religion!

Religion review

Hinduism: the bloodiest ahimsa you've ever seen

Number of stars (out of 5): 112 (two for debunking feminism, take away 12 for
dissing the McRib)
By Mandukya V Nahasapeemapetilon
(p.s. The "V" is for Vishnu)
(p.p.s. of whom I am the 10th avatar)
(p.p.p.s. Ba-zing!)

For my first installment of critiques against man's favorite religions, I have selected one of the world's oldest: Hinduism! Most of you are probably familiar with it as the religion with all the robed dudes with shaved and painted heads in Berkeley trying to sell you on some of the finer points of becoming God, but I'm going to try to cut through the major crap of the matter and deliver what I think is a pretty accurate representation of what it takes to follow in the footsteps of good ol Ganesh, the chubby kind-hearted elephant headed God that will happily take obstacles out of your path if you would kindly offer him a sacrifice of lotus flowers and wave a candle in front of his face. Now, kiddos, don't think I'm dissing Gandhi exactly, but if you want one fricked up religion, I think you'll be very happy being a Hindu. Holding the distinctions of something like 700 million followers (that's a whole lotta red dots, folks), if polytheism turns you on, the 30 million gods (human features optional) just might help you take the leap of faith into

I could spend pages elaborating on some of the more humorous aspects of the Hindu pantheon, like how the God Shiva, Lord of DEATH (and the precursor to Michael Flateley, Lord of the Dance), is worshipped all over India in his temples and idols shaped like his main symbol, namely the lingua (for all those that don't speak Sanskrit, that's a penis!), or how one time the mother goddess Indra fricked up hellof crap by cutting up the first man and creating the caste system, as the various members of society sprang out of his um body parts, but that's not the point.

Now STOP. Look around. See your ish-cluttered room, your dirty posters, the dim light that shines through your filthy windows onto your Nintendo-power collection and even your beloved porn-bot. This is all fake. WHAT? Is this not my wonderful life? That's right. Anything you see isn't really there- it's Maya-not the dudes with that must have taken forever to write their pen-pals the Incas because their letters are huge ass stone carvings of monkeys and swords and such, but in this case it means "illusion." What's real you ask? Ok now I want you to do two more exercises for me. First of all, touch in between your eyebrows (or if Bert is reading this, the middle your uni-brow). Ok next, look at the sun (not for too long, although Hindu fakirs ARE famous for going blind by staring at the sun for years at a time-we'll get to that). After a second or two, close your eyes. Do you see a bright dot in the middle of the blackness of your eyelids? Fanfare please THAT'S REALITY! That's your "Atman," you can call it your soul if you like, although in the strictest sense of the world, if you do you'll be entirely mistaken, you idiot. Your Atman is your true self. Everything else-what you see, what you think, your senses-it's all your "empirical self." You see, you may not realize it, but it's like your true self has been konked on the head and now suffers from a severe form of amnesia-it can't remember who it is. Alright now here's the best news for anyone I've already convinced to convert: Who are you (Atman) really? (cue the fanfare again) GOD! Well, not "God" in the sense that we're used to thinking of him, but instead "Brahman" (Not Brammanerguna that's another misconception I'll debunk later on) what the Hindu Gurus like to call the "Imperishable," something you can't describe exactly, except in the totally hot girl warrior Garga's word's (dude, if you want to see some freaking kinky art, buy a book about Hindu history) it's something you can't see, something that's neither light nor dark, with no dimensions, but infinitely huge, pure spirit, no matter everywhere but not everything well you get the idea. Try to understand this concept, but don't take to heart to the point of nausea, or you might wind up in a tantric cult, some of whom were known to eat poop, shove food up their butts, and walk on their hands, just to try to turn the world upside down, and demonstrate to Brahman that they knew the world wasn't real.

See, here's the thing. There aren't really millions of gods. Each more or less is a personification of an aspect of Brahman. You choose one god in particular and worship him, based on who you like best. Girls, no need to feel left out, each god has a wife goddess or consort, and SHE'S the one that really wears the pants. She has the power in her "shakti" (use your imagination) and by the reckoning of some, the only way that the god can access that power is by, well, you know, using his lingua.

Anyway, a big selling point of Hinduism is there's something for everyone! If carrying around shrunken heads and biting the necks of infidels is your bag, you might just be happy with the goddess Kali, made famous by Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom (that's for reals Hindu tantrism, folks!), or if you see yourself as the warrior type, Krishna, the 7th avatar (incarnation kind of like the seventh Jesus) of Vishnu, will advise you through reading the Bhagavad-Gita, that it's totally gravy if you want to kill hellof people. What's the point of all that you ask? Is humbly worshipping the embodiment of Brahman Itself just not good enough for you, you selfish a-hole??? Well in that case, boy, we need to sit down and have a little talk about Samsara.

