What is a temple?

I saw this tweet today wherein the lawyer is arguing that temples aren't a "Essential Religious Practice" for Hindus because Vedic Hindus worshipped Agni, Vaayu, etc. without temples : https://x.com/LiveLawIndia/status/1925490765393797190

My first thoughts on seeing this was: Wait, that's not true! And then it got me thinking, "What is a temple?"

To begin answering this question, we have to understand what "religion" is. For us, today, our thinking about these things is corrupted by one of the most potent mind viruses of our time - Christianity. More specifically, the version of Christianity that survived the Protestant Reformation. Religion for us is a private affair, a thing that we do on top of living our lives. We go to our work every day, we go to movies once in a while, we go on vacation, we retire, we spend time with our loved ones...and sometimes we pray to our Gods. There's life, and then there's practicing our religion. There are things that we owe to our loved ones, to ourselves, to the government and sometimes, if you are religious, there are things you owe to your Gods. The ancient ones saw religion completely differently. Rather, it was such innate part of their life, they didn't see it at all. When being religious involves everything from getting educated, getting married, earning your bread and butter, raising kids, and eventually getting old and dying with honor, would they know that they're being religious?

(To expand: This is even more pronounced in polytheistic societies where lack of belief in one God, can always be substituted by belief in other God which could be easily be included into the existing pantheon.)

This changes with Christianity, or the flavour of Christianity that we know and has taken over the minds of almost everyone in the world. The separation of the Church and the State, also defines the religion to be a personal voluntary practice. It allowed people to have a life outside of religion, which would've been inconceivable for the ancients.

I digress, the main issue is about temples.

So, let's assume you (your civilization) has created Gods. As it happened in those ancient civilizations like Hindus or the Greeks, the divine stood for abstract ideas and natural elements - rain, wind, fire, thunder, seas, rivers, big trees, etc. Any adjective you can think of for describing these elements, becomes an attribute of the divine. Any utility or nuisance value that these entities hold becomes their power. Having made these Gods, how do you make them manifest? Then came the idols and the temples.

The Hindus and the Greeks, I think understood temples in a very similar way. The temple is the "devalaya" or the "oikos tou theou", both essentially meaning "the house of god". Why does the god have to be housed, you ask? Because abstract entities aren't digestable until they are "pointable". One needs to be able to point at a thing that exists in the physical world as a proxy for what they are talking about. This is how the human minds works. We make things in the physical world to convey abstract ideas from one mind to another.

Temples are one of these things. You tie the abstract to a defines space in the physical world. "This right here is where God is." Only then can the idea be put to downstream use. Even if we assume that the pre-Vedic people lived a near-nomadic life without temples, the fact that they conducted ritual sacrifices, with sacrificial altars, the sites for which were chosen carefully can be assumed as an act of grounding the divine. The sacrificial site itself becomes the temple in such a scenario.

The second worst thing you can do is go against the state...

...and the worst thing you can do is go against the people.

I was listening to a podcast about Socrates' trial (Politics on Trial: Socrates vs Democracy), and this thought came to my mind.

Socrates was charged with, among other things, corrupting the youth of the city/state of Athens. In his trial, he was found guilty as a result of which, he was put to death.

The host goes through many things about the trial, but for this post, I'll only talk about one of them:

As mentioned earlier, the main charge that was put against Socrates was - 'corrupting the youth of the city/state of Athens'. The reason I say 'city/state of Athens' here, is because in case of Athens of 399BC these two could be hyphenated to mean the same entity and there are ways in which these could be seen as different entities as well. 

Athens was a democratic republic, but unlike modern representative democracies where apart from voting their representatives to run the government the people of the state have very little power or involvement in the governmental affairs, Athens had much more public participation. People were chosen randomly and took turns (over fixed tenures) to serve in public offices. Contributing to the state was an integral part of every person's life. Even in Socrates' trial, like in most trials of those times, the jury was the (a selected 500) people of city. So the city-state and the city-people can be seen as the same entity.

Yet, the distinction between the people of the city and the city state can be seen too. It was the state that went to wars. It was the people who suffered them. It was the state that faced existential crisis in a decade or so leading up to the trial. It were the people that got anxious. Regardless of their rotating system of assigning public officers, or the brief rule of a "select few members"(like the Thirty Tyrants) the ones in power and the ones that power is exercised on shall always remain distinct. It was in this way that the city-state and the city-people can be seen as two different entities.

