Cultural Appropriations of the West

 Ashish Dalela - 4.2 2025

Table of Contents 

1 The Synthetic Construction of Jesus
2 The Synthetic Creation of Trinity
3 Anointing Speculation as Holy Ghost
4 The Pagan Birth and Death of Jesus
5 Employing Comfort in the Familiar
6 The Consequences of Appropriation
7 Examples of Religious Appropriation
8 Appropriation of Scientific Concepts
9 Differences in Indian and Greek Science
10 Appropriation of Philosophical Ideas
11 Appropriation of the Platonic World
12 The Use of Platonism in Modern Science
13 Platonism is Both Religion and Science
14 Indian Origins of German Idealism
15 Platonism and German Idealism
16 Adverse Reaction to Appropriation
17 The Cycle of Universalism and Nihilism
18 From Universalism to Postmodernism

The Synthetic Construction of Jesus

If we read the miracles of Jesus, we see an imprint of Greco-Roman deities and an attempt to subsume them within Jesus. Jesus calmed a storm at sea, which was what the Greek deity Poseidon and the Roman deity Neptune, who were deities of rivers and oceans, did. Jesus turns water into wine, which is what the Greek deity Dionysus and the Roman deity Bacchus, who were the deities of wine, dance, and revelry, did. Jesus fed bread to many thousands of people, which is what the Greek deity Demeter and the Roman deity Ceres, who were the deities of food, crops, grains, etc., did. Jesus was a messenger of God, like the Greek deity Hermes and the Roman deity Mercury, called their messenger deities.

A Greco-Roman deity Euphemus, the son of Poseidon or Neptune, walked on water, as did Jesus. A Greco-Roman deity Asclepius, the son of Apollo, healed the sick, as did Jesus. A Greco-Roman deity Zagreus, the son of Hades, the deity of the underworld, made the dead alive, as did Jesus. Jesus was depicted with halos around his head, as was the Greco-Roman deity Apollo, the deity of the Sun.

Christians convinced people that Jesus was God by talking about his miracles, which were the miracles that the Greeks and Romans attributed to their deities. The miracles of many Greco-Roman deities became the miracles of one person, Jesus. As the powers of many deities collapsed into the powers of one person, Jesus became the Supreme God, greater than other Greco-Roman deities, one size fitting all.

The Synthetic Creation of Trinity

To understand the birth of Christianity, we have to understand the crisscrossing cultures in which it was born. There are four such relevant cultures—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman. The Roman Empire spanned across Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Christianity traced its roots back to Judaism, which was a culture heavily influenced by Mesopotamians. In these cultures, there were three main personas tied to religion—deities, priests, and teachers. We have seen above how Christians synthesized many deities into Jesus through his miracles. A similar type of process was involved with priests and teachers too.

The Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures revered their priests as teachers who spoke the will of God that ordinary people followed. Egyptian and Mesopotamians deities never came to earth to perform miracles but remotely controlled all things that happened in this world. Egyptian and Mesopotamian priests made sacrifices to these deities. They also doubled up as teachers for people on a variety of subjects. Both Egyptians and Mesopotamians had an elaborate system of education for their priests which involved learning astronomy, astrology, calendars, incantations, medical texts, and rituals. A priest in Mesopotamia and Egypt was simply the most literate, educated, and knowledgeable person.

But Greeks and Romans had a different culture. Their deities could appear before people, perform various miracles, and walk among them. Greco-Roman deities fathered and mothered children through human parents. These children of deities were called hemitheoi (by Greeks) and semideus (by Romans), from which the term demigod comes at present, which was taken to mean half-god, half-man, or, literally, half-god. Many Greek and Roman famous personalities were considered living-breathing-walking gods who appeared among the common people. Greco-Roman priests were not teachers who spoke the will of their deities because their deities were themselves speaking their will and showing their deeds. These priests only made sacrifices to their deities on behalf of the people.

Across the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, and Roman cultures that crisscrossed European and West Asian societies due to the Roman Empire, there were three types of personas tied to religion: (a) priests that made sacrifices to deities, (b) teachers that taught the will of God, and (c) numerous deities.

Christianity merged these three personalities into the persona of Jesus, as he replaced all preexisting deities as the Supreme Deity (miracles of all other deities were required to establish that), as he replaced all preexisting teachers (the teachings of all other teachers had to be merged to establish that), as he made the supreme sacrifice to wash away everyone’s sin, greater than any other sacrifice made by any other priest (one person had to sacrifice himself for all of humanity to establish that). These three personas then became the foundation of the Christian Trinity—Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. The Father is God, the Son is the priest who self-sacrifices, and the Holy Ghost is everyone’s teacher.

