It is incredibly hard as you grow into adolescence to rise up and break free from dogmas and traditions that are ingrained upon you as a child. For that reason, I am eternally so grateful to have been born and raised into the relatively benign Hare Krishna tradition instead of something really harmful like Christianity of Islam.
Hare Krishna is the westernized version of Hinduism. If you know nothing about Hinduism, Hinduism can be seen as such a broad term that really can encompass just about anything to anyone. Within the 30 million claimed gods of Hinduism, most all of the variations have the teachings and ideals of the Upanisads and early Vedas, Ramayana, Mahabarata, and the Bhagavad Gita, at their core. While there exists a different "sect" of "Hinduism" for nearly every of the 30 million gods, Hindus tend to see all of the gods as part and parcel of the same "eternal being", Brahman. Whether you worship primarily Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, Jesus Christ, or Muhammad, the focus is not so much on ritual and practice, but more an internal path of knowledge and awareness; a way of being.
The main way I can gather in which Hare Krishnas are set apart from the Indian hindus' Hinduism, is really just the fact that they read the texts in English translations, and focus on the incarnation of Krishna, as according to the teachings of the 1500's Indian teacher Chaitanya. Indian scholars or theologians will tell you the differences are more intricate than that, citing specific schools of Indian thought with Sanskrit terms, but I mean, come on, it's the same thing. It's like comparing Lutherans to Baptists, in the big picture it is the exact same system of beliefs.
I could have done one better, by being born into a family of intellectual and freethinking atheists, but given how the odds are really stacked against that with the pervasiveness of religion, if I had to choose one I would again go with Hinduism.
I grew up from the time I can remember with the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, in family and friends' homes and in temples. My mom would always tell me principles from it whenever any opportunity arose. By the time I was 7, I'm pretty sure I was fully indoctrinated with the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, and believed them.
The core of the teachings revolve around the constant reminder that your mortal life is limited, you are going to get old and die. It is re-emphasized constantly that you are not your job, you are not your name, you are not your body.
"the wise lament neither for the living nor the dead" Bhagavad Gita, 2.12
"never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings, nor in the future shall any of us cease to be" 2.12
Again and again it is explained that your soul is eternal, and caught up in an eternal cycle of death and rebirth. By the principles of Dharma and karma, you live out your life and create choices for your soul in subsequent lives, and pay debts from previous ones. A Christian-like concept of heaven is given in the texts, where there heaven is by fulling devoting yourself to and realizing the power and oneness of god you can escape the cycle of birth and death. There is not really the concept of the Christian eternal suffering in hell, because the life we live bound by the cycle of birth and death is considered finite and hellish. It is possible for one to make steps backwards and take lower births according to their karma.
Actual strict ritual and practices are given, but de-emphasized. The teaching of the Gita focuses on the mind, realizing you are not your body or your belongings, detaching yourself from desire of temporary material things, and surrendering yourself completely to god to attain something similar to the Buddhist "enlightenment." Rituals and practices like Yoga and chanting are given in the texts as guidelines to best attain these principles.
As such, with the respect for the soul in all living entities, and with the view of all things being a part of god, many hindus and all Hare Krishnas do not eat meat (but plenty of dairy). It all made sense to me growing up, and I didn't have a reason to doubt it. It was so complicated and non-limiting, and made so much sense not to harm beautiful animals that I believed in it all. I had scarcely heard of Christianity and didn't really know the slightest about it until I was about 15. The Vedas, while just as non-divinely inspired as Muhammad or Jesus, at least make all of their claims in incredibly vague and forever unprovable language. They actually based a lot of their theories off of detailed astrological observation. That makes the theories very complex, unprovable, but nonetheless still created by man. As an example, the Vedas claim to have a knowledge of the entire current cycle of the universe, with the years all mapped out. The claim that we are in the last of the ages, with about 420 thousand years until an incarnation of god (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_yuga) appears again to bring about the apocalypse. While just as unprovable as the return of Jesus, at least with the end times given with an exact date so far in the future, it makes hindus act much less retarded in this life than Christians who live this life half-assed, believing that jesus will rapture them up to heaven within their lifetimes, since he never did say exactly when he would return.
