Dr Simon Reads...

  Chapter Two: The Yog of Analytical Knowledge (Sankhya Yog) Reasons why it’s okay to kill.   Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bhagavad Gita). In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the Bhagavad Gita, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.   For more detail, see the introductory post https://bit.ly/2XAch2A For the online Bhagavad Gita that I use, see here https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/   And now:   “The Supreme Lord said: My dear Arjun, how has this delusion overcome you in this hour of peril? It is not befitting an honorable person. It leads not to the higher abodes, but to disgrace.”   Sankhya Yog apparently means the “ Knowledge of the Soul ”, or “Spirit”, or however you want to translate “Sankhya”. The bulk of this chapter is Kirshna explaining matters of the soul to Arjun, and is quite heavy in terms of spiritual teaching.   First o...

Chapter One: Lamenting the Consequences of War (Arjun Vishad Yog) I’ve Trained For This With The Silmarillion Welcome to the first instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bhagavad Gita). In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the Bhagavad Gita, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.   For more detail, see the introductory post https://bit.ly/2XAch2A For the online Bhagavad Gita that I use, see here https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/   And now: “Dhritarashtra said: O Sanjay, after gathering on the holy field of Kurukshetra, and desiring to fight, what did my sons and the sons of Pandu do?”   There’s a framing device to the Bhagavad Gita, or at least to this chapter, wherein blind King Dhritarashtra is told about the goings on at a distant battlefield by his minister Sanjay, who has the ability to see and hear events happening far away.   The reason why Dhritarashtra is interested in th...

New year, new religion. For this next series I leave behind the Near East and head off to India for: Bhagavad Gita:  Introduction.   Welcome to a new instalment of the Atheist Explores Sacred Texts series. Having ploughed through the Near Eastern Monotheisms for a while now, it’s time to go further east, starting with a look at the Bhagavad Gita.   Hinduism and Buddhism both seem to be less about following a particular holy text, but are dealt with more in a vast corpus of theological and philosophical works, so distilling them down to any particular piece of writing is tricky.   As far as I’ve worked out, Hindu sacred texts are comprised of two large bodies of work. The Vedas are four collections of ritual instructions, prayers, mantras, commentaries on the rituals, and philosophy and meditation. Of these, the Rig Veda is probably the most well known, the others being the Yajurveda , Samaveda , and Atharvaveda . These include the earliest known writings on th...