I am also beginning to get convinced that religion is generally a bad thing. When you ask of some kid while growing up to believe in something that is not based on scientific evidence, you generally leave him vulnerable to believing other such things too. That is to say that from the average religious kid’s point of view, if he has been made to believe that there is a supernatural God, he can also be someday made to believe that this supernatural God’s supernatural will asks of him to kill someone.

Would it not be a much better society where the young impressionable minds of the day are taught the value of a sound scientific attitude – taught not believe in something unless they see sound scientific grounds for it and taught that God is just as much subject to scientific enquiry as anything else and that thought experiments like “achaar as prasad” are great things.

To quote some wise guy, “Good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things, but for a good man to do a bad thing – now, that needs religion!”

I have noticed that the higher up the food chain (forgive me) you go in religious hierarchies, the more attention is paid to economics and fear, mainly for their utility in purely secular activities, devoid of any relation to, or interest in, what the divine might be. The moral bankruptcy of a pope does not make the folks in the pews villains, however. Moreover, a militant secularism manages to produce people as doctrinaire and nasty as any fundamentalist.

So this is the reason why I was trying to make serious comments. In my tradition at least, the feasting is not remotely blasphemous, but absolutely essential. We honor prasad, and we honor it with the gusto of our feasting. It’s true that I’m cooking for Krishna, but after I’m thinking about cooking for Krishna I’m thinking about feeding the assembly, and my enthusiasm and pleasure in cooking is very much a function of the idea that I’ll also be feeding the *people* I love–enthusiasm that only grows if I know they’ll view the prasad as prasad and be pleased accordingly. In the Gaudiya Vaishnav tradition there are a lot of stories about Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (an incarnation of Krishna) enthusiastically feeding His devotees with His own hands. Even in the Srimad Bhagavatam and Mahabharat there are stories of Krishna feeding His devotees. Or Lakshmi Devi feeding people, or Sita feeding people. And by extension, one celebrates big occasions–births, weddings, graduations, any reason for being happy and grateful–by giving away food in charity, if possible. Vaishanvs, at least, get immense joy out of feeding people prasad, and also thrill at the pleasure other Vaishnavs have in feeding them as both direct affection and the indirect manifestation of Divine affection.

So Scruggs, while I see that the humor of your classist/kleptocratic analysis is firmly grounded in the idea that I and my compatriots are mostly motivated by fear and economics, I just have to note that I experience this “kitchen religion” in a very different mood.

Yeah, I’m really not a big fan of force-feeding anyone prasad. It should be cherished, not grudgingly gulped.

I know it was somewhat tongue in cheek, but I did want to make the serious comments for the benefit of an audience that might not be familiar with the rest of it. Also, it *is* kind of annoying how some temple prasad is always sugar candy. I mean seriously, of course He would get sick of that after a while. The salted almonds at the Malibu temple were kind of cool.

Anon–well, we would say our personal relationship notions came first but got lost in the murk. . Saurabh is right, you can find everything under the sun. The Abrahamic religions definitely have their own mystical traditions that are deeply similar in spirit if not as physically ritualistic–I still remember the shock of recognition in 8th grade when I first read about Hasidic Judaism’s Bal Shem Tov and his ideas about singing and dancing in communion with one’s Lord. Even though I’m sure most Hasids would disdain me as an idol-worshipper, I still feel some odd affection for their tradition. When I was about 6 I went through one of those kid phases where I insisted on watching the same movie over and over and over again, but instead of being Star Wars or something it was Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun Sister Moon and various aspects of Franciscan devotions, the French Beguines, and similar movements have resonated with me over the years. The intertwining of Sufiism and Hindu mysticism is, of course, old news. I have a couple friends who are devout Native American Hindus, and they feel there was no moment of conversion, and that the Great Spirit conception they grew up with is of a piece with the Gaudiya Vaishnavism they now practice. Conversely, there are vast tracts of Hindu tradition that have the sort of detached, even Atheistic conceptions–very well developed forms of “Hindu” Atheism, in fact–which resonate pretty strongly with a lot of “western” traditions. Obviously a lot of westerners find a strong compatibility between Buddhism and the ideas they grew up with (there’s a whole class of books devoted to being a good Buddhist Jew, for example) and Buddhism is of course strongly related to Hinduism. Generally speaking I’m not a big fan of overextending analytical dichotomies, and you can usually find a little bit of everything everywhere.

While foreign Gods (primarily the Abraham derivatives) seem to serve is that of answering “why” where science does not and of forgiving sins, the Indian Gods are useful as entities one can have emotional relationships with. You know like they love Jesus, but not the same way a devout Indian loves Krishna and stuff.

So, basically, though most God’s were perhaps primarily invented to serve as answers to fill those gaps in knowledge that the day’s science could point to but could not fill, the Indian Gods did evolve to serve a very unique and different ummm… social or personal purpose.

PS: I am treating gods as the way practical believers treat them as, and not how they were intended to be by those who errr… created them.

To me, it makes sense to offer God what you might like to eat yourself, once the coast is clear and no one can see the blasphemous feasting.