Zoroastrianism is an ancient Persian religion that may have originated as early as 4, years ago. Zoroastrianism was the state religion of three Persian dynasties, until the Followers of Judaism believe in one God who revealed himself through ancient prophets. The history of Judaism is essential to understanding the Jewish faith, which has a rich heritage of law, Islam is the second largest religion in the world after Christianity, with about 1.
Although its roots go back further, scholars typically date the creation of Islam to the 7th century, making it the youngest of the major world religions.
Wicca is a modern-day, nature-based pagan religion. Though rituals and practices vary among people who identify as Wiccan, most observations include the festival celebrations of solstices and equinoxes, the honoring of a male god and a female goddess, and the incorporation of Every year around October and November, Hindus around the world celebrate Diwali, or Deepavali—a festival of lights that stretches back more than 2, years.
Diwali occurs on Thursday, November 4. In India, the five-day celebration traditionally marks the biggest holiday of The Bible is the holy scripture of the Christian religion, purporting to tell the history of the Earth from its earliest creation to the spread of Christianity in the first century A.
Both the Old Testament and the New Testament have undergone changes over the centuries, Mormons are a religious group that embrace concepts of Christianity as well as revelations made by their founder, Joseph Smith. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Hinduism Beliefs Some basic Hindu concepts include: Hinduism embraces many religious ideas. Followers believe there are multiple paths to reaching their god.
Hindus believe in the doctrines of samsara the continuous cycle of life, death, and reincarnation and karma the universal law of cause and effect. Philosophy Incorporated in this rich literature is a complex cosmology. Hindus believe that the universe is a great, enclosed sphere, a cosmic egg, within which are numerous concentric heavens, hells, oceans, and continents, with India at the center.
They believe that time is both degenerative—going from the golden age, or Krita Yuga, through two intermediate periods of decreasing goodness, to the present age, or Kali Yuga—and cyclic: At the end of each Kali Yuga, the universe is destroyed by fire and flood, and a new golden age begins.
Human life, too, is cyclic: After death, the soul leaves the body and is reborn in the body of another person, animal, vegetable, or mineral.
This condition of endless entanglement in activity and rebirth is called samsara see Transmigration. The precise quality of the new birth is determined by the accumulated merit and demerit that result from all the actions, or karma , that the soul has committed in its past life or lives. Hindus may thus be divided into two groups: those who seek the sacred and profane rewards of this world health, wealth, children, and a good rebirth , and those who seek release from the world.
The principles of the first way of life were drawn from the Vedas and are represented today in temple Hinduism and in the religion of Brahmans and the caste system. The second way, which is prescribed in the Upanishads, is represented not only in the cults of renunciation sannyasa but also in the ideological ideals of most Hindus.
To the first three Vedas was added the Atharva-Veda. The first three classes Brahman, or priestly; Kshatriya, or warrior; and Vaisya, or general populace were derived from the tripartite division of ancient Indo-European society, traces of which can be detected in certain social and religious institutions of ancient Greece and Rome.
To the three classes were added the Shudras, or servants, after the Indo-Aryans settled into the Punjab and began to move down into the Ganges Valley. The three original ashramas were the chaste student brahmachari , the householder grihastha , and the forest-dweller vanaprastha. They were said to owe three debts: study of the Vedas owed to the sages ; a son to the ancestors ; and sacrifice to the gods.
The three goals were artha material success , dharma righteous social behavior , and kama sensual pleasures. Shortly after the composition of the first Upanishads, during the rise of Buddhism 6th century BC , a fourth ashrama and a corresponding fourth goal were added: the renouncer sannyasi , whose goal is release moksha from the other stages, goals, and debts.
Each of these two ways of being Hindu developed its own complementary metaphysical and social systems. Svadharma comprises the beliefs that each person is born to perform a specific job, marry a specific person, eat certain food, and beget children to do likewise and that it is better to fulfill one's own dharma than that of anyone else even if one's own is low or reprehensible, such as that of the Harijan caste, the Untouchables, whose mere presence was once considered polluting to other castes.
The primary goal of the worldly Hindu is to produce and raise a son who will make offerings to the ancestors the shraddha ceremony. The second, renunciatory way of Hinduism, on the other hand, is based on the Upanishadic philosophy of the unity of the individual soul, or atman , with Brahman, the universal world soul, or godhead.
The full realization of this is believed to be sufficient to release the worshiper from rebirth; in this view, nothing could be more detrimental to salvation than the birth of a child. Many of the goals and ideals of renunciatory Hinduism have been incorporated into worldly Hinduism, particularly the eternal dharma sanatana dharma , an absolute and general ethical code that purports to transcend and embrace all subsidiary, relative, specific dharmas.
The most important tenet of sanatana dharma for all Hindus is ahimsa, the absence of a desire to injure, which is used to justify vegetarianism although it does not preclude physical violence toward animals or humans, or blood sacrifices in temples. In addition to sanatana dharma, numerous attempts have been made to reconcile the two Hinduisms. The Bhagavad-Gita describes three paths to religious realization. To the path of works, or karma here designating sacrificial and ritual acts , and the path of knowledge, or jnana the Upanishadic meditation on the godhead , was added a mediating third path, the passionate devotion to God, or bhakti , a religious ideal that came to combine and transcend the other two paths.
