was a rich person, then when i die my child would take my money and he would be in certain level of worldly hierarchy. just for being my child. but if i was a saint of God, he could not inherit my unworldly gain. he would have to earn it. this is the area where everyone is completely equal without any personal backing.

the other issue i would like to say is about how highest saints treat others. in the public eyes, they are not the highest. because there are very por ones among them. so many people would not even pay attention and would not listen to them. they care for money. i mean in my culture. highest class here is not necessarily the highest level before God. the most front attitude of those who's most loved by God is their humility, they are extremely kind, humble and even if you compliment them, they could not take it as they realize they are nothing but servants of God.

this is what i generally think and experience in my own life. it takes lots of effort and devotion to get higher in spiritual levels. as you see you can not avoid calling Brahmins highest caste. but some how they highest caste in wordly manners. there is something wrong with it.

I have read that many of the people who wrote the Vedas were born low caste.

In the Mahabratata the Great king Yudishtra was asked who is a Brahmin. This is how he answered the question.
"He who speaks the truth, who is patient, and is compassionate, whose character is without any blemish, who gives alms - he is a Brahmin."
Yudishtra then was asked
" What if a Shudra has these qualities?"
Yudishtra replies, "A Shudra who has these qualities is not a Shudra. if a Brahmin does not have these qualities, he is certainly not a Brahmin...the caste cannot be determined by birth alone."

...by birth alone...birht has nothing to do with it if you're talking about spiritual growth. of course all humanity, well at least most of them would praise humane behavour. all religions do that. no one could reach someone else if he could not get in his heart with love and respect. if not, those violant maniacs would be most beloved-yet we both know it is impossible to relocate fear with love.

The people to day that are called dalits or untouchables I have not read anything bad about them in my scriptures. Many of the people who are called dalit were tribal people who were outside of Hindu culture. I believe that this problem started with English colonalism.

i do not know Indian history very well but i know İndia would be better off without strangers.

I am part Cheyenne Indian (native American ) Do you know that 1 out of 3 native american women in America will be raped in there lifetime. This is a fact! All over the world Tribal people (ie in america we call them Indigenous peoples)are being persacuted. Native Genocide was coverd up by christian missionarrys in the 1980s in South America. Tribal people also have had many problems in the Muslim contries of Indonesia and MalaysiaI.I dont see how any of these things are different. Tribal people have been getting screwed all over the world for 100s of years.



Hindus cultures out side of India ( like bali,) do not practice the caste system. I have been a part of 2 different sects of Hinduism, both have never followed the caste system. I dont feel the need to defend the caste system.

genocide is terrible. i like native Americans

Sharia is in Qur'an. i would not defend men made sharia which has no place in Qur'an. i never did and i am not willing to either.


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[want to be hindu]

Sharia is in Qur'an. i would not defend men made sharia which has no place in Qur'an. i never did and i am not willing to either.

Most people in the west have forgotten the great behavior of the Moors in Spain. Christian Jew and Muslim all lived in peace. When I think of sharia thats what comes to my mind.

 

[Worshipper]

I thought this was a thread about Hinduism and caste in the Hinduism DIR. Why are we discussing Sharia?

 

[.lava]

I thought this was a thread about Hinduism and caste in the Hinduism DIR. Why are we discussing Sharia?

i thought about it and i guess you're right. we're not discussing Sharia but i think we cannot discuss Hinduism on this DIR either.

alright then


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[Jack_Ripper]

As you point out, caste mentality is not at all limited to Hinduist thought. On the contrary, it occurs naturally in lots of cultures.

You are quite correct in reminding us that constructive change is needed. Not only in India, but everywhere.

I agree to your point. I must also point out that caste system is the most prevalent in India because i feel it has the most no. of religions than any other country. It might be still existing in other countries, but not so extensive like that of India's.