The below is adapted from Premavardhanam on X where he delves into the mechanics of karma and how bad things happening to people does not mean people getting what they deserve/do not deserve, but are actually the workings of what is essentially a mathematical system that transcends lifetimes and may be beyond human comprehension.
People often think the traditional Hindu theory of karma entails that individuals directly "deserve" the suffering they undergo, but that ignores the fact every individual, due to having lived an infinite number of lives, has acquired an infinite backlog of sañcita karma (heaped/accumulated karma) — and thus infinite amounts of both positive (meritorious) and negative (demeritorius) karma that is yet to be activated.
When an individual uses their free will, constituted by the karmas bearing fruit for their current lifetime, to harm another individual what is actually happening is that the sañcita karma of the second individual is indirectly manipulated by the first's actions into releasing an arbitrarily large amount of demeritorous karma for them in accordance with the harm effected by the first individual.
That release, however, is derived from the infinite backlog of unfructified karma that every individual possesses. It does not necessarily imply at all that the harmed individual had accrued that specific amount of demeritorious karma for any specific past act of theirs.
The harming individual, however, has received a discrete amount of demeritorious karma, proportionate to how much of an outlier their victim's unnatural release of demeritorious karma was, that will be accumulated for them in the future.
Thus, it is absolutely *not* the case that the traditional theory of karma in Hinduism necessitates that victims of heinous crimes must be "deserving" of their punishment in any morally meaningful way, and anyone who suggests it does imply that should be sharply corrected.
Diaspora Highlight: Conversation with Pranav Behari
Hosted by Meru Media and Mukunda Raghavan. “Diasporic Comedy, Shaktipunch and Dharma: A Conversation with Pranav Behari”
Welcome to Eternal Path! This week we feature: Paganism in Gaza and its Fall, a meme on “demon-worship”, the ethnic cleansing of Bangladeshi Hindus, and an aesthetic!
History Feature: The Pagans of Gaza and their Fall
One of the prominent interreligious conflicts on our planet, the conflict between Muslims and Jews, has flared up in the past year with the October 7, 2023 Hamas Attacks on Israel, followed by Israel’s military response in Gaza, with attacks on Lebanon and the fall of the Assad government in Syria happening in more recent months.
This however is a publication about Hinduism, not Islam or Judaism. What is more interesting to us (and to you the reader) is understanding that Gaza used to be a place where people practiced Pagan religions, worshipping local Gods and the Roman pantheon during the time of the Roman Empire. In fact Gaza had one of the temples to the “Great Gods” during the time of the Roman Empire. As always, understanding Pagan religions, their history, their beliefs, and their philosophies can help us better contextualize and understand our own religion.
One of the most significant deities worshiped in ancient Gaza was Dagon, a West Semitic deity associated with agriculture and fertility, often depicted as a half-fish half-man. References to Dagon go back to nearly 2500 BCE, with Ras Shamra in modern-day Syria being a key center of belief alongside Palestine. It is likely that the Mitanni that we covered in Week 261 were familiar with and maybe worshipped the deity!
Depiction of Dagon by Henry Layards
Over time, Dagon evolved into Marna/s (possibly meaning “Our Lord” in Aramaic), a sky god allegedly from Crete who absorbed characteristics from the Greek deity Zeus and the Roman deity Jupiter (the Eastern part of the Roman empire maintained stronger ties to the Greek pantheon), and was said to control the rain. Temples to Marna were central to Gazan religious life, and of the eight major temples in Gaza, the Marza/Zeus temple was said to be the most important. Even as the Roman empire Christianized, especially after Emperor Constantine (306-337CE), local rulers in Gaza, regardless of religious belief continued to organize festivals to Zeus/Marna, a testament to the deity’s importance amongst the population.
The book “Hellenic Religion and Christianization: C. 370-529, Volume 1” by Frank Trombley has a lot of interesting material on the Pagan religion of Gaza, shoutout to Spatel from X for digging it up!
Interestingly, the people of Gaza were said to be so hostile toward Christians that a church had to be constructed at a safe distance outside the city walls. In fact, during the 4th century, Christian bishops were specifically referred to as "bishops of the churches surrounding Gaza." Unfortunately, as a cursory glance at the current demographics of Gaza would show, Paganism in Gaza, the broader “Holy Land”, and the Middle East as a whole is largely dead (other than the Yazidis of Syria and Iraq). How did this center for Pagan worship fall?
As we covered in Week 203, in 380CE “Emperor Theodosius I declares Nicene Christianity to be the only official religion and practise of polytheism is punishable by death." Trombley notes in the year 392, Hellenic/Pagan cults still maintained some vitality even in the face of explicit religious persecution.
The Bishop of Gaza, Porphyrius, ascended to his role in 395 CE, and served as Bishop until 420CE. He was a noted Christian zealot. He petitioned the emperor in 398CE to close the Pagan temples of Gaza, but the Emperor’s representative was bribed with a hefty sum. However, the winds were clearly shifting, and by 399CE, across the empire, the Roman Empire’s view on their own religious temples became quite clear.