Anointing Speculation as Holy Ghost

The most prolific Christian writer—Paul—had never met Jesus and came many years after the crucifixion. In fact, in his early days, he was persecuting Christians. Then one day, Paul (at that time called Saul), saw a blinding light and heard a voice say, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”. The voice identified itself as Jesus and told Saul to go to Damascus, where he was baptized and changed his name to Paul. This is the link between Jesus and the Holy Ghost—seeing a light, hearing a sound, not seeing Jesus, conceiving him as an all-pervading spirit, getting a life-changing experience from the spirit, and attributing it to Jesus, for otherwise, there would be two gods. Paul is not an exception; no Christian writer ever met Jesus. All their writings were anointed Christian because they claimed to be inspired by the Holy Ghost.

In reality, these writers were taking the teachings, ideas, and theories prevalent in the cultures around them and synthetically attributing them to Jesus. Bible historians have analyzed all these writings and found hundreds of textual inconsistencies; by that, we mean one story says one thing and the other says something else, even while describing the same historical events, attributed to the same person, at the same time, place, and situation. This area of study is presently called textual criticism. It does not analyze whether the book is a revelation or true or whether such a thing happened. It simply analyzes the differences between different stories, referring to and describing the same historical event.

Thereby, nobody disagrees that the various stories and statements were created by people who had never met Jesus, and all their narrations were at best second-hand, if not further removed. They claim that all these were inspired by the Holy Ghost, who is Jesus, hence the authors who wrote these things were directly taught by Jesus even after his death. If we separate Jesus from the Holy Ghost, then we get no book. If we separate Jesus from the Father, then we get no miracles. If we keep the Father and the Holy Ghost, but exclude Jesus who sacrificed himself for humanity, then we get no salvation.

The synthetic construction of Christianity, as we know it today, took over 300 years, during which time, there were many Christianities, following different stories, believing in different teachings, talking about different miracles, and celebrating the crucifixion and resurrection on different days of the year. Then in 325 CE, at the First Council of Nicaea, representatives of different Christianities decided to converge them into one Christianity. Biblical scholars are sure that not more than 30% of the existing stories, teachings, and ideas made into the converged Christianity, but many suspect that the number could be far less. The rejection of what was previously inspired by the Holy Ghost is also inspired by the Holy Ghost.

The Pagan Birth and Death of Jesus

The birthday of Jesus, after the Council of Nicaea, fell on the Mithraic new year (called Makar Sankranti in India) when the Sun enters Capricorn in its upward path (called Uttarāyaṇa). This date was 25th Dec 1600 years ago, but it has shifted by several weeks at present. Mithra is one of the 12 Adityas in the Vedic tradition and is identified with a day (and contrasted to Varuna, who is identified with night). The images of Jesus began to be drawn with a halo around his head, symbolizing the similarity between Jesus and the Sun deity, which was a common practice in Roman times.

Romans of that time practiced blood rituals for rejuvenation, extension of life, and a better afterlife. Blood spilled on land was believed to nourish the Earth, and important for the continuation of the Roman empire. Blood nourished the Roman deities and made a person’s journey to the underworld easier. Many kinds of blood rituals were in vogue: (a) a dishonored woman killed herself, (b) soldiers that had shown cowardice or deserted the battle, were put to death, (c) slaves were sacrificed in Gladiatorial games, by having them fed to lions, (d) dying for the land in wars led to ascendence to heaven, (e) captives from the war were sacrificed in the name of Roman deities to appease them, and (f) slaves were sacrificed as part of a funeral ritual to ease the journey of the previously deceased to the underworld easier.

While Christians appear to have been opposed to these blood rituals, they coopted them in two ways: (a) the crucifixion of Jesus was elevated to the greatest sacrifice in the service of mankind, and (b)  a concept of Christian martyrdom was created under which sacrificing oneself for God, including in violent defense of the religion, was celebrated as a sacred act. Nearly all ritual sacrifices involved eating the remnants after the offering to the deity. This practice became the Eucharist or thanksgiving, in which bread and wine were eaten as the body and life of Christ since he had offered himself in the sacrifice.

The birth and death of Jesus were thus given a deep pagan religious meaning. The birth became a new beginning coinciding with the new year and death became a blood ritual, through which the whole of humanity could receive a better afterlife. This, just like the merger of various Roman deities into Jesus, was important to bring followers of other pagan religions into Christianity as they could now find their beliefs and practices reflected in Christian beliefs and practices.

Employing Comfort in the Familiar

Christianity, since its inception, has redeployed familiar practices for novel purposes. This gives religious converts a sense of comfort as their old practices continue while they are given a new interpretation. As the earlier meanings of rituals are replaced by Christian meanings, outwardly the new convert continues more-or-less unchanged but inwardly his beliefs are transformed. Christianity addresses a fundamental problem that converts to other religions face: They are expected to change their practices, dresses, food habits, and rituals as they convert to a new religion, which often creates social awkwardness. But Christianity allows the earlier practices to remove social awkwardness.

