MMK

The notion of "belief" in God is foreign to the Hindu tradition, where divinity is traditionally experienced as a lived reality. However, the salience of the question (and general incoherence in the replies) illustrates the dilemma: In the modern world, religions are constructed along the lines of Reformation Christianity, which elevated the issue of "right belief" as the primary organizing principle for religious life. This understanding of religion is not just an abstract matter, but is deeply embedded in our social fabric, our politics, and our culture. The result is that Hindus feel compelled to contort their tradition to fit into this schema: belief in god becomes central, texts turn into "scriptures" that are meant to be read literally, myth transforms into a record of what actually happened, etc. Although this haphzard Abrahamization often yields ridiculous results, the underlying pressures cannot be dismissed or ignored, at least if one expects "Hinduism" to be an active participant in the global marketplace of religions. What we have now is just confusion: Hindu society is still shaped by localized, embodied, idiosyncratic traditions that operate by a fundamentally different logic, but we insist on (badly) contorting them to show other religious groups that we are just like them.