Bhakti in a general form can be traced in the epics and even in some of the Upanishads, but its fullest statement appears only after the Bhagavad-Gita. It gained momentum from the vernacular poems and songs to local deities, particularly those of the Alvars, Nayanars, and Virashaivas of southern India and the Bengali worshipers of Krishna see below.
Therefore, most Hindus are devoted through bhakti to gods whom they worship in rituals through karma and whom they understand through jnana as aspects of ultimate reality, the material reflection of which is all an illusion maya wrought by God in a spirit of play lila.
Gods Although all Hindus acknowledge the existence and importance of a number of gods and demigods, most individual worshipers are primarily devoted to a single god or goddess, of whom Shiva, Vishnu, and the Goddess are the most popular. Shiva embodies the apparently contradictory aspects of a god of ascetics and a god of the phallus. Shiva is also the deity whose phallus linga is the central shrine of all Shaiva temples and the personal shrine of all Shaiva householders; his priapism is said to have resulted in his castration and the subsequent worship of his severed member.
In addition, Shiva is said to have appeared on earth in various human, animal, and vegetable forms, establishing his many local shrines. To his worshipers, Vishnu is all-pervasive and supreme; he is the god from whose navel a lotus sprang, giving birth to the creator Brahma.
Vishnu created the universe by separating heaven and earth, and he rescued it on a number of subsequent occasions. Several of these are animals that recur in iconography: the fish, the tortoise, and the boar.
Others are the dwarf Vamana, who became a giant in order to trick the demon Bali out of the entire universe ; the man-lion Narasimha, who disemboweled the demon Hiranyakashipu ; the Buddha who became incarnate in order to teach a false doctrine to the pious demons ; Rama-with-an-Axe Parashurama, who beheaded his unchaste mother and destroyed the entire class of Kshatriyas to avenge his father ; and Kalki the rider on the white horse, who will come to destroy the universe at the end of the age of Kali.
Most popular by far are Rama hero of the Ramayana and Krishna hero of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata-Purana , both of whom are said to be avatars of Vishnu, although they were originally human heroes. Along with these two great male gods, several goddesses are the object of primary devotion. They are sometimes said to be various aspects of the Goddess, Devi.
In some myths Devi is the prime mover, who commands the male gods to do the work of creation and destruction. As Durga, the Unapproachable, she kills the buffalo demon Mahisha in a great battle; as Kali, the Black, she dances in a mad frenzy on the corpses of those she has slain and eaten, adorned with the still-dripping skulls and severed hands of her victims. The Goddess is also worshiped by the Shaktas, devotees of Shakti, the female power.
This sect arose in the medieval period along with the Tantrists, whose esoteric ceremonies involved a black mass in which such forbidden substances as meat, fish, and wine were eaten and forbidden sexual acts were performed ritually.
In many Tantric cults the Goddess is identified as Krishna's consort Radha. More peaceful manifestations of the Goddess are seen in wives of the great gods: Lakshmi, the meek, docile wife of Vishnu and a fertility goddess in her own right; and Parvati, the wife of Shiva and the daughter of the Himalayas.
The great river goddess Ganga the Ganges , also worshiped alone, is said to be a wife of Shiva; a goddess of music and literature, Sarasvati, associated with the Saraswati River, is the wife of Brahma. Many of the local goddesses of India—Manasha, the goddess of snakes, in Bengal, and Minakshi in Madurai—are married to Hindu gods, while others, such as Shitala, goddess of smallpox, are worshiped alone. These unmarried goddesses are feared for their untamed powers and angry, unpredictable outbursts.
Many minor gods are assimilated into the central pantheon by being identified with the great gods or with their children and friends. Hanuman, the monkey god, appears in the Ramayana as the cunning assistant of Rama in the siege of Lanka.
Skanda, the general of the army of the gods, is the son of Shiva and Parvati, as is Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of scribes and merchants, the remover of obstacles, and the object of worship at the beginning of any important enterprise. Worship and Ritual The great and lesser Hindu gods are worshiped in a number of concentric circles of public and private devotion.
Because of the social basis of Hinduism, the most fundamental ceremonies for every Hindu are those that involve the rites of passage samskaras. These begin with birth and the first time the child eats solid food rice. Later rites include the first haircutting for a young boy and the purification after the first menstruation for a girl ; marriage; and the blessings upon a pregnancy, to produce a male child and to ensure a successful delivery and the child's survival of the first six dangerous days after birth the concern of Shashti, goddess of Six.
Last are the funeral ceremonies cremation and, if possible, the sprinkling of ashes in a holy river such as the Ganges and the yearly offerings to dead ancestors. The most notable of the latter is the pinda, a ball of rice and sesame seeds given by the eldest male child so that the ghost of his father may pass from limbo into rebirth.