Many historians of religion have speculated on the reasons for the popularity of Christianity. None of them have attributed this success to the syncretic nature of Christianity, which appropriated different deities, varied teachings, and diverse ideas of sacrifice into one. After that, Jesus was God to some, a priest who made the greatest sacrifice to others, and a great teacher to yet others. This mesmerizing combination of preexisting civilizations and crisscrossing cultures made Christianity very popular.

The Consequences of Appropriation

But it also made Christianity incoherent. In the Bible, we find the message of love and brotherhood alongside the message of conquering and converting other territories by force; the message that God loves the poor and meek alongside the message that God blesses the worshippers with wealth and power; the message of humbly accepting one’s misery as God’s will alongside the message of praying to God to alleviate that misery. One book contains so much because it was created by synthesizing many preexisting ideas. This allows Christians to pick and choose what they like out of the book. Thousands of sects of Christianity have been created as a result of cherry-picking statements from the Bible.

Christianity is the greatest example of cultural appropriation in history which has allowed it to adapt to varied cultures and societies around the world. In India, Christians call their missionary centers Ashrams, a term previously used for the schools of the Vedic tradition. They compare the Christian trinity of Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost to the Vedic trinity of Viṣṇu, Brahma, and Shiva. Christian converts from the Vedic tradition are encouraged to worship Mary as their erstwhile feminine deities. The Tulsi or Rudraksha beads that people wore or used for chanting mantras are redesignated as rosaries for prayer. The appropriation of the Vedic customs during birth, death, and marriage, are too many to mention.

Many people wonder why Christianity uses such tactics to trick people into thinking that they are getting the best of both worlds—their previous life continues more-or-less unchanged while they are promised salvation by believing in Jesus. This is the result of not knowing that Christianity has been a syncretism from the start. It tries to take everything from everyone, and synthesize it into a confusing accumulation of incompatible ideas, with no underlying philosophical unity. The magic ingredient is the promise of an easily attained salvation predicated on the ablution of all sin through the self-sacrifice of Jesus.

Examples of Religious Appropriation

The above facts about Christianity are not unique to it. All core ideas of Abrahamic religions are taken from previous civilizations. But because most people do not know the history, i.e., the traditions of the older civilizations, they tend to think that Abrahamic texts and practices are revelations from God. The denigration of past civilizations is an essential tool in this deception. If you keep saying bad things about old civilizations, most people will not read about them, and remain ignorant about the true extent of appropriation. Hence, I will try to list some of these appropriations to give the reader an idea of the broad trends. Collecting all such appropriations is an enormous task for specialist historians.

Jews borrowed their Ten Commandments from the Egyptian Book of Life and Death but told a fictitious story of their persecution at the hands of Egyptians. They created a false story of immigration away from Egypt into the land of Israel when they were always living in Israel. Israel Finkelstein writes: “There is no indication that the Israelites ever lived in Ancient Egypt, and the Sinai Peninsula shows almost no sign of any occupation for the entire 2nd millennium BCE (even Kadesh-Barnea, where the Israelites are said to have spent 38 years, was uninhabited prior to the early 12th century BCE).” The story that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews after their immigration, which underlies the present-day Middle Eastern wars between Muslims and Jews, is a fabrication. Their concept of a covenant that God made with His chosen people is a fabrication. Their aversion to idolatry, as something that their God asked them not to do, is also a fiction; as late as the 2nd century BCE, Jews minted their coins with pictures of Athena and owl on the two sides of the coin. Athena is called Lakśmi in the Vedic tradition. She is the deity of wealth and rides on an owl. Money is called Lakśmi in the Vedic tradition. Thus, Jews were worshipping pagan deities, such as Lakśmi, many centuries after they claimed to have renounced them. Their kings were officially imprinting images many centuries after the time they claim to have abandoned them.

Their principal deity called Yahweh, a storm and rain deity, existed in all old civilizations. He is called Indra in the Vedic tradition. Mesopotamians called him Marduk, Egyptians called him Seth, Greeks called him Zeus, Romans called him Jupiter, and the Aztecs called him Tlaloc. His consort, called Asherah, had counterparts in all older civilizations. She is called Indrani in the Vedic tradition. Greeks called her Hera, Romans called her Juno, Egyptians called her Nephthys, and similar names existed in all cultures.

The concept of the Prophet came to the Abrahamic religions from Mesopotamian priests who were also astrologers and prophesized the future as the will of their deities. All priests were astrologers and to be a priest, one had to prophesize the future. Abrahamic religions borrowed the Mesopotamian concept of priests as their Prophets who (a) prophesized the future, and (b) told the will of their monotheistic God.