My main these is two-fold. 
1. Socrates did a grave mistake of going against the state. I think I read this in David Dennett's book - that a state can be seen as an organism, which like most organisms is primarily driven by self-preservation. The Athenian city-state too was driven by self-preservation. It took the threats against it seriously, and in doing so, naturally found Socrates' actions threatening the existence of the state in the form that it was back then.
The kind of questions that he asked, doing is philosophy in the public squares, drove people to question the very foundations upon which the state was built on and based its everyday functioning. When the state held every person responsible for keeping itself afloat, Socrates "corrupted the minds of the youth" by driving them away from the duties laid onto them by the state, thus undermining its power and threatening its existence. This is an extremely serious crime for anyone to commit.

2. Much more grave than the mistake of going against the state was Socrates's actual mistake - going against the people. Towards the end of Socrates's 71 year life, the people of Athens had gotten anxious about the future of their beautiful democratic experiment that the city of Athens was. It was just reeling itself from the Peloponnesian War, and then a series of coups like the Thirty Tyrants. Since 508BC, Athens had been an oasis of democracy in a land which wasn't really accepting of those ideas. It managed to survive till the turn of the 5th Century BC by holding its ground against some very serious forces. By the time of the trial of Socrates (399BC), it would be naturally for the people to be tired of protecting their faiths in the idea of Athens against their own realities. Then comes Socrates' with his grand philosophies of undermining the very thing that they cared about and staked their lives on. "But why do you find Athens worth protecting? What is it about democracy that makes it better than everything else? Why you seek to have an equal say in the flow of power?" Socrates would ask questions like these justifying them by his pursuit for truth and higher knowledge. But while doing so, Socrates was, inadvertently or not, perceived as being contemptuous. His questions were perceived as personal attacks against people who were so devoted to the cause of Athens, which was naturally offensive to those whose devotion had previously demanded them to risk even personal life. This made the people wary and tired of Socrates.

Out of these two, I think the first got Socrates to the trial, but the second one gave him the verdict. People would rather let 71 year old Socrates die, that to have him survive amongst them planting seeds of doubt if their entire lives (as faithful servants of Athens) had been a lie. People rather chose to live in a happy delusion than possibly bitter truth.

Entertainment should never be free

While on my commute to office today morning, I was listening to a song from "Mi Vasantrao", the lavni song. The scene came to my mind:

Vasantrao and PL Deshpande go to the old Lavni singer's hut. She sings for them. Vasantrao is quite touched by her singing and although he himself was poor, he takes out whatever money he had in his pocket and gives it to her. She then asks him to sing for her, and he sings equally well, after which she returns him that same money, along with some of her own.

Now, when I thought of this today morning, it got me thinking - entertaining someone is probably the best thing you can do for them. Life can get anything from dull and boring (in the best worst case) to pretty miserable and painful (in the worst worst case). Providing someone a moment of happiness, maybe making them laugh, making them excited, making them thrilled, or awed...is extremely valuable. A small island in this vast ocean of suffering that life is. This service, should never be free.

When I say that being entertained should never be free, I am not putting the responsibility of putting a price of entertainment on the entertainer. No. Rather, the entertainee should feel a internal obligation to reimburse the entertainer fairly. One should have a natural urge that compels them to pay their entertainer what they are due.

If you see a joke that makes you laugh, you ought to pay for it. If you see a good movie that made your lifted your spirits, you ought to pay for it. Someone's company makes you feel better, you ought to pay for it (this kind of payment can and often is done in the form of reciprocation)

Bottom line, entertainment should never be free.

Does it matter if Socrates was real?

"Socrates wasn't a real person. Everything we know about Socrates comes from other sources like Plate. There's no historical proof of the man Socrates"

I heard this in a podcast today. I've heard this before too. Not just about Socrates, but a few other common figures too:

- Jesus of Nazareth was not a real person

- Lord Rama wasn't a real person

- The Mahabharata wasn't real (meaning, it didn't really happen)

A part of me hears this and feels - so what? 

Of course, there's merit to doing history and there's merit to being objective about it. But that's not what I'm talking about here.

The reason, I think, people want to either prove or disprove the historical existence of entities so that they can give or take away the legitimacy of being proud of it all. Take the example of Socrates - if I am a stakeholder of the Greek philosophical heritage and agree on its influence on Western thought, somehow proving that Socrates was a real person who actually contributed to philosophy the way hay he did, gives legitimacy to your pride in Greek culture. Disproving that he exists, if you are already leaning against Greek superiority would help your cause in delegitimizing the pride that someone takes on being partaking from the Greek thought.

Another example would be from the Indian political spectrum. The Indian Hindutva-coded Right, often promotes Hindu idols, and also attempts to historically prove their existence. This helps their cause in helping their votaries feel secure about their political placement. If the great Hindu philosophers, kings, warriors, artists of yore really existed in the ancient times that they did, then the pride that I feel in their existence as participants of this grand eternal unbroken stream of Hinduism. The Indian Left, on the other hand, determines its political existence on that of the Right, and places it against all these things. They sinisterly try to disprove that these entities existed in the way they are presented because this plants seeds of doubt in the minds of Indian Right's votaries, which in turn helps the Indian Left.

