Why do Hindus leave shoes outside their place of worship but Christians don’t?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
so what is scripture? say bible is also scripture then why is it that in the church Christians wear shoes but Hindus don’t they wear it in temples Bhaktivinoda Thakura explains that scripture contains the revelation of our god given according to specific time period circumstances so there is a purpose and there is a practice now the purpose can be the same the practice can be different now whenever I go to America and then I come back to India I was 3 months in America whenever I am going for a program after that I always end up going on the wrong side of the car because in America in India we drive on which side of the road? left now you see the practice is not only different it is opposite now in India if I drive on the right I will be penalized if in America I drive on the left I will be penalized the practice is opposite but the purpose is the same so if you get too fixated on the practices now the purpose of the traffic rules is the same that is regulating traffic so that people can travel smoothly the purpose is the same but depending on whatever particularities may be there now in USA when United States of America was liberated from Britain they had that sense that we are no longer the colonies we are separate so they did many things which were different the opposite of what was being done in Britain so they decided they will travel on the other side of the road they just wanted to assert their identity separate from what was British so of course some things they have continued so Stanford and Massachusetts they are more or less modeled on Oxford and Cambridge but some things they did opposite so the practices can be different and the purpose is the same so if we start expecting that all the practices should be same then what to speak of Christianity and Hinduism we will see even in different temples the same movements of practices will be different so we don’t get too caught with the practices but look at the purpose the purpose is to raise our consciousness towards Christianity and whether we remove our shoes or we don’t remove our shoes the mood is when Christians go to a church they go there in a mood of remembrance they go there in a mood of respect so generally speaking in the Catholic churches or in the Christian churches in general they don’t have a deity over there so they don’t have a conception of a form of God that is manifested in this world and it is the presence of the deity that is especially sanctified and because the deity is considered all pure so therefore when we go to the temple we don’t take a good prayer over there but because there is no deity in the church there are many different reasons which can be considered specifically for cultural practices but because there is no deity so that specific aspect of not taking one’s shoes inside cannot happen so we don’t have to get fixated on practices there was a movie PK which was a satire of religion which highlighted those practices and which tried to show that oh there are these religions are all man-made but actually no they are not man-made they are made for man and because man in different places is different the way it is manifested will be different so I wrote a book in response to the movie PK it is called GK for PK so GK is General Knowledge, God Knowledge, Gita Knowledge so using these three levels of knowledge I answered all the questions that were raised in that movie I got all answers on my website also but in general so this was one of the questions I answered there also but in general we focus on the purpose not the practices the practices will be different even in normal educational system say in IIT Kharagpur and IIT Delhi it is not exactly the same system of education it is not the same books may be used it is not the exact same apparatus the purpose is to give education the practices will be different similarly different religions or different traditions or different centers of religion the practices may be different the purpose is the same to raise human consciousness in the spiritual life