The concept of divine law came from the Hammurabi Code which were man-made laws attributed to their deities by Mesopotamian kings. The idea that their king was a representative of their God, divinely ordained to rule over the world, came from the Egyptian Pharaohs, who were called the divinely ordained kings ruling over Egypt. The Jews took the concept of an eternal battle between good and evil from Zoroastrianism. Their ideas of Escatology, i.e., the end of the world after the rule of divine kings, came from Zoroastrians.

Their idea of a Jealous God, as one who doesn’t permit the worship of any other deity, came from Zoroastrianism which rose from an opposition to all deities but one. Zoroastrians had forked away from the Vedic tradition in which God is so nonchalant, that He doesn’t care if people don’t worship Him. But if they are devoted to Him, He becomes a putty in their hands, adapting to their mood of devotion. Jealousy is most prominent in demons but completely absent from God and His genuine devotees. When jealousy was imputed upon God, He became a demon. Zoroastrians even called their principal deity Ahura Mazda. The term Ahura is a deformation of Asura used for demons in the Vedic tradition (in the Persian language, “sa” becomes “ha”). The merger of God with a demon normalized the destruction of other religions and the forced conversion of their followers as the will of God.

Islam borrowed the name Allah from a preexisting Arabian religion which worshipped a deity called Allah with three consorts called Allat, Mannat, and Al-Uzza. Allat was worshipped in the form of black cubic stone deities. Islam merged Allah and Allat into a black stone deity and broke all other deities. Allah and Allat were depicted with a crescent moon on their head, which became a sacred symbol in Islam. These three deities of Arabian religion were collectively worshipped as Ishtar in Mesopotamia who was depicted by five-pointed or eight-pointed stars, which also became the sacred symbols in Islam.

Religious appropriation is the heart and soul of Abrahamic religions. All key doctrines and deities are taken from preexisting cultures. The irony is that after taking these things from other religions, they were weaponized against the religion they were taken from. History is obscured to maintain this deception. By constantly deriding older cultures, Abrahamic religions hope that nobody will discover the extent of appropriation and weaponization and people will believe that the stolen doctrines and deities are divine revelations.

Appropriation of Scientific Concepts

Even in science, Newton borrowed the concept of infinite converging series from Indian mathematicians to create the concept of infinitesimals, and finite things as the sum of these infinitesimals, which then then led to calculus. This has to be contrasted to the Greek philosopher Zeno, who is quoted by Simplicius as saying: “It is impossible to traverse an infinite number of things in a finite time”. While this presents the problem of computing an infinite series sum in a finite time, its solution came from Indian mathematicians who showed that we don’t need to add infinite terms to get a fairly accurate estimation of a number like π or √2. We can get a good estimate in a few steps, which require a finite time.

Europe could not make any scientific progress due to Zeno’s paradoxes for over 2000 years, which is why Newton wrote to Robert Hooke in a letter: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”. Of course, Newton did not mention the giants. His paperwork was kept hidden for centuries by the British government during which time most of his original writings were destroyed or lost.

The Vedic system of time calculation combined a system of counting in 24 and 60, in which a day was divided into 60 parts of 24 minutes, which were divided into 60 parts of 24 seconds, which were divided into 60 parts of 24 Prāṇa. But all modern historians attribute the Sexagesimal system (counting in 60) to Mesopotamians. Christian colonizers learned astronomy from ancient Indian texts and gave celestial bodies Greek and Latin names, as if Greeks and Romans had such a great knowledge of astronomy when the fact is the Greek Calendar and the Roman Calendar were highly unscientific and inaccurate.

The concept of rule-based grammar widely used in parsing computer code at present, to check if the code is syntactically correct, comes from the work of the Indian grammarian Pāṇini who produced a 4000-rule grammar for Sanskrit. Before this, European linguists believed that we could never construct a rule-based system for any language. After the European discovery of Pāṇini, a distinction between formal and informal languages arose. Sanskrit was a formal language as it was backed by a rule-based grammar. European languages became informal languages since they were not backed by a strict system of rules. Computer code follows a formal grammar while European languages follow an informal grammar. And yet, Pāṇini is never mentioned as the founder of theoretical computer science in academic texts.

