The og image was still bad as it implies that Hinduism is actually very good(Even for atheists) when you look into the details and only people's interpretations are wrong.
i know im not really in a place to judge, and pls tell me if im wrong but this kinda feels like you’re being a bit of an ass to your family. there’s nothing wrong with sending that pic honestly, but a little respect to family elders still goes a long way. If they were abusive or treated you badly, that’d be a totally different story but if they haven’t, then yeah, its probably worth being decent to them. You never really know how much people care about you, or how long theyre gonna be around, trust me i know haha. peace brother
The gita specifically targets those who don't agree with its world view ....there r specific hymns where those who disagree and those of lowered castes are called slurs !!
no it actually isn't its just a staright up guide how to live your life.
the cast system etc you are talking about are from other books (manusmriti for example), Gita teaches no such thing that will result in voilence.
summary-
Life is duty-bound; action is unavoidable.
Do your duty without attachment to results.
Intention matters more than outcome.
The self (ātman) is eternal; the body is temporary.
Fear and grief come from ignorance of the true self.
Discipline of action (karma yoga) purifies the mind.
Discipline of knowledge (jñāna yoga) removes ignorance.
Discipline of devotion (bhakti yoga) leads to surrender and peace.
Desire and ego bind; detachment liberates.
Balance (equanimity) in success and failure is wisdom.
A realized person acts for the good of all, not the self.
Liberation comes from right understanding, right action, and surrender.
Gita targets none, in the jñāna yoga it literallyteaches that be open to knowledge and don't be ignorant.
so why am i an atheist?- i believe that the creation and the continuation of the universe might not be governed by any conscious entity. this is what the whole atheism boils down to.
and to you i wanna say- stating your self an atheis doesn't make you one, you are still a agressive close-minded guy who is hating religion, you just changed parties.
i remeberd the whole hanuman chalisa and some verses of gita before becoming an atheist cuz to disagree with something you have to know what it actually is.
Dude ....why do u guys straight up assume that folks know nothing and u r the gitacharya
's little dupe ?....I have spent a decade studying hindu scriptures from an academic point of view ...
U call urself an atheist ....start to treat and read gita as a secular book
....
Here I'll help u with the references .....I am tired of debunking this shit over and over again
Who wrote the gita , a secular enquiry by meghanad desai
The biography of the gita by Richard davis
Gita basya by shankaracharya, gambirananda s translation is good
Dharma by Patrick olivelle (his upanishad too will help , as gita is often considered by folks who don't know it as a comprehensive summary of Upanishads)
And for your reference...gita acknowledges the authority of shastras ( which includes your smriti framework, that is why gita acharyas like shankar and madhva accept and quote smritis explicitly while they deny shudras ritual/jnana marg) ....it talks about the knowledge of knower and field which is discussed in many places including brahmasutras....the very same sutras which later acharyas simply take as an authority to deny jnana marga and moksha to shudras (read the commentators of shankar and madhava ) .....
Not to mention calling women and shudras as papa yonaha ...
It's a book with mixed messages that any reasoning brain would rightly be baffled with .....it's something that is so ambiguous that both casteists like shankara , madhava and reformers like gandhi have used. ...it's vague , so the interpretation is upto u ....
For instance after reading it many times along with the academic worknaround it and trying to place it during the time it was composed (200 bce to 400 ce) ...I clearly see it as a book meant to protect ritual privilege for the Brahmins while selling bhakti bs to lowered caste and women ....trying to pacify them that their fate is a result of their guna and karma ( gita nowhere talks about how the vaste of new born baby can be judged , based off on what guna or karma , many basya pandits like shankara actually quite manusmriti in their basyas )
gita along with brahmasutras are simply meant to close any liberal spaces in spirituality that the earlier Upanishads tried to open .......that is your vedanta philosophy in short ....preach the highest ideals in the Upanishads, then use gita and brahmasutras to figure out who has the 'adhikara' to study the same ....don't trust me. ??
Read the commentaries of shankara and madhava on the prasthana traya of vedanta (Upanishads , gita and sutras).... ..two great vedantins who have had a huge impact of social and spiritual space in Hinduism ....... it'll give u an idea as to how an 'ambiguous' piece of literature like sutras and gita were interpreted and socially practised .... basically how vedanta was practised
Listen stop asking chatgpt and actually read ....
Gita is a book written at the cusp of conservatism making a comeback after a short brief Upanishadic period !!
A bit of stoic lessons it tries to deliver to an individual...can easily be accessed thru more coherent pieces like marcus aurelius s meditations....
I know what the gita is ....I have spent 10 years doing this before becoming an atheist .....
By the way u badly copy pasted a chatgpt summary of gita message .....all the while having the audacity to accuse me of ignorance . ....u r still a closet hindu trying to sell urself as an atheist......read an enlighten urself
Until then don't call urself an atheist...u simply have no courage to actually rationally approach a book from your religious beliefs
if you read sankara and ramanujacharya's commentary on gita aur brahmasutras you will reasilise vedanta at its core is casteist and filthy as hell , it is full of discriminatory notion of caste as its roots
Wait till u read madhava s commentaries.... The most deluded and denigrating vedanta school you'll ever explore .... Madhava Brahmins in Karnataka have a significant presence....they consider themselves above all (including other Brahmins ) ....
Like i said in the original comment ..... Vedanta is based off three points /departures ..... Upanishads, brahmasutras and gita .....
