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Those lovely Hindus!

I don't think the entirety of Hinduism can be disregarded because of this, vile as it may be. Same as one not dismissing any religion entrely because of a few acts. Its tempting, but not needed.

I've often found Hinduism a bit confusing; we have the Bhagavad Gita, a semi-fictional story about a war between two wealthy, royal familes (a metaphor yes, but still)- its a good book to dabble through, as it does contain a lot of wisdom; but the war symbol seems a bit distasteful- though it dsplays a nob-dual nature, whereby war and peace are seen in equal light....and then we have the caste system, as mentioned, which can completely ruin ones exstence simply for the shade of skin and family one was borne too...

You'll find decadence in all religions, some more then others, but its almost always present.
 
Can some one clarify this for me? I thought the Hindus considered the Cow sacred, like not to be touched and all. Then why are they slaughtering buffalos to appease the Gods? Is it that buffalos are just different enough from cows to make it okay? Or is this some cultural meaning I'm not quite understanding?
 
haha, ^i was just about to ask this.

i wont bother getting into the discussion already going on...:\
 
Mr Wobble said:
Hmm, well I do think that one could argue that killing might be necessary to meet dietary requirements. Are you really saying that there is an equivalent necessity to meet supersticious belief? Come on.
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I think you're asking the wrong question. The ones that come to mind immediately for me are: 'What does this event mean to each individual who partakes in or witnesses it?' and 'What does this event have that people can take with them back into their workaday lives?'

People WILL anthropomorphize and worship the forces of the world around them that actually have no faces, but affect their lives in ways that give them pause for awe. You might not. But other people will. Either way, I don't see what there is in this religious event to look down on, no matter what angle you're coming from, unless it's just taking of sentient life period.

Oh, and, according to the article, it's 250,000 animals, 1/4 million (not 25,000) - are there really any western slaughterhouses that could process that many animals in a week? Maybe there are, but they must be truly grim places!
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Oh, I'm sure it's very grim. But I'd venture a guess that's kind of deliberate.

There could also be a practical component to it, as there was at some point with lots of rituals of all types. Since I've never heard of such a festival before, I'm going to guess it's not something Hindus everywhere do, and it's probably a local tradition. Nepal has very cold winters, that are starting right about now. (India doesn't.) I could see it being of value to just stash a whole bunch of meat for the whole community for the whole winter, as soon as it was cold enough to leave it outside to freeze. Maybe that was preferable to slaughtering on an as-needed basis throughout the winter.

Might even be a tradition that predates anything we'd call 'Hindu' in that area.
 
MyDoorsAreOpen said:
I don't see what there is in this religious event to look down on, no matter what angle you're coming from, unless it's just taking of sentient life period.
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The angle I'm coming from is 'here's an example of where superstitious belief is used to excuse unnecessary cruelty'.

That unnecessary cruelty being the nature of a mass slaughter where thousands of buffalo are killed in front of one another - one can imagine the panic and terror of the animals in such a situation.

The taking of sentient life is not my argument at all; it is the suffering - the fear and pain - caused in taking life, and the evident lack of any measures to reduce that suffering.

If the grimness is deliberate, then that is even less forgiveable.

Again, 'It's their culture', is not a defence, IMO.

---

All that said, MEA CULPA, I should not have titled the thread as I did. I can quite understand how that comes across as being pretty incendiary. With hindsight I might rather have called it 'In the name of religion', or something like that.

And, yes, horrific acts of cruelty have been carried out in the name of all the big religions, Christianity a likely front runner there. I am no fan of any religion; far from it.
 
And, yes, horrific acts of cruelty have been carried out in the name of all the big religions, Christianity a likely front runner there. I am no fan of any religion; far from it.
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True. I think with this particular festival, the sheer open-ness of such cruelty assails most westerners sense of "right/wrong"; we've learned to do all that (and more) behind closed doors.
 
ninjadanslarbretabar said:
so this thread was about exposing your own degree of delusion you once had about those lovely hindus i presume
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Yep, pretty much - but there is a difference between delusion due to lack of knowledge and that caused by adherence to superstitious belief.

(And have you read the rest of my posts here? I do regret that thread title, it was ill judged in the extreme).
 
Mr Wobble said:
I do try to be equally scornful of all religions. :\
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Religions = a wide spectrum of people - it's a tough call to say ALL people practicing ALL religions are to to be scorned - there's completely irreligious shit people & very religious shit people & vice versa. :)
Killing animals goes on all the time - poisoning millions of rabbits on a yearly basis because we have too many cows to eat doesn't put us at the top of the class for animal welfare or common sense.
The whole world is mad
 
B9 said:
Religions = a wide spectrum of people - it's a tough call to say ALL people practicing ALL religions are to to be scorned
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Now you are putting words into my mouth there! ;)

It's the belief system that I scorn. I'm not saying that believing in a religion makes someone a bad person, far from it. But I do think that such belief is essentially delusional (I refer back to my comment re: Scientology).

Yeah, there's good and bad in all sets of people whether they be religious, agnostic or atheist.

And there's plenty of examples of atheist dogmas which can be every bit as delusional as any religion.
 
Mr. Wobble, I think you're confusing superstition with symbolic ritual. Superstition is seeing one event as having caused another, when it didn't. Ritual is manipulating physical objects in order to make a certain impact on people, so that they in turn, reflexively, can make a certain impact on the physical world.