The texts of Hinduism also stress the insignificance of our particular universe and creation. Every trace of our observable universe is said to be contained in a single bead of sweat on the skin of Vishnu as he sleeps - with each cycle of his inhalation and exhalation, all of creation and destruction takes place. Creation is described as neither beginning nor ending, perfectly consistent with cosmic evolution theory I would later read about in Stephen hawking and Einstein.
Luckily for me, none of these unfounded beliefs conflict with any scientific knowledge. Therefore, as I grew up going to public school, I never had to doubt the science that was taught to me, I never had to have my parents explain to me that the science books were wrong about evolution. As far as I could see and still can, all of the teachings in Hinduism are, while unprovable, at least compatible with all of cosmic and biological evolutionary theory, unlike the other major world religions, which have steadfastly been completely destroyed and eroded away by the progression of science.
The classical science I learned didn't weaken my faith, as a child it only reinforced in me how amazing it was that the Vedas, some of the worlds oldest known texts, still stood strong against modern science. I just thought surely I have been lucky to be exposed to such a true and vast religion and not a closed one. When I learned that much of Hindu principles predated Christianity by at least 3,000 years, and with no translations (people still read the texts in Sanskrit), it served to further convince me that my faith must be more correct than the others, as it was far older, less misinterpreted, and not in such blatant contradiction to modernity.
Already by about age 13 or 14, I took heed so much of the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, or my young interpretation of it, that I one-upped the teachings of my temple and parents, who taught chanting and praising of various forms of god by instead thinking that it didn't even matter if I spent any time chanting or worshipping god at all. I had realized and fully agreed with the base ideas that I was not my physical body, that death could come at any moment, and that I should live with compassion and with god in mind to take a higher next birth. Chanting "Hare Krishna, hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna hare hare, hare rama, hare rama, rama rama hare hare"( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maha_mantra) 108 times on a strand of beads, 16 times a day, or saying another chant after preparing food before eating it, all no longer seemed important to me. If freedom from birth and death was something for only the purest of devoted sages that took several lifetimes to achieve, then I knew that I wasn't going to achieve it in this lifetime. I just decided if I was a decent person that tried not to build up bad karma, I would at least take a higher next birth and that that was fine; that was all I could hope for anyway.
By these dogmas indoctrinated into my head as a child, I am so grateful they were this harmless when I compare my childhood experience to that of my peers who may have been raised within the various degrees of ignorance (or outright abuse) of Christianity. All of their guilt, shame, and overwhelming fear of hellfire and god's wrath that I have heard so many stories of, I luckily never had to feel a day of my life.
In fact, at the age of 15 early on in high school, was the first time I had my first real look at what Christianity even was. I would meet classmates who encouraged me to go to sermons or to youth groups. I did a few times to a few different churches, over a year or two. It only took one Christian sermon for me to be completely shocked at how perverse and incorrect their teachings were.
One
sermon, and I was already told that the bible, in its innumerable
translations, transliterations, and unknown sources was the perfect
word of god. That Jesus was the ONLY way to salvation, and to live in
fear of hell and with the guilt of our sins. Their whole program was so
messed up, I thought to myself. My religion was so much friendlier and
not riddled with the vast contradictions and loopholes. I concluded
very early on that Jesus must have been a great devotee of Krishna, and
that his message had been all but destroyed and lost by centuries of
power-hungry, blood-thirsty and confused men. I justified their ways to
myself by saying that "they are still good people, they mean well. They
are trying to live in the ways of god, and all god is the same god, so
I knew even less about Islam in this pre-9-11 world, but with it being huge in India, and an eastern tradition, I automatically held more respect for it than Christianity because I failed to see how anything could be a much more perverse and incorrect way of living one's life. In a surge of desire to educate myself for real in the post-9-11 world, I would soon change my view.
