Diving Into Religion: Hinduism Q&A ft. moi… and another Q&A

The title is interesting.

Yeah, I should really spice up my intros.

Hey hey hey! Once again, I’m stealing an idea from the wonderful Bayance. Her Q&A about Islam was wonderful and eye-opening, leading me to think about how lots of people don’t know anything about Hinduism, and it would be wonderful to see what questions you have!

I want you guys to comment below any questions you have about Hinduism. From meditation and yoga to rituals and beliefs to food and holidays- I would be thrilled to answer them!
Please note that I have the right to not answer anything that makes me feel uncomfortable. But I know you guys are great and I hope I don’t have to exercise this right!

This is another small-ish post-
wait jk I’m writing this backwards and now it’s at like 1000 words and I oop-

-but I think that’s okay. Anyways, the Q&A will be super long assuming people even want to read this post and give questions so this will be the calm before the storm.

Btw I’d like to thank Olivia @ Purely Olivia for making me become re-obsessed with changing the font sizes 😉 so you can totally blame her for the cRaZiNesS.

And can I just shout-out Mukta for a moment- she hasn’t posted in a while (WAIT! NEW POST JUST CAME I’M SO HYPED WHOOO) but she’s SO sweet and we have SO much in common and she’s Indian (and I’m pretty sure she’s a Hindu, I don’t know though…).

I’ll be accepting questions until August 15th, when I’ll start compiling the answers (I’ll do my best to be as accurate as possible) and hopefully get them out faster than my last Q&A!! It took like a month smh I’m great…

The questions will probably fall under one of these categories:

Beliefs

This could include our thoughts on capital-G God, what the whole deal with ‘thousands of gods??‘ is (Hinduism being one of the only mainstream ‘polytheistic’ (this is so complicated –that it needs another set of parentheses– I’ll explain in the post) religions today and people, especially Westerners (ooh I’m a Westerner technically), gotta be honest, don’t know much about polytheism), and any other questions you might have. Thoughts on modern controversies like women’s rights and LGBT treatment.

Practices

Most people know that Christians go to church and they study the Bible. Muslims go to the mosque and pray five times a day, things like that. What are our customs? How do we worship, what/who do we worship, when, why, how?? Yes, I’m answering your questions and you can be assured that you’ll get an answer!

Rituals

What’s a puja? What’s agarbathi? What in the world is manja podi or kumkumam? You’ve probably never heard of a poonal or an ayishhomam or even Carnatic music (you’re missing out XD hey Mukta how’s your day). Well, ask away and you’ll be informed!

Religious Scriptures

The Vedas. The Puranas. The Bhagavat Gita. The Mahabharata, the Ramayana- gods, it’s amazing and a sea full of knowledge that I’d love to share! And not all of it is even directly correlated to religion- you can learn a lot from these, just like I’ve learned from the Bible and the Quran.

Spirituality

Meditation. Yoga. All the things Hinduism is known for and shunned for because oh, India is the land of snake charmers and black magic smh. Meditation and yoga is PROVEN (science, y’all logic lovers) to help your mental health and improve stability in and out of your body.

By the way, I just took an Art of Living course and with the meditation and intuition techniques they taught me, I’m able to accurately trust my first instinct and know a color or word even without seeing it. I’m telling you, meditation and yoga is freaky awesome!

Food

Come on, every culture has special food and Indian food is too good to miss an opportunity to talk about. Even if this is supposed to be religious. I guess here you an ask all the standard Qs- is vegetarianism a religious thing and that stuff.

Holidays

Ooh, the fun stuff! I’m sure some of you have heard of Diwali, at least, and Holi, but there’s also Navarathri, the Tamil new year called Pongal, and so many more that I don’t even know about!

and. the dreaded, much-hated-upon, infamous~

Caste System

You just can’t have a Hinduism Q&A without a chat about the caste system- it’s still a part of the history, just like the Crusades are part of Christian history and the slave trades were a part of Islamic history.

Anything Else

I’d love to hear all your questions! If I’m missing any categories, feel free to lemme know!

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Have a wonderful day!