Instead, Alan Turing is called the father of computer science for doing nothing more than giving a binary representation of words and describing a machine that reads and writes on a tape. When computers were first built, they were reading programs from punch cards, just like the punch cards used by cloth weavers in India. The French had taken Indian looms from weavers in Gujarat or Bengal around the 1700s and began patenting them in France; after some iterations, came the Jacquard Weaving Machine. In these looms, threads were input data, punch cards were input instructions, and cloth was output. Indian weavers were masters of producing patterned sarees. Each pattern was encoded into a punch card as the instructions on how to move the threads to weave yarn into cloth. When a customer wanted a unique saree, the weaver would pick some punch cards from his catalog of cards, and stack them in a specific order, which became a complete set of instructions on how to weave the saree. Turing generalized the handloom of the weavers in a fancy language calling threads input data, punch cards input instructions, and cloth output data and named it a computing machine. The humble weaver was not mentioned.

Differences in Indian and Greek Science

Indians had advanced mathematics but Indians never treated it as the nature of reality. Mathematics applies when we can reduce a big thing to the sum of small things. For instance, we can call a bag of rice the sum of rice grains. But we cannot powder a rice grain and hope that sowing this powder into soil will produce a rice stalk. Mathematics applies to non-living things (e.g., a bag of rice grains) but not to living things (e.g., a rice grain). But living things can enter relations to create a structure like humans joining hands to form a human chain, which is non-living. A human is living but a human chain is non-living. If humans did not exist, a human chain would not be formed. Hence, mathematics can be used to describe non-living things, or something living that can be approximated as something non-living, but it is not a truth. Life is fundamental and the non-living is emergent. But Greeks made the non-living fundamental. They created axioms about non-living things and claimed that this was the fundamental truth. Abrahamic religions, Western philosophy, and modern science all coopted this essential lie.

Today, historians call Greeks the inventors of science disregarding two crucial facts: (a) all other cultures had far more advanced mathematics and astronomy, and (b) despite this advancement, they did not consider it a fundamental, let alone universal, truth. Europeans took advancements in mathematics and astronomy from other cultures, elevated them to the universal truth, and called themselves the creators of science when the fact is that a non-living foundation of science cannot explain the living. The creators of mathematics knew its place. Those who took it without attribution did not know why it was created, how it was to be used, the limitations in its use, and elevated it to the highest truth.

Appropriation of Philosophical Ideas

Western philosophy has three main streams. The first, called Analytic Philosophy, is rooted in the Greek conception of a non-living world. As noted above, it is taken from cultures that had mathematics and astronomy, which Greeks elevated to the universal truth. It has some pragmatic uses but its elevation to the universal truth is false in its entirety. Analytic Philosophy works on the problems of science, the scientific method, general epistemological problems, and computational theories of the mind.

The second stream in Western philosophy, called Religious Philosophy, is rooted in Greek pagan religions which talked about a heaven as a place of myriad deities, transformed by Plato into a world of pure forms. It is partially true since there is such a heaven, but mostly false because Platonic forms are ideas rather than persons. Religious philosophy tries to understand how material symbols could signify the transcendent or divine. Platonism helps by saying that the transcendent descends into the mundane.

The third stream in Western philosophy, called Continental Philosophy, is rooted in Vedic ideas about the self as the repository of truth and illusion from which experiences spring out during waking or dreaming. This would be mostly true if we don’t universalize the truth and illusion in each person; it becomes false because Western philosophers try to universalize the truth and illusion in the self to everyone. This is the result of trying to marry Platonism in Religious Philosophy with the Vedic theories of the self. Since there is only one transcendent reality or God, its marriage with the self, reduces it to one kind of self.

Appropriation of the Platonic World

The Platonic world of forms is an idea stolen from the Greek pagan heaven where pagan deities resided. There were deities of water, fire, and air; there were deities of directions; there were deities of love and war; and there were deities of truth, beauty, and justice. Each deity was one thing and many things. The soul in the deity was one, but the body had many parts—hands, legs, head, stomach, eyes, ears, tongue, nose, skin, etc. The soul is the name of the deity, representing the word. The body parts of that deity represent the word’s meanings. For instance, the deity of knowledge is a soul. The body parts of the deity are many types of knowledge, such as logic, physics, biology, psychology, etc. Logic is knowledge but knowledge is not logic. Biology is knowledge but knowledge is not biology. Psychology is knowledge but knowledge is not psychology. Every word has many meanings that are the soul’s body parts.

When Plato stole the idea of pagan deities and converted them into pure forms, he depersonalized the deities. Now, there was a soul without a body. These souls became words like knowledge, which had to have only one meaning. Greeks started calling these words with one meaning logos. But they could not provide a definition for any word. They claimed that each word had one meaning but could not say what that meaning was. Thereby, Platonism was a catastrophic disaster because you could use all the words without knowing what they actually meant. Everyone was talking without saying anything.

Platonism is by far the only unique idea in Western philosophy, although it was stolen from pagan religions, and depersonalized. The unique contribution of Western philosophy is the depersonalization of heavenly forms. Thus, it has been said that Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato.

