Yuyutsu

Well I like you Yuyutsu, your pretty unique, especially by OLO standards!

Dear David F.,

«Ever the romantic. Hinduism is a complex system which you may appreciate, but will Hindus think of you as a Hindu?»

They do already. I feel totally accepted in the Australian Hindu community, nobody ever looked down at me, nobody ever avoided my company, nobody ever restricted my participation and taking roles in Hindu worship. I do have special feelings for the land of India where so many saints and sages trode, but I cannot think of anything that could possibly make me an Indian, nor did anybody ever expected me to belong to the Indian tribe.

«It is much more difficult to determine the culprit in the interaction between religion and nationalism than between rapist and rapee.»

Some specific cases are easier to determine than others, but take any of the atrocities you mentioned not once on this forum, such as in your words,

"the occupation of lands inhabited by Aborigines, American Indians and other indigenous cultures and the extirpation of those cultures along with the enslavement and murder of the peoples and forcing Christianity on them, massacres of Jews and other non-Christians, murder of Servetus, Hypatia, Vanini, Bruno and other scientists and thinkers who questioned the Christian worldview, house arrest of Galileo, Wars of the Reformation where Christians of one kind killed Christians of another kind, the slave trade, the Inquisition and the support of most of the churches in Nazi occupied lands for Hitler",

then add the Muslim and Jewish equivalents, and check for yourself whether you cannot easily find the true culprit(s) among the following (in either their personal, tribal or national forms): greed, lust (in the general sense, not only sexual), anger, delusion, pride and jealousy. Why then blame an innocent such as religion and all the innocent people who follow it, for the crimes of others?