The Bhagavad Gita is my favorite non-Christian guidance book. In fact, it speaks of the debate between those who believe it’s necessary to fight evil and those who are trying to avoid it for too long. Arjun is from the warrior caste and being asked to fight in a civil war against his evil distant cousins who have taken over the throne. He doesn’t want to do it, he thinks it would be better to surrender the kingdom to them rather than shed blood, even though they’re doing great evil upon the world, he co sides them kindred.
As it turns out, his chariot driver is God in disguise, who takes divine form, and explains in great detail about action without attachment to the fruits, the importance of duty, fighting against evil, and doing everything for the sake of God. I would highly recommend it.
I would read a Ramayana graphic novel to my kids, without having to edit the evil out of it like I did with the Bible with its stories of genocide and infanticide of dashing babies, ripping them from the womb, ending pregnancies prematurely by forcing unfaithful women to take a weird concoction, stoning women if they claim to be SA’d in town but no one could hear her scream, all from the Hebrews????
I think the Ramayana helped my oldest daughter learn to read when the Catholic school had tried to force her to read chapter books in kindergarten ahd basically made her unable to read at all for years, putting her behind, and treated her like she was bad because she was not raised in the faith because of my conversion after she was a preschooler, & they knew her father wasn’t Catholic, she would quietly stim during mass, which people didn’t like, and they tried to gatekeepe me from getting her the sacraments.
That girl is now 22, and that Hindu children’s book was a fun, supportive, creative story which she still remembers fondly! I read it to my youngest, too, who is now 10, who loved the great adventure of Rama to rescue his wife Sita from the bad guy, with lots of animal friends in the jungle helping him because he had been unfairly exiled from his rightful throne.
Abraham gave his wife (who was his half-sister, wtf) to the king to have sex in his harem because he was afraid. Abraham intended to kill his own son because he thought God asked it, and forced everyone to cut off the tips of their peens because he claimed God wanted it. What the actual fuck. He was like, cut off the peens of all babies, yeah, and every person in his family forced to do this shit, too!
I can follow Jesus, but the religion he came from was messed up. Idk man I’m not saying be Hindu, but damn! I mean Hinduism is thousands of years old, people take things and change them, I mean it’s like saying Christianity is wrong because some trannies are priests in the Episcopal church today!
I like their ancient scriptures, and I found less evil in them than in the Old Testament. And when the Catholic Church hated us, those stories helped me believe in divine justice, give God glory and worship, and the idea that God could incarnate every 5,000 years or so to lead a revolution against evil in the world, and give me advice on how to devote all my actions to God, was pretty good. Helped through some tough times.
If Pope JPII can kiss the Quran, and Pope Francis can kiss the feet of Muslim religious leaders, and Pope Leo can visit a mosque, then I can read the Gita & Ramayana. 🤷♀️