Chismar:  What would you say is the key thing Christians need to understand about Hinduism?

Olasky:  Christians need to understand how much of what we would call superstition is really involved in Hinduism.  It’s defined in different ways.  Sometimes it’s defined as a monistic religion, sometimes as a henotheistic religion, sometimes as a polytheistic religion, I won’t go into all the different definitions here but in practice and having spent some time in India and spending a lot of time in Hindu temples in practice it certainly does seem polytheistic.  Now a Hindu would say these are al manifestations of one God but you know people are worshipping idols and in fact you’ll see them, you’ll see in Hindu temples when they have English times there you’ll see the direct reference to idols. 

In my classroom I don’t usually like to talk about idols in the sense of maybe this is derogative to Hinduism so I’ll talk about statues or something but in India they are actually referred to as idols and people bow down to them and worship them, leave them various offerings of food and grain and so forth.  It very much in practice tends to be choosing a particular god who’s going to do something for you and doing something in return for that god so it’s more of an exchange religion as opposed to Christianity, which is a grace religion.  We can’t do anything for God. So very different in that way so I think I want people to understand the difference between a grace religion and an exchange religion, see how much of Hinduism is bound up in practice with, in essence, worshipping idols and it also freeing ourselves from the very superficial texts that we may have gotten from reading about Gandhi or seeing the Gandhi movie that Hindus are pacifists.  Not at all.  In fact the most read and known Hindu scripture is the book of Agdneeda (?) is basically in many ways a justification for military action.  In this case even fighting a war against your cousins.  So there’s no contradiction between the sort of a Hindu nuclear bomb, a strong Hindu army and the supposed pacifist of Gandhi because Gandhi actually picked up a lot from Artho (?) and the practice of non-violence he picked up a lot from the west, merged with some from the east and so forth, but if we typically associate Hinduism with Gandhi or we associate Buddhism with the Dali Lama both times we are not understanding the essence of what is going on.