When sanatana-dharma is inclusive why are most Hindus pluralists?
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sadhan dharma is inclusivist but most Hindus today are pluralist so why is that? yeah there are multiple reasons again for this first is that from a historical perspective within the Vedic path itself in the Vedic tradition itself there were different paths for different levels of human and these different paths, there is a karma marga, gyan marga, bhakti marga there is worship of the different devatas, there are different kinds of yogas all these are meant to be progressive to help people to rise to higher levels of consciousness but historically what happened was each path, instead of being seen as one phase in the progressive ladder, each path started claiming to be the ultimate, so what was meant to be progressive it became competitive so within the Vedic tradition itself there has often been a lot of healthy intellectual debate about which path is the best which path is the highest so the ethos within the broad Indian tradition is of liberalism that has always been like that because the conclusive unity of all paths has not always been understood so the Bhagavad Gita offers the synthesis of various paths and shows how they can be reconciled but that’s not always been understood so the understanding that there are different people at different levels, they follow different paths but we see that although there was this pluralism in the past also in India that pluralism was was not religiously indifferent or religiously apathetic all of them were focused on understanding the absolute truth trying to move towards the absolute truth in some way or the other so because the common goal was not understood so much that’s why the Indian tradition is often pluralistic and along with that also if we consider the recent historical context most of what is modern Hinduism today has emerged from what is called as the Bengal Renaissance when Britishers came to India for the first time they conquered Bengal and they tried to convert and Christianize Bengal and they very severely criticized Hinduism and many of the leaders of modern Hinduism they emerged at that time in various ways they tried to counter the criticism of Christianity rather than becoming Christians they tried to present Hinduism in different ways so they focused on trying to establish their moral superiority over Christians so Christians were saying that Jesus is the only way so the Hindu leaders in order to position themselves as better than the Christians they said you people are so narrow minded we say there are many ways so Hinduism presented itself as pluralistic in order to counter the conversion agenda of the Christians and since then the popular conception of Hinduism is pluralistic so pluralism itself is not is not wrong if the paths if the different paths are seen as entirely discordant if you don’t see that there is one mountain on which you are climbing if all these are different paths they go to entirely different destinations and all destinations are the same then it becomes a problem but if you see that all paths are actually meant to raise us towards higher consciousness then that is even pluralism can be accepted if it is helping people to rise towards higher consciousness but if pluralism becomes a license for anyone to do whatever they want to do then it becomes a tool by which people rationalize staying where they are or even going down on the path of consciousness and they think that they are being spiritual so we need to focus on philosophical education so if there is proper philosophical education then pluralism can also be integrated within an inclusive perspective that people raise their consciousness from where they are does that answer your question any other questions