Vedas

[Greg Goode]

At 11:50 AM 10/3/97 -0400, Ram Chandran wrote:
>Martin Gifford wrote at 11:35 AM 2/10/97 -0700 in reply to Vidyasankar:
>        Third, as Vidyasankar has pointed out: " As for the infallibility of
>the Vedas, when a Hindu says this about the Vedas, he means something
>very different from what a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim says about his
>own scripture."  Vidya's statement can be clearly understood by the
>Hindus and for others it needs some additional explanations.

Let me add a note to Ram Chandran's explanations of infallibility of the
Hindu's scriptures vs. the Christian or Muslim or Jew's claim.  Although I
was not raised in ANY religious tradition at all, I'm going to take a stab
at why the Hindu's claim is different.

As I understand it, the Hindu's claim is that the Vedas are eternal, and
are coeval with creation itself.  Even more, they ARE creation.  If you
can even distinguish the Vedas from creation itself, nevertheless they
both emanated out of the syllable AUM. This helps account for why the
Hindu would not deny a mystical truth discovered by someone in another
tradition.  There is no mystical truth that can contradict the Vedas, because
as divine and self-luminous, they are Truth Itself.

Now these other, Semitic, religions claim that their holy books were inspired
by a personal God, a long time after the world was created.  The books were
written
by human authors under the divine guidance of Ishwara.  Another thing that is
common among the Semitic religions is various statements that amount to the
claim
that everyone outside that religion will end up in that religion's hell.  If
all these religions' claims are true, then everyone will go to someone's hell.

(Do the Vedas make any such claim?)

--Greg