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My friend is Hindu and I was wondering.
I would not be wearing their Hindi dress or going along with the practices.
| I is ok under certain conditions. (Please name.) | 4 | |
| No, it is not | 3 | |
| It is ok as long as you are there just to learn and not a part of it, | 10 |
Lol one of my closest friends is indian and I went to many Hindi celebrations over the years, even went to temple, they love it actually and are very welcoming. I don't see anything wrong with it
Catholicism bans such things, for there is nothing enlightening about going to other religious celebrations, and you may be misled in some way.
Yeah, staying ignorant is the way to go, huh? You can't even demonstrate the teachings of your fucked up cult are true, you closed-minded, brainwashed, Catholic freak.
Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. It's good to experience other cultures.
Some religions try very hard to stop their adherents from ever being exposed to alternative religions. Basically, this is very much like the cola wars: both Pepsi and Coke sell shitty, unhealthy products that taste virtually the same, both companies know that damn well, so most of their advertising is devoted to maintaining brand loyalty and dissuading their customers from trying the alternative.
I obviously have no idea what brand of Christianity you've invested in, so I have no idea how neurotic the executives of the organisation are about their clients being exposed to alternative viewpoints. One thing you can be sure of is that you're not actually going to be contaminated in some way by attending the celebration.
You presumably believe that your God is all-powerful and The One True God, so how can the strange pantheon of Hindu gods can possibly be any sort of challenge to your belief? I assume you believe your God _really_ exists, while those strange beings are merely fictional characters. However, you might consider that Hinduism goes back to at least 1500 BC, while Yahweh only decided to announce his existence to a bunch of goat- and sheep-herds in Palestine around a thousand years after that. So who's most likely to be the Johnny-come-lately imposter?
A celebration is fine yes but I wouldnt be apart of any rituals or prayers.
It's mainly a matter of personal conscience, I think. Jesus has this way of making people reveal their hearts by their choices, rather than laying down lots of rules.
You know the 10 Commandments from the Hebrew scriptures: the first commandment is that you must worship the one God Yahweh and only serve him. For an indication of how strict that is, you only have to look at what the consequences were for the ancient Israelites when they worshipped other gods than their own. You also know the Great Commandment: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, to love your neighbour as yourself, and to love your enemy. You know that the Great Commandment is the prism through which to interpret everything else. Hold these tenets in the right sort of tension with each other.
Your act of worship as a Christian is to love both God (that is, the God of Jesus Christ) as the only God, and to love people at the same time. As for how this translates into practice, I think it depends on whether it would bother people if you stood aloof from collective acts of worship and remained silent during prayers or songs. And also, it would depend on whether your presence there in and of itself, would be understood by people as an act of worship. If you went and your abstention from rituals and prayers bothered people, it would have been better to stay home for their sake. Likewise, if you'd feel pressured to join in with the worship because everyone else was doing it, it would be better to stay home for the sake of loving your God as the only God.
All my best, friend.
"...you only have to look at what the consequences were for the ancient Israelites when they worshipped other gods than their own."
Yahweh decreed that anyone who did that or anyone who tried to get others to do that should be hit with rocks until they were dead. (Exodus 20:22, Deuteronomy 13)
I do get why Christians who have actually read the Old Testament are terrified of offending their god. This is a deity who set up the first humans to sin and then punished them for doing what he - as an omniscient being - knew they would do. A while later, He became so enraged at how his creation wasn't behaving as He wanted that he decided to drown almost every human being and animal on Earth. And once he'd settled on his Chosen People, he repeatedly directed them to slaughter every man, woman and child who didn't worship Him and stood in the way of His Special People dominating a Very Special Patch of semi-desert.
Anyone who reads the Old Testament and thinks about what it actually says has to come to the conclusion that the deity depicted there is a controlling, violent, vindictive and neurotically needy being who constantly demands not just respect, but worship. In fact, anyone who had the misfortune to grow up with an abusive, volatile, narcissistic father will have a very good understanding of Yahweh's character.
And since He is supposed to be unchanging and eternal, the God of the New Testament must be the same asshole. JC did his best with his spin and marketing, but he was like a criminal defence attorney trying to portray their client as a fundamentally kind, decent person while everyone in the courtroom can read a detailed confession of the defendant's murderous, sociopathic acts written in his own hand.
Stockholm Syndrome is a terrible thing.
I nearly posted some scathing counter-attack on your first anti-God post Boojum, but I rose above.
OP and I did absolutely nothing invite an attack on our God whom we know and love, for the things about him that are hard to understand and easy to dismiss, and the things that aren't.
I gave OP an honest answer to an honest question, from something similar to the perspective he/she identifies with. That was all he/she asked for.
We know your crusading too well here. Your inability to be civil to us is on you.