The year 402 is said to be the year that the temple to Marna/Zeus was destroyed. Porphyrius, along with Christian inhabitants of Gaza laid siege to the temple but were first thwarted by the priests, who locked the temple from the inside. However, treacherous inhabitants of Gaza told the Bishop to light up the temple with pitch, sulfur and fat, which burned the temple down and the ensuing flame burned for days. Then stones of the temple were used to pave the streets of Gaza. Seven other major temples in the area fell to the Bishop, Roman forces, and the Christian population within the next five years, and soldiers went door to door in Gaza burning idols and private book collections. Some historians think that the burning of Gaza’s Marna Temple was a crucial point that marked the point of no return for Roman Paganism.
Why this long read on Paganism in Gaza? Because the destruction of Hindu temples and heritage was part and parcel of the Islamic invasions of India as well as European colonialism. More recently, in Sri Lanka, Sinhala Buddhist extremists aided by the army burned down the Library of Jaffna, which housed countless irreplaceable cultural artifacts and documents relevant to Tamil Hinduism. Knowing the history and beliefs of fallen Pagan civilizations should provide us the resolve to take action to not be like them.
History Highlight: Mitannis and Sanskrit and Hindu Gods
Via Mudit on X - The Mitanni were a Bronze Age kingdom that ruled in northern Syria and southeast Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) from around 1550–1260 BCE. Historians and linguists are perplexed by them because they generally spoke Hurrian (a language from an extinct language family) but engaged frequently with the Hittites (who spoke an Indo-European language related to Sanskrit).
Below is an interesting treaty between a Mittani King and the Hittites from ~1380 BCE that swears upon Hindu Gods!
Even more interesting is the fact that many Mitanni Kings, who keep in mind were not of Indo-European origin, kept Sanskritic names!
Diaspora Highlight: Future of Hindus Outside India
With physical attacks on Hindu communities in the Indian subcontinent (flaring up most significantly in Bangladesh) and in the West (Khalistani attacks on Hindu temples in the Untied States and Canada) many in the Hindu diaspora are wondering what is next for Hindus outside India. The Carvaka Podcast recently put out a podcast episode focused on just that, with the video version embedded below, followed by the audio versions.
Hinduphobia Highlight: Effects of “Caste Training”
In late November it was revealed that the New York Times and Bloomberg killed an article covering very interesting academic findings at the last minute. Why? One can only speculate but likely because the study shows that Diversity Trainings, which gained wide acclaim and usage in the last decade, actually have deleterious impacts, including making people more willing and likely to engage in discrimination!
The paper in question “Presented By Instructing Animosity: How DEO Pedagogy Produces The Hostile Attribution Bias" was a collaboration between the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and the Rutgers University Social Perception Lab. Much of the study concerned the impact of broader diversity training and its impact on making respondents align more strongly with authoritarian and vengeful beliefs, or that respondents would go hunt or see bias where no bias exists.
Many of our readers will know that there is a group called Equality Labs, which engages in a considerably amount of lobbying and spreading of misinformation against the Hindu community. What readers may not know is in recent years, Equality Labs has often been utilized by corporations and agencies to provide training on caste. A reminder that the head of Equality Labs, who might be training you on caste, doesn’t even properly know how to identify people’s castes. Nevertheless, even though they are bad actors spreading fake statistics, their training can influence people and may be the only exposure others have to the topics of caste or even Hinduism!
The NCRI found that after going through Equality Labs Caste Training, the likelihood that respondents agreed with Nazi-esque anti-Brahmin statements vastly increased. These statements in Figure 7 below are indistinguishable from Nazi rhetoric used against Jews.
Figure 5 shows that after the trainings, respondents were more likely to want to punish Hindus!
So what are people to do? Don’t be a mute spectator. Raise your voice against these folks. If you see Equality Labs cited in an article, write to the editor and point out they are a bigoted group. If you see their garbage on social media write a comment refuting their misinformation. If they are training in your workplace, then refuse their training.
Religion Highlight: Slavic Mythology and the Concept of “Prav Yav Nav”
At Eternal Path, we like to highlight indigenous religions from other parts of the world as we think understanding their worldviews, history, and practices can provide interesting lessons to Hindus. The literal meanings of the words Prav, Yav, and Nav, are, respectively, "Right", "actuality" and "probability" and the video below, by an Indian Hindu, goes into the Slavic concept and compared it with Hindu concepts.
Welcome to Eternal Path! This week we feature: 18th and 19th Century Female Hindu Philosophy Scholars, the circle of Islamist whitewashing of violence, and an aesthetic!
Sahajo Bāī - Rajasthani, wrote on Hatha Yoga and non-Dualist Vedanta
Dayā Bāī - Rajasthani, wrote on Yoga and Advaita Vedanta
Kāmākṣī - Sanskrit language writer
Hatī Vidyālaṅkāra - Bengali, wrote on navya-nyaya
Śyāmasundarī - Bengali, wrote on nyaya philosophy
Veṅkaṭamāmbā - Telugu, wrote on Yoga
Bhairavī Brāhmaṇī - Likely Bengali, wrote on Tantra
Dr. Sharma writes more about these writers in the paper, and also lists a few more potential names that he may explore in future pieces. All in all, a very interesting read.
Hinduphobia Highlight: The Islamist Circle of Whitewashing Violence