My take on this is, "Why does it matter if they are real or not?"...."given that the ones that talked about them, the ones whose historicity can be proven are real"

Mahabharata is a fantastical story of mythical creatures and fictional beings. Okay. But the fact that it was written is true, right? The characters and the scenes painted in the Iliad are perhaps not real, but Homer was a real person, right? "Akschually, Shakespeare didn't write those stories" So what? Those stories are still born in the English culture of the 16th Century. 
That these cultural artefacts didn't come from the person who is usually thought to be their creator can in no way rob the culture that produced them its glory. Vyasa may not be real, but Hinduism would still be GOATed for having written a book like Mahabharata. Socrates may not be a real person, but the impact Greek philosophy has on the Western mind is undeniable. Nothing can delegitimize the pride one would feel on considering themselves as admirers, adherents and carriers of that culture.

"Whatever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger" [Gone Religious]

I was listening to this podcast on my walk today morning and it had a bit about how Manichaeism influenced Augustine. 

He became a believer in Manicheism. Manicheism was a Gnostic religion back then that was actually a pretty serious rival to Christianity during the times of Saint Augustine. Basically, the idea behind it was that, I mean, God wasn’t all-powerful, and that in actuality all the things in the world are controlled by a dualistic cosmos. I mean, in the case of Manicheism, there were two forces, good and evil, constantly battling against each other. And it should be known that these two forces in themselves are actually extremely complex, and they represent a lot of different things. Many times, the Good represented the higher spiritual existence, and Evil represented the material, flawed lower existence. Huge fans of philosophy might consider it similar to Empedocles’ view of the forces of Love and Strife. [Transcripts quoted verbatim]

Further, a few seconds later, he said

But really, one of the great things about Christianity is that it kind of has everything. I mean, there are Christians today who believe in something very similar to that. They believe that the devil exists and has the power to intervene and try to influence humans to do his bidding. You know, the devil tries to get us to do bad stuff, and God tries to give us strength so that we won’t succumb to his temptations. The similarities to Manicheism are obvious.

I found this to be very interesting. Christianity and Manicheism were both competing religions in the 3rd Century CE. One survived, the other didn't. What's interesting is, the one that didn't survive was essentially absorbed into the one that did.

Is this true for other religions too?

I think it could be true. After all, all religions in a way offer answers to our existential questions. People, I've noticed, ask questions not because they want answers, but because they want someone to tell them that the answer they already have is true. People want support for their worldview. As long as there's different kind of people on this earth, different religions that offer different kinds of answers will always find takes. A religion that is vague enough to seemingly offer different sorts of answers to the same question would have higher survivability than its competitor.
In the 3rd Century CE, when Manicheism and Christianity were competing, neither answered all the questions to everyone's satisfaction. Somehow, through brute strength, historical luck or some clever persuasion, Christianity found itself to have a slight edge. Eventually, as Manicheism started receding ground, Christianity maintained and improved upon this lead, not by staying the same, but by absorbing the good (meaning effective) ideas from Manicheism.

This kind of interplay must've happened elsewhere too. I'm not sure right now, and this needs more reading, but I'm sure a part of the reason Hinduism survived for however long it did because it's vague in places it cannot afford to have a narrow span of available answers to life's questions.

Nietzsche on Augustine

“But my sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in Him but in myself and his other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.” – St. Augustine. Augustine hated himself, or rather his past self for having indulged in mortal pleasures instead of setting his mind on God. 

This somewhat reminds me of what Nietzsche said about the priestly classes corrupting the original morality: [PARAPHRASED]

What was good was good but what was bad wasn’t evil. There’s no disgust that’s to be felt towards the bad, only disdain. You aren’t supposed to to feel. The good distances itself from the bad when it encounters it, it doesn’t shudder at it’s existence. The change in the morality from good v/s bad to good v/s evil is primarily brought upon by the 4 Ps, one of them being the Priestly class. 

The priestly class found itself not being able to keep up with the strong (who define the good), so they made weakness into an ideal. To be strong, now, was to be an ascetic. The strength lied not in doing more, but in doing less. Eat less, drink less, sleep less, earn less, lift less, abstain from sex, have no kids, etc. God favoured not those who collected wealth or power, but those who collected virtue. The human drive became pitiable at best and disgusting at worst, for rising above it became virtuous. 

Reading Augustine’s line, I can see it clearly now. Religion (here, Christianity) teaches you to hate yourself. That it does this, if I’m being particularly considerate to religion, in an attempt to make you better is a possibility. But what cannot be ignored, that in doing so, it does make people second doubt themselves. It feeds into them a feeling of being impure which I’m not sure is the right thing to make people feel about themselves.