Billions is a stretch. It also goes against the alleged merits of Indian darshanas dating back to thousands of years. if they really worked, why would we still have billions of unhappy people today, as you claim? And the people who are happy around us did not get there by following Indian religions stressing on the need for a liberation of the soul. Clearly then, these doctrines have failed to achieve what they set out to. But like I said earlier, I do not think the majority of the world is unhappy. Do we have any objective evidence to measure this? In absence of such evidence, I would not attempt to count happy and unhappy people.
Hmm, why would it be the failure of Indian philosophy that billions are unhappy today? Indian philosophy only represents India and not the world, and as far as we can tell from historical evidence Indians did indeed live quite prosperously. They had schools and universities, hospitals and a massive work sector to employ peple. The GDP of the Indian economy were the years 1D to 10AD was aprox 33%,the highest that any country has had in history. The census records even in the 19th century report every province had tens of thousands of schools. The remarkable philosophical and scientfic tradition that developed in India is evidence of a healthy religion. Your Charvakas would have been killed in other parts of the world.
India's state today is the result of the British empire plundering it for 300 years of its wealth, poisoning and distorting its history to create a generations of Indians alienated from their history and culture. Indian philosophy cannot be blamed for this. The blame stands squarely on the British for economic genocide on India. Many Indian and Western intellectuals have noted how devestating British rule of India was. It is a history of 300 years of rape(even literal rape, Indian women were raped in public by the British in front of their families)
I can also show prolonged periods of time in several places where there was no war and no destruction. We tend to notice and highlight wars and ignore/downplay times of peace, making it appear as if there were too many wars.
I do not dispute we had periods of peace and even good periods in history, but to take this as being equivalent to the periods of war, death, destruction etc is dishonest. The history of humanity has been almost constant war and strife, especially outside of India. The darkest period has been the modern period in fact where entire civilisations have been systematically slaughtered such as the Native Americans and Aborigines. The African civilisation suffered immensely for hundreds of years through enslavement and exploitation. In modern times we have fougt two devestating world wars, and encountered massive genocides where innocent people have been killed(Germany, Soviet Union, China, Africa, Indonesia) in millions or hundreds of thousands.
I think you take your peace and freedom for granted. Even today if you were living Africa or Iraq you would not be treating this suffering so lightly.
Yes. And if you have not learnt from history, then there would be something wrong with you. The Buddha preached peace 2600 years ago. Jesus preached love 2000 years ago. And yet, people who professed to follow these religions have perhaps engaged in more destruction than anyone else. Other religious beliefs that encouraged detachment from society and focus on the individual's liberation have failed miserably too. We have thousands of years of evidence to realize this fact. Obviously then, these problems you talk about cannot be svoled by any existing religion. It has failed to work all these years and there is no evidence that it will work in future.
You certainly have a case for the immense destruction done by the Abrahamic religions(Christianity and Islam) but I would like to hear your case for the destruction done by Hinduism and Buddhism?
Violence is in our nature. External factors like religion have very limited impact on our ability to suppress these violent tendencies. If a solution exists to this problem, then it has to be outside religion. But that will not work you as you have invested too much time and effort in religion.
If violence is in our nature then we would always be violent and we would be peaceful. This is not true, humans are capable of love, compassion, kindness, humour. In fact when the human is in a normal state he/she is not violent at all, he/she is civil. This normal state occasionally gets disturbed by negative emotional states(anger, depression, lust, hate etc) which have psychological causes. It is evident that the physical object itself is not the cause, because not everybody would react in the same way. Somebody who is prone to anger will get angry at the slightest provocation, and somebody who is calm can remain remain calm even with severe provocation. I have seen people remain unphased even when subject to intense verbal abuse.
Therefore, rather than violence being natural to us, it is actualy a disturbance to our natural state. The good news is that it can be eradicated by learning how the mind works and developing psychological techniques to deal with negative emotional states. Yoga is widely considered the most effective psychological system to do this.
I already made it clear that I accept inference within reason. I will infer the presence of a driver from a moving car.
Yep, and your insistance on the conclusion of this inference being valid is equivalent to my insistance that my insistance the conclusions of my inference are valid.
I bet you accept atoms as well. Do you know that nobody has actually seen atoms?
I will not infer the presence of a ghost from the sound of wind in the darkness.
Nor would I. This is another one of your lovely strawmans to make inferences presented by darsanas other than your own sound silly. You misrepresent what they say and then refute the misrepresentation. Is this because you cannot refute what they actually say?
How do you know there is nothing in the basic elements to create the self? That is Pratyaksha to me and I see no reason to reject it. If there is a problem with what is perceived, then we can look at other options.
It is known by examining the the properties of the basic elements and the propeties of consciousness. Consciousness has the properties of desire, knowledge, ignorance and pain. The basic elements do not demonstrate any of these properties. If the sun for example had the property of ignorance and forgot to shine, all life on earth would end. If the parts of my body had intention, then they would do whatever they wanted. My legs would move by their own volition. Scary thought indeed.
Therefore the evidence is clearly showing the basic elements have no such properties that consciousness has. How then can they lead to producing consciousness? Does an apple seed ever produce an orange? Does a human couple ever give birth to dogs?
I argue that Nyaya's alternate hypothesis raises more questions than it answers. Given that we have multiple such alternatives, Occam's razor leads me to accept the simplest of them all - Svabhava-vada or the Lokayata/Carvaka position.
Yeah occams razor in this case is clearly supporting Nyaya. To say that matter somehow one day magically becomes develops an immaterial thing involves the fabrication of new entities. The truth is, it is you who are being irrational here and not religious people who insist consciousness is separate from matter. You are denying a very basic fact that we observe vis-a-vis matter and consciousness.
I state that conscisousness has a beginning and an end. X was born at time T1 and died at time T2. T1 is when his consicousness was created and T2 was when it ended. There is no reason to look for an alternative.
You are talking about a body which was born at T1 and died at T2. But we already know that the body is dying all the time. I don't have the same body I had when I was 5 or even 5 min ago. The cells are constantly renewing themselves. I still exist though. So why should it be any different when the body is completely gone?
If I cannot observe myself I would not know I exist. But I do know I exist and that means I am able to observe myself. No reason to put myself beyond time and space.
What do you observe yourself with? The 5 senses? The internal sense(which you rejected earlier) You never observe yourself. Your sense of "I" is not something you know through any of your senses. That "I-am-ness" is just there. It is a sense of beingness. It exists, that is why you know, experience or perceive anything. If it is not there, you would know nothing, experience nothing, perceive nothing. It precedes everything that you know, experience and perceive. It is therefore not an object you ever know through any means of knowledge. As all you know takes place in time and space, it therefore cannot be in time and space.