The Use of Platonism in Modern Science

Nearly all Western mathematicians are Platonists. They think that mathematical theorems are the pure forms in the other world that descend into this world and become imperfect and impure forms. Thus, there are no pure triangles, circles, or squares in this world, but pure geometrical forms exist in the Platonic world. This allows science to say that equations need not perfectly model the world because the world is an imperfect reflection of equations. These equations are true if they look beautiful.

The pursuit of beautiful but useless (or only partially useful) equations has thus become the main dogma of modern science. A news reporter once asked Einstein about the experimental tests of relativity: “What would have happened if experiments had not confirmed your theory?” Einstein responded: “So much the worse for experiments”. Equations should look beautiful on paper even if they don’t precisely mimic the observed world because the world is only a poor imitation of the equations. Scientists equate beauty to symmetry. Thus, the beauty of equations simply means equations with more symmetries.

An entire generation of physicists chased beautiful but useless equations in String Theory. Economics, as is taught in colleges, is simply beautiful equations, not how the economy works. Western philosophy replaced the Greek deities in heaven with mathematical equations. The Greek deities governed the world in the Greek religion. Mathematical equations govern the world in Western philosophy. Thus, mathematics was called the queen of sciences, because until recently a queen was ruling England.

Platonism is Both Religion and Science

According to the Platonist idea of science, you have to make mathematical equations to be called science. If you do not make such equations, then you are not science. Escape into this imaginary world of beautiful equations, or depersonalized Platonic forms, is an escape from reality, exactly like salvation from earth into heaven. Scientists often talk about the mind of God. Those who don’t know Platonism think that they are religious people. But in science, the mind of God is the Platonic world of equations.

In the religious version of Platonism, there is a God whose mind thinks mathematical equations. In the non-religious version of Platonism, there is a world of mathematical equations without a God. These two are so similar and synonymous that atheism and theism are roughly identical. Thus, atheistic scientists become religious without changing their science. Likewise, religious scientists become atheistic without changing their belief system in Platonism and science. The debate between these two groups called the debate between religion and science, is simply about whether mathematical equations are in the mind of God or in the Platonic realm of ideas. Both of them agree that the world is mathematical. This is why nothing comes out of science-religion debates unless we attack the mathematical view of reality.

Indian Origins of German Idealism

Continental philosophy is a stolen idea from the Vedic tradition but it is very hard to prove that because the key players of German Idealism either did not acknowledge this influence (such as Immanuel Kant) or denigrated India as part of the colonial propaganda (such as Georg Hegel). A rare acknowledgment is found in the writing of Heinrich Heine, (1797–1856), who stated: “The Portuguese, Dutch, and British have for a long time ferried huge treasures on big ships from India to their home countries. We Germans had to look on. But we will not be left behind. We take their knowledge. Our Sanskrit scholars provide us with this wealth from India right here in Bonn or Munich.” Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is credited with creating a “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy giving birth to what is now called German Idealism. To understand this revolution, we have to understand why it is called a revolution in philosophy.

Greeks and Romans had a tripartite theory of the soul, nearly identical to the concept of Ātmā in the Vedic tradition. The essence of both these theories is that the soul is reborn many times, including in animal species, and the purpose of human life is to attain a perfect and purified state of existence. This purity could take many lifetimes to attain. However, purity is something immanent in the soul as the soul is a part of God, and hence, eternal and divine. Each of these ideas underwent a drastic change under Christianity: (a) the soul was inherently sinful rather than divine, having been born of the sinful Adam and Eve, (b) the soul did not exist before the creation of the world and hence was not eternal, (c) the soul did not reincarnate into animal species, (d) there was only one life and salvation could be attained in that life, and (e) salvation was not related to one’s purification but rather to the grace of God.

The sinful portrayal of the soul in Christianity made knowledge impossible. The soul was evil so it could not imagine the good. God was good, so the soul could not understand God. Thereby, God and good could only be known through revelation. Jesus, the son of God, was not from this world. He was from heaven, and good. He could talk about good and God because he had seen it first-hand. Therefore, man had to accept this revelation on faith without trying to understand the nature of good and God. Likewise, the nature of the world could not be known through man’s own endeavors. The Bible was the sole source of truth even about the world, and man trying to know anything not already given in the Bible was heresy. This cemented the preeminent role of the Church, as the guardian of the revelation.