For the Hindus, life is like one big tilt-a-whirl. Only take that tilt-a-whirl, make it into a metaphysical reality, and imagine that you can't ever climb out of it. EVER! Spinning, spinning, spinning, while you (as the Atman) are stuck in the craphole whirling purple grape-shaped seats you call your physical body, next to a girl you thought would be nice to take to the fair, but has revealed herself to be a ticket-swiping, cotton candy eating biznitch that you desperately wish to get away from. But here's the thing: you're strapped in by a little black lap restraint known as KARMA. This is the concept of the wheel of Samsara. You can tug at your Karma all you want, but all it does is have the effect of making you more or less able to breathe, once you get tired of straining. Ask a Christian what exactly "salvation" means, and he or she will launch into a 10 minute speech about lordknowswhat, but ask a Hindu the same question, and they'll respond, "get me off this damn tilt-a-whirl!" Now to complicate things, imagine that you're on the ride so long that you eventually die. If the fairgrounds were sensible, they'd stop the ride, and remove your vomit-covered corpse making room for the next hapless fat kid. Instead, they take you out of your little car, examine your karma, and throw you in jail to be tormented by hot little red dudes with long forks if you have bad karma, and send to heaven to be massaged in hot oil by winged virgins if your karma looks good. Sound good? Well after seven years of whatever your fate is, you're whacked on the head so that you forget everything, and then depending on how good you were in the last life, you're thrown into a better or worse body in the next life. After your tenure in hell, you might end up a cockroach, in which case you better be a damn good cockroach in the next life so that the virgins can massage your crusty exoskeleton in heaven. If you were good, you might become a powerful person with hellof wives. Worst of all is being reincarnated by a woman. If that happens, hell, you might as well be the best girl you can be and hope to be hit by a truck, because ain't no way you're going to be saved if you lack that certain anatomical element. And if you're a BAD wife, and mention another dude's name besides your husband, or don't burn yourself on his funeral pyre, forget it, babe, you're destined to be reborn in the womb of a jackal. Oh yeah, all this is called "Transmigration" not "reincarnation" like everybody thinks. Geez, how tired am I of debunking all you ignoramus' misconceptions about Vendanta and the Upanishadic tradition!

Whatever the case, good or bad, you're strapped back into the tilt-a-whirl for another 80 year spin. There's only one way off. Moksha! (I'm pretty sure that's something I heard Jabba the Hutt say in the Return of the Jedi- no joke) It means liberation. It means saying, So the Frick LONG to not only the tilt-a-whirl, but the entire fair, and flying off into the sky to rejoin Brahman. There are several ways you can accomplish this, but they all come down to one thing-passionless action. You see, even if you have good Karma, you're just destining yourself to another spin at life. The point is to have NO Karma at all. You need to be disconnected by your actions. You can eat that big strawberry and cream covered banana split, but you sure as frick can't like it! But you can't dislike it either. You have to do it, just to do it. This is more or less the concept of Dharma (it has NOTHING to do with that biznitch on that stupid ass show-I'd transmigrate her ass into the body of a carrot if I could)-do your duty, stupid. The Hindu Vedas tell the story of a guru who saw a scorpion fall into the water and start to drown. Immediately, he picked it up and it stung the crap out of his finger. He dropped it, and presently, it fell back into the water. He picked it up again, and it stung him again. His buddies who were watching were like, "dude let that ungrateful arthropod die and become a no-see-um or something equally bogus in the next life" but homeboy with the messed up fingers simply replied "it is the duty of the scorpion to sting those who touch it. It is the duty of a guru to help others when they can." At which point, the other dudes either fought with each other over who got to get stung next, or pushed the guru into the water with his beloved scorpion and said "how's this for what gurus are supposed to do?!" The point is, whatever you do, just do it! That's right-little known fact-NIKE is a Hindu company. It won't be long before they replace that little swoosh with the 1000 handed boner-endowed Shiva on their stupid shoes. Now, returning to a few paragraphs ago, another way you can get Moksha, is by devoting yourself to one god and hoping he will save you in the end. The result is the same. You won't care about anything else in the end. Another way to do this is to say the name of your god 10,000 times a day or more until you forget about anything else and enlightenment suddenly pops into your head. That's the thing. As soon as you realize that your Atman is equal to Brahman, you should, in theory attain enlightenment. However, try as I may to say those words, I don't suddenly turn into the Imperishable, mobbed by sacred cows. Oh well, this has gotta be true it must be something I'm doing wrong.

Now as promised, here's a brief guide to Hindu fashion, depending on how old you are. For kids, wear nothing. Seriously. Run wild, naked, and ish-covered like a baboon. If you're a girl, you'll likely be married by age 5 anyway, and then your husband will decide what you're going to wear. OK, next, in stage two of your life, take a wife and acquire riches. Wear Abercrombie and fitch liberally and let everyone else know how tight you are. When you're 50 or thereabouts, suddenly remember that you're on a crappy fair ride of a life, have your customary mid-life-crisis, leave your wife and possessions to your oldest son, start dressing like Gandhi, and seek to find Moksha. When you turn 75, your lot becomes even worse. Become a mendicant, and go back to the running around naked, ish-covered, business. You can only live off of whatever people give you, and the best thing you can do it jump in the extremely polluted Ganges river, and do something like stick your toe in your mouth for 5 years straight holding your hand up towards the sun, while staring at it, just to show that you're tight and that you know that you're detached and can do anything. Once you die, if you've reached enlightenment, so long world! Hello eternity without attributes!

On a final note, I'd like to explain the elusive significance of the cow. Hindus are famous for worshipping their cows, and this is because they're the embodiment of innocence and caring and all that. They eat only grass, yet give us so much leather jackets, jello, cheese, stuff to tip the ironic part is, that they revere cows so much, that Hindus are not allowed to mess with cows (i.e. make all that stuff out of them). All they CAN do is kiss them on the lips, clean up their crap, and tell them how tight they are.

Anyhow, I hope that this has been helpful in your decision on whether or not to become a Hindu. I will continue to present this information objectively, without comment as to whether or not I subscribe to this particular belief system, but I WILL say this I can get by the monkey-faced gods, worship of the cow, eating poop thing, but dude, c'mon if my wife burns herself when I die, who's going to be around to tell everyone else how tight I was?