Why do some spiritual organizations that believe in the Vedas not accept Deity Worship?

From Ravikant Jagtap P

What is Vedic understanding of Bramho samaj, Arya samaj and Nirankaris. They also believe in Vedas but why they don’t accept deity worship?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Question from Ravikant Chakta Prabhu. What is the Vedic understanding of Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj and Vedankaris? They also believe in Vedas, but why don’t they accept Vedic, accept deity worship? Answer, that is because of generally two factors.
One is a fragmented understanding of the Vedic literature. And second is excessive influence of the contemporary world views at that particular times. So let’s look at Brahmo Samaj.
Ram Mohan Roy, he was the pioneer of what is called as the Bengali Renaissance. So this was a time when the Indian intellectuals, they started trying to respond to the critiques of Vedic culture that were done by Christian missionaries and by British education. So in trying to respond to that, they felt that there are certain things within the Vedic culture are wrong and certain things are right.
And the basis for what is wrong and right was not any understanding of Guru Sadhu Shastra coming in parampara. That understanding was based on just their own conceptions. So with this focus, they often rejected those things which they felt would be indefensible from the Vedic, from in modern people’s eyes.
So in the Abrahamic religions, because there is no positive description of God, so therefore there is a strong antipathy towards any depiction of God in material form. Because they don’t, their scriptures don’t describe how God looks like. So they think that any depiction of God will be a concoction.
And that’s why there is heavy criticism of that. And often that’s the cause of intolerance and destruction of any material representations of God like deities which happened during Islamic rule and even during Catholic rule in Goa and other places. So the point is that the deity worship was very severely criticized during the times of Bengali Renaissance and many people who wanted to defend themselves, they chose to reject those aspects of Vedic culture and literature that were subject to too much criticism.
And one of them was deity worship. So in fact Ram Mohan Roy himself wrote a very heavy critique of deity worship. And actually the review of his work was written by a Christian missionary.
And that Christian missionary said that no book that we could have written could have been as convincing as what he has written. So why did he write a book like that? Because he could not unfortunately come in contact with any of the acharyas in the parampara who could have given proper understanding. And at one level we can say that his intention was to protect the culture that he had been born in.
But in protecting he actually rejected one of his essential features. And then what was left was in many ways a shell that did not have substance. So different leaders went to different aspects of the Vedic literature without seeing them in complete perspective.
So Ram Mohan Roy started Brahmo Samaj, focused primarily in the Upanishads. And he also he tried to merge Christianity with the Upanishadic teachings. And especially he was attracted to, there are two broad brands of Christianity.
They are not Catholics and Protestants. They are more fundamental. They are what is called as Unitarian and Trinitarian.
So Trinitarian talks about three substances. Three beings, you know, God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Unitarian talks about one substance.
Unitarianism is in many ways similar to impersonalism in Vedic teachings. So he tried to merge Unitarianism, Christianity and impersonal Hinduism. And he was in many ways influential for many subsequent spiritual teachers also.
So on the other hand, similarly, if we look at Arya Samaj, Dayanand Saraswati focused on the Upanishads but on the Vedas itself. And he also rejected everything that came later. And he was trying to respond in the vernacular language to the challenges of the Western culture as well as the prevalent evils in society.
So overall, we can’t go into the technical, socio-cultural details of every organization. But the broad principle is that if one doesn’t understand one’s own tradition properly, and one is too hypersensitive about the criticism from contemporary society, then one will reject what is essential in the name of defending one’s own culture also. So we have to have fidelity and flexibility.
So fidelity means we have to be faithful to the tradition and flexibility means we present it according to time, place and circumstance. So Shri Prabhupada exhibited this fidelity. They kept the essential teachings but there was flexibility also.
You know, unlike the mainstream society where outside, like even today in Jagannath Temple, people are not allowed to come to the temple. People who are non-Hindus are not allowed to enter the temple. So that sort of narrow-minded notion, which are not actually based on the Vedic literature, they did not accept them, they rejected them.
And when that sort of broad-mindedness is shown, Prabhupada allowed even women to do deity worship, pujaris, as pujaris, he gave Raman Diksha also to them. So Prabhupada was anyway very broad-minded in terms of embracing people within the folds of Krishna consciousness. At the same time, he did not lose the essence.
So when there is not a proper balance of flexibility and fidelity, when the fidelity is lacking because of proper understanding of the essence of the Vedic teachings and then one becomes, in the name of flexibility, one becomes just bend whichever way the sociocultural wind is blowing and one loses the essence. So the belief in Vedas of these organizations is often selective belief that is so selective that it goes to the point of becoming deceptive. Deceptive for themselves and deceptive for those who come in contact with others, contact with them.
So we want to get a holistic understanding of the Vedic literature with its multi-level understanding of the karmakanda, jnanakanda and upasana-kanda bhakti teachings. And that integrated understanding is presented by the acharyas in the Gauri Vaishya Sampradaya, in the Vaishya Sampradaya in general. Thank you.