Religious understanding?

Sorry for the long break. I wasn't on holiday the whole time. But work does sometime get in the way of blogging.

More will follow about India, but I thought I would start off with one thing that really struck us on this holiday. We were in Tamil Nadu and so of course we saw lots of temples. Now I have seen Hindu temples before but never really studied them (to my shame). As we were seeing approx 2 amazing temples a day, we decided it would make sense to try and understand the significance of the temples, their decoration and their role in people's lives, not to mention of course who the gods and deities were who were being worshipped there.
We hoped that way to be abe to explain to ourselves why certain statues in the temples were covered in yellow and red colouring and had flowers and candles in front of them, and others didn't.

I have to confess, it was all a bit confusing. First of all there are a multitude of different gods and incarnations of the same gods and different stories about them, which are all somehow interlinked but don't really add up. And then of course there are the different branches of the religion, not to mention the Shivaite and the Vaishnavite followers. So all in all a lot to take in.

At first I was a bit irritated. Why couldn't it all be logical and clear? Why were people contradicting themselves. But then we started to talk about other religions, in particular Christianity, which is the religion we know best. When you start to think about it, Chrisitianity is not only far from logical, it also contradicts itself internally. There are many different branches of Christianity, many of which exist under one roof (take the Anglican Church for example). Catholics and Protestants have a fundamentally different understanding of the role of Mary for example and so it goes on.

Once we had gained this perspective on the religion that formed our cultural background, in fact to be honest, once we imagined a poor Hindu being taken round the UK and shown a multitude of different churches, chapels and cathedrals, it became clear to us that it was only the greater familiarity with Christianity which made us think it was logical and clear.

Not an amazingly new insight but still powerful. If you put yourself in the situation of being a stranger on your own cultural map, then you realise how difficult it is to navigate.
We became a lot more understanding of the diversity of Hinduism and felt less pressured to make everything logical.

Of course we still didn't work out why certain statues were all yellow and others weren't.