| They used
images, practiced temple worship, maintained a sacred fire and often had Gods of the same
name and function as the Hindu. Similarly the accusations of polytheism and idolatry made
against oriental religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, are the same as those made against
the Pagan Europeans from whom science and rationality first arose. In time Christianity (and Islam as well) adapted the Pagan
philosophies of the Greeks (Plato and Aristotle), along with Greek medicine, science and
other cultural factors, as it had no real philosophy or science, no real intellectual
culture of its own.
On the other hand, Oriental cultures, like India, have had
their own traditional of rational philosophy much like the Greek, as we can see in the
Upanishads, Sankhya, Nyaya-Vaisheshika, and the Buddhist schools, which similarly
emphasize reason and dialectic but combined with ethical and meditation disciplines. |