I'll grant that some rituals may have began as superstitions. But they get carried on as traditions over many generations only when they have some real value to the people(s) who carry them on. For example, if I get the closest parking space to my school building every day that I take a test that I do well on, and then one test day I get worried because this space isn't available, I'm being superstitious. But this doesn't mean that driving past and looking for that 'rockstar parking' space is no more than superstition, and therefore utterly without merit. It still brightens my mood to get that space (which helps academically), and still saves me a bit of walking in the cold. So I still do it.

I don't believe for a second that all the Nepali Hindus who take part in the festival you mentioned think that by conducting this festival, they're guaranteeing a good agricultural season in months or years to come. Hinduism has a rich history of philosophy, literary criticism, and scholarship. Yes, to many uneducated peasant farmers, whose lives are too tied up in the practicalities of extracting a living from the land to be bothered with the finer points of Hindu scholarship, such a festival is 'just what we do', and not much thought goes into it. But I'm sure there are many in the educated classes who could go into great detail on the importance -- societal, agricultural, psychological, spiritual, and historical -- of such a ritual.

It's easy to romanticize that which seems alien to us. But it's also easy to knock it, without fully understanding it.

It's fine if ritual is something you have no need for in your life. But please appreciate that it's something that has an enormous impact on, and enjoys an important role in, the lives of many others.
 
Okay, the ritual is of importance to those taking part and it may well perform a role in maintaining social cohesion, local culture, a narrative connection with the past etc.

I, personally, don't believe that any ritual is of sufficiently cultural and social importance as to excuse unnecessary cruelty.

And I do think that this method of slaughter is unnecessarily cruel - extremely so.

And, I have to say that all of the arguments that I've heard here - there's worse things going on elsewhere in the World, outsiders have no moral right to comment on local traditions, it's not as cruel as it looks, the cultural and social significance outweighs any cruelty etc. - apply equally and, indeed, oft are, trotted out to defend bull fighting and (where I live) fox hunting.

I don't think such arguments excuse cruelty in either case and I'm not inclined to make an exception just because this is the other side of the world.
 
^Fox hunting and bull fighting really aren't the same. Bull fighting is ritualised killing for entertainment; fox hunting is ritualised, but necessary, killing. I don't think the ritual of the hunt is tasteful, but hunting with dogs is actually one of the less cruel ways to hunt. Traps, poison, and shooting all usually result in a more prolonger suffering than the brutal, but quick, death a fox meets when savaged by dogs.
 
ironically, the spanish also have a yearly tradition called "the running of the bulls" right before a bullfight; where the humans become the victims. every year more then 200 of the participants get injured; from time to time even to the point of death.
 
Yerg said:
fox hunting is ritualised, but necessary, killing. I don't think the ritual of the hunt is tasteful, but hunting with dogs is actually one of the less cruel ways to hunt. Traps, poison, and shooting all usually result in a more prolonger suffering than the brutal, but quick, death a fox meets when savaged by dogs.
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For once I'm afraid I'm going to disagree with you Yerg.

Fox hunting is, IMO, unnecessarily cruel. I live in the countryside, I've seen many fox hunts. My grandmother and father were both brought up in the farming community - my grandmother on a farm, my father spent most of his free time on his uncle's and his grandparents farm - both were strongly opposed to fox hunting on grounds of unnecessary cruelty. I know many farmers - old style traditional hill sheep farmers at that - who are similarly against it.

One farmer in the village told me how they would have to go out with shotguns to protect their land when there was a hunt on. And having seen the damage caused by a hunt - I once watched a herd of sheep panicked by a pack of hounds stampede through four fields, demolishing three dry stone walls in the process (and this was in Februaury, coming up to lambing!) - I can see why.

I've also seen a fox, gone to ground, flushed out by terriers and set on by a pack - it wasn't instant at all, the fox was screaming for a good 10 seconds at least, and this was after it had been chased, probably for up to an hour.

Fox hounds are bread to be slow to prolong the chase. If you think that the benefit of hunting with dogs is that it's less cruel than the alternatives, then surely it would be better to use a pack of fast hunting dogs - lurchers would do it. My old dog was a bit lurcherish and he had no problem catching up with any foxes he came across (he just liked running alongside them!)

And there was the famous case a couple of years ago of a huntsmen filmed on numerous occasions leaving food outside a den for fox clubs (this was, if I remember rightly, the master of Prince Charles' fox hunt) - kind of makes you think that this 'foxes are vermin that need to be controlled' line isn't all that they make it out to be? And it's said that fox numbers got so low in the C19th that foxes had to be imported into Britain from Sweden - again, that rather goes against the vermin control argument.

It's interesting that during the foot and mouth fuck up a few years back, when there was next to no hunting for a long period, there wasn't an appreciable increase in fox numbers.

Bottom line fox hunting is a recreational and social activity, dressed up as pageantry and tradition and it is unnecessarily cruel - IMO, obviously. ;)
 
Life is bloody and cruel. We enter in the painful act of birth, out in death...too often the same. In between we live with conflict, love, pain and blood....and so on. Slaughter and cruelty. Yes, unfortunately.

It is part of life, to be expected whether we accept it or not.

peace <3
 
Meat tastes good. rawr.

OP you should take a look at ALL religions. Some sacrificed people.
 
drscience said:
OP you should take a look at ALL religions. Some sacrificed people.
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Yes, I know, that's the "worse things happen elsewhere" argument.

Following that line of reasoning, one might then ignore lesser crimes, such as common assault, fraud or theft, because far worse crimes, rape, murder etc., are committed.

I still believe that the method and circumstance of this particular slaughter - thousands of panicking cattle being killed, beheaded with knives, in front of one another - is unnecessarily cruel. Neither tradition, ritual, pageantry, symbolic grimness, religion, or ignorance alters that for me.

Would anyone argue that this level of cruelty is necessary?
 
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