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Help us inform other podcast listeners by subscribing to the Issues et cetera podcast with YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. Hinduism is a very diverse religion.

It's a very open religion.

It's a religion open to contradiction, self-contradiction to all kinds of amendments and mixing with other religions.

And its writings in many ways are so simple in their concepts.

It kind of explains why Hinduism is the universal solvent or mixes with any other cocktail of religions. Welcome back to Issues, Et cetera. I'm Todd

Wilkin. It's time for part three of our series on the Bible and other religious writings. Today

we'll take up the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Dr. Adam Francisco joins us. He's Director of

Academics and Scholar in Residence for 1517. He's adjunct professor of history at Concordia University of academics and scholar in residence for 1517 he's adjunct professor of history

at concordia university chicago and author of one word many writings adam welcome back

hi todd how are you before we get into the uponashads of hinduism just remind us of what

hindus believe well that there's um sort sort of textbook Hinduism, and then there's like Hinduism on the street, so to speak.

So it's really hard to boil it down because it's such a diverse religion with that is quite

comfortable with competing interpretations.

But I think if there's a common feature to what we might call

like an Orthodox Hinduism or Hinduism that has some sense of doctrine, is that it is monistic.

That is it, in fact, you could say the central creed, though they wouldn't necessarily use that term of Hinduism, is that Brahman, which is a kind of a synonym for a God, but not God in any sense of the way that Christians would conceive of God.

Brahmin is all and all is Brahmin.

So that is to say that while it appears there's different and distinct things from Brahmin and then a whole bunch of a plethora of some Hindu traditions suggest over 300 million gods, lesser gods, and then humans and animals and everything else,

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