Maybe you should read Gödel or Cantor or Turing and realize that any logic system rests on axioms and your choice of axioms are no better then anyone else's
It would be the same as equating a medically inept quack (who got his medical degree by way of cheating) to a surgeon who is an expert in his field. If you go to a medically inept quack, suffer under his care (or lack thereof) and think all surgeons are the same it would just be your bad luck/experience and does not, in any way, degrade the expert surgeon who has treated plenty of patients successfully under his care.
Same way, to study ancient scriptures and their actual meaning, you shouldn't be going to random quacks or reading translations written by such quacks. There are experts in this field for a reason. Study under them.
To give you a start on this journey, might I suggest reading Philosophy of Madhvacharya? [1]
Thank you for the book recommendation. I dispense the snark. Open your mind to sound logical systems starting at axioms you might not have thought of beforehand. Or don't. I loose nothing either way.
Sorry. Disagree. As someone who studies Vedanta I know for a fact that it is not pseudoscience.
> Read this and stop all the magical fairy tales.
You have to remember that these scriptures were written in a different era. They used poetry and stories as a medium to explain difficult to understand concepts. That does not make it "magical fairy tales". Those who can grasp the inner meaning of the stories know what they were actually trying to say. For everyone else it seems like a magical story/mythology.
1: Om, That is Purna; This is also Purna; From Purna is manifested Purna,
2: Taking Purna from Purna, Purna indeed remains,
3: Om, Peace, Peace, Peace.
It might seem complete gibberish at first glance. But it is definition of Infinity in the form of poetry. Purna means fullness. It is explaining the characteristic of infinity and how adding/removing anything from infinity doesn't change its intrinsic value. That it always remains infinite.
This is just one example. The problem is not in the authors of these scriptures. They were highly advanced beings for their Time. The problem is with us that we do not have the capacity to understand it the right way. Even now many Vedic scriptures are mistranslated with even more of them tragically lost due to burning of the Nalanda University by invaders.
I also checked the book you linked to see what the author has to say about Time. Funnily enough, the book itself quotes Dharmic concepts of cyclical Time to further its points albeit in a convoluted and rejigged way, where the author says: "An alternative to the periodicity view of the universe is to display periodicity
as a series of sine waves. Now we can walk along the troughs and peaks of the line
without ever returning to the starting point (figure 1.1, right). Time here is a continuum with the cycle as its metric. The cycles are identical in shape, and the start
and end points of the cycles form an infinite path into the seemingly endless universe.". He doesn't realize that this is exactly what Dharmic concept of Time is anyways. So his assumption that "Time is cyclical" to mean everything "repeats" is not what Dharma says at all. It just stems from a common misunderstanding of Dharmic concepts that has plagued the discourse in the West as most of the translations are done by Western Indologists without conversing with Indian Vedanta scholars who are experts in the field.
The Greeks had similar sayings about infinite, and the Chinese too for sure, they did proto-Calculus and integration. Zeno's paradox it's a good start.
This is why we should use Mathematics, it's an universal language. If you think about it, from Geometry itself you can extrapolate the 90% of the core Algebra laws.
Religion and philosphy are just either methods of power or the emergent culture of the society of their days. Kinda like Nietzche was the "son" of the industrial revolution on cities against the old Regime which was tied to rural societies.
When Nietzche said "God it's dead" for sure it meant as the old regime which emerged from ruralist towns and the Neolithic revolution which was something born of agriculture.
Even the Bible itself it's a metaphor as a war between hunters/gatherers and farmers (Cain vs Abel) and the Abrahamic religion are just Sun/wheat workshippers. The Holy Week meets exactly harvesting times after a hard winter. Abrahamic religions are just that, the glorification of the Neolithic symbols.
The paradise was in the hunter/gatherer society, were no hard work was needed to keep the lands farmed and the cattle fed, you just hunted animals and collected fruits; and giving a painless childbirth could be possible maybe with either drugs or hallucinogenic mushrooms.
> This is why we should use Mathematics, it's an universal language. If you think about it, from Geometry itself you can extrapolate the 90% of the core Algebra laws.
Good. Now that you talk about Mathematics being the universal language, the core of Mathematics itself originated from Dharmic scriptures. The symbols themselves are Brahmi numerals. These numerals were studied by Arabs who took it to the West which ultimately became the numeral system we know today. This is how many of the measurements were made in Ancient times by Hindu astronomers. For instance, how do you think Indian sages measured the distance between Earth and the Moon or the circumference of the Earth if not for using Brahmi numerals? Aryabhatta calculated that the Earth's circumference is 39,968km. Off by 0.27% of the actual value of 40,074km.
