Member-only story
Americans are so used to Christianity being “the thing” in their country that they are just about completely clueless as to what other beliefs exist outside their own circle. As I grew up in America, I was brought up in a Greek Orthodoxy household (remember, there’s Catholics, Protestants, and then Orthodoxy). At the end of my teen years, I couldn’t take my anxiety with the belief system anymore and broke away. After a year or two of “searching” for what I belonged to, I finally found myself comfortable calling myself a Hindu Pagan.
Hinduism, when attempting to teach it to people who have never been exposed to it before, you might as well be teaching a completely different language that has a totally different structure than what you’re used to in your own native language. So for Americans, this would be like attempting to teach them Arabic.
People forget that Christianity is relatively young when you compare it to other belief systems (like Hinduism and Buddhism). Christianity has a relatively simple timeline they can follow (what happens in the Old Testament and then what happens in the New Testament). Hinduism, not so much. The Vedas (holy books for Hindus) vary wildly. The timeline is absolutely not linear for Hinduism. For Christianity, their holy book often dictates a very specific way things have to be done. In Hinduism, there’s a lot of natural variety. Before…
