How Richard Dawkins Has Erred in Calling Hinduism ‘Idiotic’ and ‘Ridiculous’ - News18

“Modi’s BJP is a tragic affront to India’s secular beginnings. Between them, these two idiotic religions have betrayed the ideals of Nehru and Gandhi.” If one reads this tweet from Richard Dawkins, without knowing the context, one would assume that an act of cataclysmic proportions has been committed by Hindu zealots, similar to 9/11 or worse, to invite such damning terms as “ridiculous” and “idiotic” for their religion — Hinduism. No wonder when one reads Dawkins’ The God Delusion or Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, one finds nothing about Hinduism, except a few disparaging paragraphs condemning it as an extension of Christianity and Islam. It at least attempts to see Hinduism — as in the chapter “There Is No ‘Eastern’ Solution” — through the prism of Sai Baba and Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. In his 1959 article, “An Indian Perspective of Darwin”, British-Indian scientist JBS Haldane wrote, “To Europeans and Americans, it inevitably seems that Darwin’s greatest achievement has been to convince educated men and women that biological evolution is a fact, that living plant and animal species are all descended from ancestral species very unlike themselves, and, in particular, that men are descended from animals… But in India and China, this distinction has not been made; and according to Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina ethics, animals have rights and duties.