No one is contesting not to use Mathematics that we know of today to do our measurements. But remember that the Ancients (before the rise of the Abrahamic religions and destruction of various important libraries - Alexandria, Takshashila, Nalanda etc) used advanced mathematical concepts to construct super structures: Great Pyramid of Giza, Mayan Temples, Indian Temples like the Kailasa (which baffles scientists to even this day) etc. There is no way that many of these marvels were possible without having decent grasp on scientific and mathematical concepts. Most of that Knowledge is lost. That is the only conclusion I get after having studied them. The Knowledge we know today are mostly rediscoveries. The only difference being that we are more terse/accurate in our calculations. Conceptually there hasn't been any major advancements from what Ancients knew. Theoretically at the very least.
Ok, they might had advanced technology. How did they lost it? Against what? Why didn't the contemporary people to the Indians depict them as semigods?
No wonder people sees Indian nationalism as a joke. Kinda like the Nazis when they had "time-travelling" UFO tech mixing pseudoscience with esoteric stuff...
Start here: give me an explanation for Kailasa Temple and how it was built. The entire temple was built by carving out a mountain by removing 400,000 tonnes of rock. Please explain how so much rock was removed from the face of the mountain using just chisels and hammer. I'll be waiting for a proper scientific answer to my question. To know what the Kailasa Temple is and its breath taking architecture you can watch the video I linked below [1]. Remember that this entire Temple was supposedly constructed in just 18 years.
You do realize the Hindu civilization (more specifically Sanatana Dharma) is the only Ancient Civilization that is currently existing? Most of the other Civilizations (like Egyptian, Mayan, Greek etc) that co-existed with us were wiped out by either natural disasters or with the rise of Abrahamic Religions. Libraries were burnt down. Most of the structures destroyed. Why do you think the Sphinx in Egypt has its nose cut off? Who destroyed these beautiful super structures? If you truly are inquisitive you will find your answers. They are the same ones who destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan. They are the same ones who burnt the Libraries of Alexandria to the ground. The same ones who destroyed the Libraries of Takshashila and Nalanda. It is quite rich to question "where is the evidence" after destroying evidence. We have somehow managed to collect and preserve whatever remaining piece of evidence we have and tried to reconstruct lost history through it. We ofcourse do not have complete knowledge of what was lost.
> Why didn't the contemporary people to the Indians depict them as semigods?
All Ancient Religions had concepts of God and a family of Demigods. Take Greek or Egyptian or Mayan or Hindu. Even Zoroastrians had scriptures that were similar to Vedic scriptures. Most of these are gone now except the Hindu Civilization. We are the last ones who managed to preserve some of the Knowledge despite repeated invasions. Even we have lost major portion of our Knowledge as our scriptures reference texts which no longer exist today. It is extremely sad/unfortunate.
> No wonder people sees Indian nationalism as a joke.
Which people are these? I haven't met anyone except very few people who has an issue with genuine curiosity/understanding of what the Ancients did/believed in and implemented. I feel you need to come out of being so close-minded. It is antithesis to someone who claims to believe in science. Science is not dogmatic. If it was dogmatic we would have never moved on from Newton's theory of absolute time to Einstein's explanation of relativistic time. And you can get ideas from anywhere. There is no reason to dismiss something as "pseudoscience" just because you are unable to understand it the right way. This is what the Church did in the medieval ages to scientists like Galilio and Copernicus. Don't emulate such practices. Be broadminded/inquisitive enough to question and reason rather than outright dismiss an entire field of research as "pseudoscience".
> Kinda like the Nazis when they had "time-travelling" UFO tech mixing pseudoscience with esoteric stuff...
Jokes on you because most scientists of that era actually studied Dharmic scriptures. Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr and Carl Sagan are some of the names that come off the top of my head.
All of them read some portions of the Dharmic scriptures, specifically Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita, that shaped their understanding of metaphysical nature of Creation as well as existence.
It is very unfortunate that people today do not have the same curiosity as what these excellent scientists of the previous Era had in expanding their conscious thoughts beyond what is taught in academia. Even what is currently taught in academia is just a synthesis and solidification of what the Ancients taught us through generations. You study Dharmic scriptures and you'll find a lot of foundational concepts of science described in great detail. Ofcourse you would first need to be open minded to do that.
Your comment it's a list of fallacies, starting with the one ad authoritam.
You wouldn't even pass a basic high school test here.
Sorry.
All of your statements won't validate the scriptures. They are just myths. Grow up.
Newton did 'alchemy'. Well, he tried. Obviously, it didn't work. So what? Tell that to Lavoisier. Bam. 5000 years of bullshit, debunked from a French Chemist with basic Chemistry.
There is a reason most philosophical traditions have been restricted to initiates for most of human history. If you arrive at wisdom without the proper knowledge, you might dismiss it as gibberish. Or worse, misunderstand it and make wrong choices in life.
Kinda like how Maximilian and many other after thought they could turn lead into gold after misreading gnostic texts.