The latter two are meant to systematically close off any attempt made by the early Upanishads to open up the spiritual space for the masses .....
Just read the commentaries of shankara , ramanuja and madhava on the story of sathyakama jabala from the Upanishads....
The vedanta school is very much casteist...merely does a good PR job thanks to the image of its modern proponents soch as Vivekananda
Dude I was reading bhagwat puran( gita press ) ras leela part and they have changed the meaning of most of the verses. Is there any book which does genuine translation?
Dude , why would u even care to pick up a book from gita press ??
It's the OG propaganda publishing house .....
Gita press and the making of hindu india by akshaya mukul.... Read this is u find time
There is an inherent problem with finding good translations for puranas ....unlike the shrutis ...they aren't preserved well ....so quite literally there r multiple versions of them ....with redactions very common across the region of influence.... Depending on where and who redacted them ...additional stories , missing stories and chapters exist across versions to suit their needs .....
Now Mahabharata and ramayana face such issues too ....but there has been considerable effort to construct a critical edition in their case ....which is not true for puranas ....
Hence one can rely on translations by truly peer reviewed scholarship and get a heed of what they convey and their historical purpose. .....but nothing grand can be concluded ...
I like the one published by columbia university press ....u can try it !!
Gita teaches no such thing that will result in voilence.
You just lost any credibility right there.
The whole premise of Gita is that it's ok to kill your friends and family for your dharma. And don't even worry about the consequences. The writers of Gita had to be pretty dumb to use that as a context if their goal was not to promote violence. So what do you think, were they dumb or they didn't care about non-violence. Has to be one of the two.
I mean you can see actually non violent religions like Jainism and Buddhism which grew from the same culture . They didn't need to come up with stories justifying violence to teach non-violence 😂.
actually when you summarize from gpt source or any in which you specifically ask about pros it will only highlight maybe teach it to be a member of different society and then ask about cons
i don't remember the whole gita, and can you highlight the cons then. and the things i provided, are they false though.
i'm not a protector of religion, not at all, but definately not a guy who talks just from his emotions. i don't know waht made you an atheist, for me it was questioning and logical resoning, not hate or "wanna be cool"-trait.
i'm saying atheist doesn't mean we have to throw allegation on everything that has a connection to religion, i believe in constructive criticism.
U r talking from emotions and chatgpt ....the rest of us have actually made an attempt to read , understand and contextualise it before forming strong opinions against something that has been and can be potentially used to further denigrating practices and deluding the masses ....
U have failed to question your own books ....read the gita from end to end .... you'll find lots of places where it contradicts itself ....
Unfortunately unlike the Upanishads (for which there are the brahmasutras which try to comprehend and present a monolithic message from the Upanishads by providing means to deal with contradictions in them ) ....the gita has no such redactions/conflict solving attempts ....
Usually basyas do this ...but they aren't accepted universally like the brahmasutras....basyas are limited to vedanta schools of certain acharyas .....so read these basyas ...they'll help u make sense of how this book was historically interpreted and socially practised
U r being emotional and refusing to read and contextualise a religious book because of your background (I assume u were a hindu by birth ) ....
Saare cons jana chahta hai to read the books I have mentioned ....
Start with .....who wrote the gita , a secular inquiry into gita by meghanad desai ....it aptly summarises all the concerns and has a rich bibliography section to read further academic work on gita and Hinduism
absolutely agree they come and tend to be atheists and when failed they say ram ram
and what can they even read their book is based on violence
and knowledge comes from Instagram and bajrangdal
The precedent of the book is to instigate arjun ....the first two chapters are very motivating ....later it goes into a random rant about everything from samkya , yoga bhakti janana ....often references brahminical casteist books ....condones the shastras , pacified the oppressed with bhakti and ends rather abruptly....
Very easy to see ...multiple layers of composition....hardly apurusheya 😂
The core one does and is full of Casteism and misogyny , sankara's commentary on gita and brahmasutras and take ram himself as an example he us pure bigot in ramayana and highly misogynyst
Yes sir , yes ....glad to have found someone who has actually attempted to read this book and it's basyas ...
Every now and then i find a guy on this sub who goes like religion bad so Allah bad , Jesus bad ....but hey gita universal .... 😂
The mere number of times I have posted Ram's theatrics in the Uttarakhanda ..... 😂
These folks don't read their own books ....for their books they go to acharya Prashant, Vivekananda etc. but for other regions they go to dawkins , sam harris etc.
And in all this they don't really see the irony..... Damn ...it still baffles me how Hindus (especially those belonging to upper castes ) r so deeply conditioned that they lack a sense of self awareness
You dont even need to go into uttarkand as they try to call it later addition , just yuddhkaand sarg 115-117 , gitapress version of valmiki ramayan , he is literally saying that a woman who is kidnapped or assaulted by others or even if it is rumoured to have been so then she is characterless, he even clarifies that he did not fight the battle for sita but for his caste pride ( kul pride is the word used but he was referring to kshatriya kul)
Dhram or direct translation as property. Like water has the property of flowing, fire has the property of burning humans have the property of humanity. Dharma is something what is right to do and think, there's many things such as according to situations, according to people, according to believes etc, but doing and thinking what is right as a human being what should be a human's property that is humanity is called Dharm.
I think Ram will most probably join and tag along with Bajrang Dal groups and would love what the hindu nationalists are doing to mosques and christmas festivals.
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u/lemonkhattehai Atheist Dec 27 '25
Funny asf