Hinduism refers to the religious beliefs and practices of the people of India, even though there is an enormous amount of diversity among those beliefs and practices.  Hindus themselves favor the name sanatana dharma which means “everlasting law” or “eternal teaching.”  This speaks of the eternally unfolding nature of their religious teachings.

Hinduism is one of the world’s oldest (at least 3000 B.C.) and most popular religions, involving about 1 billion adherents (1/6 of the world’s current population).  But what remained an “eastern” religion for so many millennia has recently made significant inroads to the West through the missionary travel of various gurus within the USA beginning toward the end of the 1800’s (the New Age Movement is Hinduism meets ‘fast-food’ Americanism).

BELIEFS:
Two near universal beliefs of Hindus:
(1) All are born into the caste system (a hierarchical social system which divides classes of people based upon their heredity/birth);
(2) Belief in the Vedas as authoritative scriptures containing eternal truth revealed to sages;

Other general beliefs of Hindus:
(3) Most Hindus believe there is one God who reveals himself in a pantheon of gods and goddesses (avatars);
(4) There are three possible paths to God, karma (works), jnana (the way of knowledge), and bhakti (devotion);
(5) True reality is that only God (Brahma) exists.  Reality is an absolute unity (monism);
(6) All things that appear to exist (e.g., individual selves), as distinct from Brahma, are maya (illusion);
(7) We are all stuck in the vicious cycle of birth and rebirth (samsara);
(8) Our goal is to achieve release from rebirth (moksha).  This happens through a process of achieving better/higher rebirths until we are released from life altogether.

Why it seems to me that Hinduism cannot be true:
From a Christian perspective, there are various reasons why Hinduism misses the mark.  However, from the perspective of just clear thinking, there is one enormous reason why Hinduism seems obviously false to me.  It is self-defeating in at least one critical point in its philosophy.

Hinduism asserts that all of reality is One in nature (monism), and that everything that appears to be separate from that One reality is just an illusion (maya).  In fact, what happens at our last of many successive deaths (moksha) is we finally shed the illusion that we are individual selves.  Nirvana is that state where the illusion of individuality is torn away, and like drops of water we reunite with the impersonal ocean of the One.  Nirvana is the extinction of an individual personal self that was never really in existence to begin with.   

Here’s the problem:
I, as an individual self, am an illusion.  And I am told that I must recognize/believe that I am an illusion in order to be released from that illusion.  However, I don’t see how it makes any sense to speak of an illusion having knowledge of something.  Think of a dream that you’ve had which involved other characters besides yourself.  Did the characters in your dreams “know” that they were just dream characters?  Does Bart Simpson know that he is a cartoon?  Of course not.  In order for one to have knowledge of something, one must be a thinker, a mind.  Yet, Hinduism asserts that “the thinker” is a mere appearance.  So, the Hindu belief that there really are no minds (required for belief) seems self-defeating to me. 

Christianity in contrast:
God’s creation of a real world is described as “good” in the Genesis creation account (Gen 1-2).  In fact, a biblical worldview involves not only the full redemption/glorification of the individual person who follows Jesus, but also the full redemption/glorification of the whole of creation.  We are told that along with followers of Jesus being glorified and perfected in eternity, the physical creation itself “waits in eager expectation” when it “will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8:19-21). 

The Christian hope in eternity is not to lose personal identity, or even to experience a ‘cloudful’ existence as disembodied spirits.  Rather, our hope is that one day we will live on a new physical earth with immortal, imperishable, incorruptible, resurrected physical bodies (1 Cor 15:42-44).  The good world which God has designed, while deeply broken by sin, is still a very real world which God has called us to live in, cultivate, have dominion over, and shine His light into as we reflect His creative, redemptive love.  This is part of a Christian worldview.    

REFLECTION QUESTIONS:
1. Why do you think that Hinduism has become so popular and appealing in the West (seen in the New Age Movement)?
2. When you think of our existence in eternity, do you tend to think of it as the Bible describes–with a physical world and having physical bodies?