The “Copernican Revolution” of Kantian philosophy was that the soul is divine, immortal, enlightened, and good. The idea of truth and good are not alien to man, only to be received through a revelation, but innate within the soul. These ideas are found in the Vedic texts where the soul is described as pure and enlightened, and salvation is attributed to discovering the soul’s inherent truth, without blind faith in a revelation. The Kantian concept of the mind came from the Vedic texts in which the mind precedes the body and the body is produced from the mind. Before that, there was Cartesian mind-body dualism in philosophy in which you could not know the body by knowing the mind. In Christianity, the self was ignorant and sinful, so even if you tried knowing the body empirically, your endeavors would fail. God made the body and breathed the soul into it so only God knew how He made it. But if the body springs out of our mind, we can know the body by knowing our mind because we have first-person access to the mind which is not ignorant and sinful. The production of the body from the mind is why it was called Idealism. But it wasn’t German Idealism. Germans simply took it from Indians and branded it German.

The innate idea of truth became the basis of Kant’s book Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781. The innate idea of good became the basis of Kant’s book Critique of Practical Reason, published in 1788. These culminated in Kant’s book The Metaphysics of Morals, published in 1797. But Kant never attributed his “Copernican Revolution” to the Vedic texts. He never explained how the ignorant and sinful soul of Christianity became its polar opposite, i.e., enlightened and moral, and why the world conformed to the mind when these were two separate substances in Cartesian metaphysics.

The reason is that Kant did not create these ideas. He just took them and claimed ownership. The Christian Doctrine of Discovery sanctioned it: The land a Christian discovered becomes their property. The French, the British, and the Portuguese were discovering lands to claim them as their property. The Germans discovered ideas to claim them as their property. Christianity was bad if it called Christians evil. Christianity was good if it allowed them to take other’s lands and ideas.

Platonism and German Idealism

The problem was that Kant could not give up Platonism. So, he tried to conjure ideas of universal truth and universal good through his philosophy. His idea of universal truth was that scientific concepts such as space, time, causality, and law came not from the world but were innate ideas in man. These were universal ideas too, so nobody could conjure different concepts of space, time, causality, and law.

His universalism became his undoing when Einstein revised ideas of space and time. Kantian ideas of space and time were rooted in linear or flat Euclidean geometry but Einstein introduced Riemannian geometry with curvature of space-time. Kant’s ideas of universal causality and law were based on the Newtonian idea of mathematical determinism. These proved to be his undoing as quantum mechanics showed that there was no deterministic law or causality that explained quantum phenomena.

Kantian morality, called the Categorical Imperative, also required universalizability. It stated: Act in a way that you could accept it to be a universal law followed by everyone. Thus, if you do something, everyone should be able to do it and it should become a universal law. Either everyone is a policeman or nobody is a policeman. Kant’s universalization of morality proved to be his undoing as society gave special powers to different roles. His ideas of morality were not based on duty, which is unique to each person, and often based on time, place, and situation. He was trying to marry morality to Platonic universals.

Thereby, Kant could not capitalize on the “Copernican Revolution” of replacing a sinful and ignorant soul with a moral and enlightened soul, despite reading the philosophy of the Vedic texts, wherein each soul is not just eternal and divine but also unique. Vedic texts don’t subscribe to a singular Universal Truth. Instead, truth is a ladder of rungs, and the top rung is called the Absolute Truth. A person can climb the rungs of this ladder, so everyone doesn’t have the same conception of truth, right, and good.

Even as the soul is eternal and divine, it can be covered by delusion, also known as Māyā. The situation is neither eternal goodness nor eternal evil. It is a combination of good and evil. The soul is good but it can be covered by evil if it chooses to accept such a covering. Everyone can choose a different evil, so they are not uniformly or equally evil. Everyone can reject evil to varying extents so they are not universally or uniformly good. Thus universalization, inherited from Platonic uniformity, is the central problem.

Kantian ideas became the basis of German Idealism in which every philosopher began searching for truth and goodness in the human mind. Whatever each philosopher found in his mind, he universalized it to the whole of humanity. Carl Jung, for instance, saw the ideas of divinity in the human mind and stated that religion was a byproduct of applying universal mental categories of good and evil to the world to see good and evil in it. If that were indeed the case, then everyone must have the same idea of good and evil. Why would there be conflict in the world if everyone agreed on what was good or evil?

Adverse Reaction to Appropriation

Most people cannot understand that Western philosophers have been appropriating ideas from other cultures because Western philosophy looks so different from the philosophies of other cultures. This is because whatever ideas Western philosophers take, they depersonalize and universalize them. These two are simply two sides of the same coin because personalization means the uniqueness of each person. If we universalize, then we destroy that uniqueness. That universalization is hence depersonalization.