In daily ritual, a Hindu generally the wife, who is thought to have more power to intercede with the gods makes offerings puja of fruit or flowers before a small shrine in the house. She also makes offerings to local snakes or trees or obscure spirits benevolent and malevolent dwelling in her own garden or at crossroads or other magical places in the village. The temple is also a cultural center where songs are sung, holy texts read aloud in Sanskrit and vernaculars , and sunset rituals performed; devout laity may be present at most of these ceremonies.
In many temples, particularly those sacred to goddesses such as the Kalighat temple to Kali, in Kolkata , goats are sacrificed on special occasions. The sacrifice is often carried out by a special low-caste priest outside the bounds of the temple itself.
Thousands of simple local temples exist; each may be nothing more than a small stone box enclosing a formless effigy swathed in cloth, or a slightly more imposing edifice with a small tank in which to bathe. In addition, India has many temples of great size as well as complex temple cities, some hewn out of caves such as Elephanta and Ellora , some formed of great monolithic slabs such as those at Mahabalipuram , and some built of imported and elaborately carved stone slabs such as the temples at Khajuraho, Bhubaneshwar, Madurai, and Kanjeevaram.
On special days, usually once a year, the image of the god is taken from its central shrine and paraded around the temple complex on a magnificently carved wooden chariot ratha. Certain shrines are most frequently visited at special yearly festivals. For example, Prayaga, where the Ganges and Yamuna rivers join at Allahabad, is always sacred, but it is crowded with pilgrims during the Kumbha Mela festival each January and overwhelmed by the millions who come to the special ceremony held every 12 years.
Some festivals are celebrated throughout India: Diwali, the festival of lights in early winter; and Holi, the spring carnival, when members of all castes mingle and let down their hair, sprinkling one another with cascades of red powder and liquid, symbolic of the blood that was probably used in past centuries.
History The basic beliefs and practices of Hinduism cannot be understood outside their historical context. Although the early texts and events are impossible to date with precision, the general chronological development is clear.
By about BC , when the Indo-Aryan tribes invaded India, this civilization was in a serious decline. It is therefore impossible to know, on present evidence, whether or not the two civilizations had any significant contact. Many elements of Hinduism that were not present in Vedic civilization such as worship of the phallus and of goddesses, bathing in temple tanks, and the postures of yoga may have been derived from the Indus civilization, however.
See Indus Valley Civilization. By about BC , the Indo-Aryans had settled in the Punjab, bringing with them their predominantly male Indo-European pantheon of gods and a simple warrior ethic that was vigorous and worldly, yet also profoundly religious. Brahman God or gods? The gods of the Hindu faith represent different expressions of Brahman. Hindus recognise three principal gods: Brahma, who creates the universe Vishnu, who preserves the universe Shiva, who destroys the universe.
Brahma Brahma is the Creator. Hindus worship other expressions of Brahman not Brahma , which take a variety of forms. Hindus are often classified into three groups according to which form of Brahman they worship: Those who worship Vishnu the preserver and Vishnu's important incarnations Rama, Krishna and Narasimha; Those who worship Shiva the destroyer Those who worship the Mother Goddess, Shakti, also called Parvati, Mahalakshmi, Durga or Kali.
Vishnu, Shiva and other deities Vishnu Vishnu, the preserver, is believed to be linked to a very early sun god and is considered by his worshippers to be the greatest among the gods.
Vishnu is represented in sculpture and painting in human form, often painted blue. His city is Varanasi, and any Hindu who dies there is believed to go straight to heaven. Shiva is the source of both good and evil who combines many contradictory elements. The Great Goddess Mahadevi The great Goddess appears as a consort of the principal male gods and encompasses the thousands of local goddesses or matas.
Other Vedic gods Indra, the god of storms. Indra was once the Vedic king of all gods but has, over time, lost some influence. Indra's main function is in leading the warriors see caste system. For this reason the scriptures very often use the term "It" to refer to God apart from using He and She. The form of Lord ardhanArIshvara 3 clearly conveys that God is masculine, feminine and neuter. When the God is called the Lord of all creatures, It is the God irrespective of the gender, animal race, or whatever other differentiation one could think of.
The beauty of Hinduism is that the concept of God is tried to be understood, experienced. There are purANa s that elaborately tell through the voice of the divines the glory of God. These are one part. On the other hand the scriptures like upaniShad s analyze through questioning and reasoning the concept of God. These two types go very much hand in hand. Neither the divine glory limited to the reaches of the human mind with the purANa like scriptures telling the things beyond the normal human reach.
At the same time they do not command a blind following of some super-human texts, but also very much permit analysis. The presence of a range of philosophies in Hindu system is the testimony of this. There are texts like yogasutras that cover the scope from reasoning to divine glory too. So the total and complete spectrum of human verification to super-human wisdom is richly available for the smooth progress of the follower in Hinduism.
No need to be blind-folded, explore your way to the Supreme!! See Also: 1. Forms of Lord Shiva 2. Where is God - ThirumuRai Series 3. Please click this Icon to play Radio.
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