But before 9-11, I had no Islam in my picture, only Christianity, and I started to see that it was EVERYWHERE. I would see the televangelists when I watched TV at night with their limiting unfounded language that stood in contradiction to reason and science making my skin crawl. Why couldn't people just see things the way I did? Why couldn't everyone else know that no one had for sure the exact written words of god, and that the god we all worshipped across the world was all the same god or force? Why did people get so caught up in the competition of who's sect was better than who's, about who was bowing their heads correctly? With the conviction which Christian's believed in their bible which was so obviously bogus to me, I realized that in all fairness, my ancient Hindu texts, while less translated and older, were just as unprovable. Followers of my faith were just as dedicated, and both faiths couldn't be correct, so I believed that at most, only what was at essence of both faiths could be true, and that all books and practices had distorted and lost any once-existing truths. This was perhaps my first important realization, at about age 16.
Over
the next two years, my eyes opened up to the real harm Christianity was
causing all around me. Something so obvious that I was able to observe
around me on my own, with no influences in my life telling me that
Christianity was bad. It was in the way they consumed and wasted more
than everyone else, with no remorse for other living things or the
planet. The way their minds were more closed than any others, who would
fully cast judgement upon you and condemn you to hell simply for being
an unbeliever. Or even worse, the outright violence that I would see on
the news such as the stuff that used to go on in
When I was 18, I awoke to all-day long looping images of 747s crashing into twin towers in
I started by reading their qur'an, and reading books about the history of Muhammad. From there, I uncovered the Muslim roots in Christianity and Judaism, and in-turn Christianity's roots in Judaism, and realized for the first time at 18 that the three religions all came from the same tradition. In turn, this made me go back for a study of Judaism and early Christianity. I tried to read the bible and called it quits halfway through the old testament and after some secondary sources on the new testament. What a sick and twisted, utterly worthless piece of literature with unknown authors and zero relevance to our lives today. I took a college class on early Christian and jewish beginnings. These studies lead me for the first time to the long history of purely religious conflict in the middle east over Israel/Palestine. Book after book, topic after topic I learned, I was astounded by the ignorance and bloodshed. All of these religions were so much more simplistic and easier to disprove by any shred of modern science than the one I was raised in, all of them so much more closed and intolerant than the one I was raised in. After going once through the other major religions of the world and seeing what a misguided sham they all were, it was such an obvious step to completely disregard any fragment of the religion I had been raised in. How could I call out all these other religions on being false since they stood in mutual contradiction and all with unproven texts, when the religion I was raised in lacked any real evidence as well? I completely threw it all out.
Any of the religions one chose served only to narrow ones perspective to varying degrees, at worse, all the way to rejection of science and violence towards outsiders.
In all of this, it is such a logical transition for me to see how the very hindu principles I was raised with from the very beginning are what allowed me to be open to science and analyzing other faiths. Hinduism stressed to me the vastness of what we cannot understand and what we cannot ever understand. It reaffirmed from my early childhood the relative insignificance of our lives, of our entire world, of the vastness of the universe. It was within this framework that I was enabled to be open to the facts of science, the science which so easily dismantled all other faiths of the world.
It was the very open mind that Hinduism afforded me in the first years of my life that allowed me to think critically and nonlinearly about the nature of the world, and to eventually reject my own faith and any claims of divinity.
Note: don't take this as a praise for Hinduism. Any person or book that makes a claim about the nature of being, the nature of god, or how one should live in accordance with the afterlife has no bearing in reality and serves only to divide and harm. I will admit that of most of the world religions, Hinduism is among the least-wack. Wack nonetheless. Every minute bowing down to brass effigies of gods, reading ancient circular texts about essentially nothing, and chanting long-dead ancient names is a fucking waste of time.