Individualism is an adverse reaction to universalization and depersonalization. If you force a single set of ideas, laws, or theories on someone, their response will be to reject it. It is a natural thing because each person is unique. We cannot subsume the person under universal ideas, laws, or theories. If we impose universal ideas, laws, and theories on anyone, they will retaliate against that imposition. This retaliation is called individualism. Under its influence, everyone in the West is habituated to challenging every idea, law, or theory. Their aggression is the side-effect of centuries of forceful imposition of universal ideas, laws, and theories on people and their continuous struggle against these forceful impositions. Thereby, even if someone isn’t trying to impose anything, the Western mind is habituated to seeing it as an imposition on them, which they have to rebel or retaliate against, forcefully and violently.

Western individualism creates rebels without a cause. They don’t know what they want. They just know that they will not accept anything you tell them because they suspect that you are trying to impose your ideas, laws, and theories upon them. If it did not come out of their mind, it probably means that it is an imposition upon them. Individualism makes a person impatient. Their immediate reaction to all new things is dismissing them. They think that by denying another person a patient hearing, they have asserted their freedom from the imposition of ideas, theories, and laws. Thereby, the Western mind is largely incapable of learning new things. They always seek comfort in the familiar. They have greater trust for things coming out of the Western mind and great distrust for things outside the West.

However, as time passes, their trust in whatever they believed earlier keeps declining because there is essentially no truth in Western thinking. Even when good ideas have been taken from other cultures, they have been universalized and depersonalized, which means they are applied to all times, places, situations, and persons, which results in numerous failures, destroying people’s trust in them. Thus, as time passes, universalism transforms into nihilism which means people don’t believe in anything. They are always angry at having trusted something in the past which eventually proved to be wrong. They are also fearful that their trust in anything new will be broken so they don’t venture into new things.

The Cycle of Universalism and Nihilism

Thus, whenever we begin with universalism, we always end up with nihilism. This binary is called nirviśeṣa (non-uniqueness or universalism) and śūnyavāda (nihilism). These are not impersonalism of Advaita and voidism of Buddhism, ideas unique to India. Advaita says that the world is an illusion and the self is real. But universalism says that you have to follow one set of ideas, laws, and rules. Both destroy a person’s individuality so they are similar but in the West, people think that they are highly individualistic so how could they destroy their individuality? The destruction of individuality in the West is the result of imposing universal laws, rules, and theories rather than calling the world an illusion as in Advaita.

As this imposition fails, a person rejects laws, rules, and theories and becomes a nihilist. He stops believing that it is possible to know anything. He rejects all attempts to understand the nature of reality and becomes cynical, angry, violent, aggressive, and destructive. That is the opposite of what Buddhists call voidism, in which a person enters a peaceful, calm, deep sleep state. But nihilism sounds just like voidism—both implying that there is no truth or reality. Since an angry person cannot be peaceful, and they cannot accept that the self and the world don’t exist, so how could they be voidists?

The fact is that nirviśeṣa and śūnyavāda in India are quite different from the ideologies described by the same name in the West. Since Eastern adjectives don’t apply to the West, and vice versa, the problem of universalism and nihilism isn’t understood when it is described as nirviśeṣa and śūnyavāda. If that is the case, we can use the terms universalism and nihilism instead of nirviśeṣa and śūnyavāda.

From Universalism to Postmodernism

Jean-Paul Sartre contrasted these two ideas as essence and existence. By essence, he means universal laws, rules, and theories. He rejects these and then talks about existence, by which he means a person’s individuality. He goes on to say that each person has to create their personal, unique, and individual meaning in life. Nobody can accept a universal imposition of laws, rules, and theories. Therefore, the entire history of Western impositions is contrary to the individual quest for personal uniqueness. Of course, he has no clue on how to fulfill the individual quest so everyone who followed Sartre’s system of philosophy—called Existentialism—ended up being a dark, brooding, hopeless individualist. This way of thinking eventually led to postmodernism which is exactly nihilism or the absence of any truth.

When I was in college, I read a lot of Sartre (and his compatriot and successor Camus) during my free time. It was seriously depressing. Meanwhile, the main job was learning the system of mathematical depersonalization where everyone talked about a universal theory of everything. I quickly realized that both of these are hopeless. But these are the only two alternatives being offered in the West.

Whatever new ideas the West takes, it filters them through the sieve of universalism and forces them on everyone as inviolable laws, rules, and theories. People feel stifled, suffocated, and suppressed. They find that these universal theories don’t work, retaliate against them, and become nihilists. This is the Western cycle of life—universalism and nihilism—from which the only escape is the Vedic tradition in which there is infinite uniqueness with a common purpose. We reject universalism because there is infinite uniqueness. We reject nihilism because there is a common purpose. The pen and the sword can be used for the same purpose. They don’t have to be one type of thing and they don’t have to be useless. The pen and sword are not bound together by universal laws. They are bound together by a shared purpose. But we see that the West wants to digest the Vedic system into its universalism and nihilism. If it could work, it would destroy the only escape from the cycle of life in the West.