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Funny how your mind went to asking questions on caste and not on asking about several other interesting philosophical questions that arise from say Vedanta or A
by aicaffeinelife 3y ago
Funny how your mind went to asking questions on caste and not on asking about several other interesting philosophical questions that arise from say Vedanta or Advaita school.
I simply don’t get the urge to sound “cool” by deliberately trying to reduce the entire corpus of Hindu philosophy to caste.
- pkphilip 3y agoNothing funny about it. Ultimately any philosophical debate has at its very foundation a notion of the value of humans. Caste is something that directly impinges on that since it assigns value based on birth and since it also impacts relationships between people, it makes sense to consider what the bot says about that very important subject.
- nostrebored 3y agoNobody is trying to sound cool, it is simply one of the most alien and unfair concepts to basically all of western society.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoWe do have something similar though. I once went to get a sandwich with an Indian colleague. The sandwich server was from the same region as my friend and they began speaking together. After we left my friend was quite upset. The sandwich server had apparently been very rude to him and looked down on him because of their caste differences. My first thought was How can the Subway server feel superior to someone earning incredibly well at a startup? But I caught myself, realiding that I had myself put them in hierarchical categories based on their income. When taken in consideration with the difficulties that people from lower income families have in getting themselves out of poverty, I don't think we're so far from categorising people's worth by their birth situation.
- pkphilip 3y agoThe difference is a poor person in the west can become a rich person (and vice versa). But that is not the case with caste - caste is assigned at birth. You can't change it even though some people pretend that it can be.
- actuator 3y agoThe amusing thing is, even in India, it starts mattering less once you become rich. For example, you would typically find it is the middle class or below who are more attached to the idea of marriages between similar groups.
- aicaffeinelife 3y agoAnd yet currently in India there are active movements that are trying to get “lower caste” tag just to get the benefits of reservation even though they are comfortably well off. So don’t try to potray things as black and white and reduce a particular religion to one concept and unidimensional like other Abrahamic faiths. Which btw are pretty much black and white and have more stringent concept of what’s human and what’s not (for instance branding women witches and burning them alive).
- pkphilip 3y agoI am from the so-called upper caste myself. I know how the upper castes keep whining about reservations for the lower castes that is available to them now - but they had absolutely no issues with getting defacto "reservations" for 1000s of years. And can you please stop blaming other belief systems for faults in your religion and culture?
- nostrebored 3y agoI don't see how this really interacts with the parent comment. In practicality caste has been an immutable construct, and is currently the basis of much discrimination. I don't think anyone is saying that the single defining feature of India is caste. But it is an oddity to see people defend a concept that the vast majority of the world would define as unjust.
- aicaffeinelife 3y agoIs it? I must have read the history of serfdom and slavery wrong then.
- nostrebored 3y agoI have never seen anyone lose access to promotions, jobs, or be otherwise personally targeted by society for their lineage as a serf or slave. These are institutions that we've decided were violations of people's humanity.