Customer Reviews

Our Religions: The Seven World Religions Introduced by Preeminent Scholars from Each Tradition

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I've been trying to get a better understanding of Taoism. I was reading articles by Russell Kirkland at the University of Georgia and I came across a transcript of a speech he gave. In the speech he basically says that almost all western perceptions of Taoism are incorrect and spent a good deal of the speech tearing down different translations of ancient texts (such as Stephen Mitchell's translation of the "Tao Te Ching") and westernized interpretations that little resemble real Taoism (such as Benjamin Hoff's "Tao of Pooh"). He did, however, mention the chapter in this book by Liu Xiaogan as being a pretty good treatment of Taoism. He was right. It was most excellent.

As well, I have recently been studying the concept of Zen. This led me to read the chapter in this book on Buddhism and once again I was not disappointed. So I decided just to read the whole book.

This is an excellent book written by knowledgeable experts. It manages to avoid the pitfall of cultural bias that afflicts so many other works on religion. If you want to begin understanding the "whys" and "hows" of the world's major religions, I strongly recommend this book.

The book itself is great. I like the formate, with scholars from each tradition explaining their own religious heritage, and I have found it remarkably informative for someone like me who had only a passing familiarity with most of the world's faiths other than my own. I've learned a lot from this book, and I like that I am getting an insider's view and not the perspective of someone mounting a polemic against someone else's faith, or even that of a detached outside.

But the main thing that prompted me to write this review is to let other Kindle users know that the Kindle edition is frustratingly strewn with errors. Scanning mistakes abound, "modem" instead of "modern," for example, and, surprisingly often "Cod" instead of "God." Reading about "Almighty Cod" is amusing a time or two, but it gets old quickly. In the section on Hinduism there seem to be some Hindi-specific characters that don't convert into the Kindle fonts, leaving uninterpretable squiggles in the middle of names. I hope at some point Amazon does a corrected edition and updates my digital file, but right now it's clear that no one at HarperCollins even bothered to proof-read the Kindle edition.

I found this book an interesting resource it gave a very good general idea of the concepts with in the Religions described in the text. A good starting point if one is interested in trying to understand the views of different Religions.

There is a great benefit to hearing about a religious tradition from a scholar who has chosen that tradition as his own. This is the novel approach taken in "Our Religions". All too often, a person writes a comparative book only to shake fingers at other people's faiths. I now have a new respect for Hinduism's tolerance of other religions. I have a new respect for Islam and Judaism. Each section devotes a good amount of history to the religion being covered.

Personally, I have chosen Deism for my own religious view, so I wasn't swayed by any of the writers. Although, I am most curious about Confucianism now. I am grateful to Sharma for bringing together these different traditions in a scholarly and respectful way.

I think that putting together this collection of chapters, each by an expert
in his own religion, is a good idea. I find it amazing that no one has ever
done this before, if it's true.

But I have a problem with the chapter that Arvind Sharma wrote on his own
religion - Hinduism. He contradicts himself several times, and makes excuses
for things that are not excusable. For example, he states that if Hinduism
sometimes seems uncivilized, that is only because it is older than civilization.
I'm sorry, that rationalization is not good enough. If Hinduism sometimes
seems uncivilized, that is because it *is* uncivilized.

If Hinduism wants to be relevant to a modern world, or even to its own
younger generation, Hindus will have to not make these excuses. Hindus
will have to get over the worship of their own culture and of their own
baseless superiority complex, and instead think about what they actually
have to offer that will help people to advance spiritually. And then
they will have to figure out how they can communicate that better than
they do. Every time I pick up a book written by a Hindu, I keep hoping
for good clear writing, but I never see it, and this chapter is no
exception. Classes in technical writing for everyone!

I speak as somebody who has tried it and moved on. But if the Hindus
can wake up and make these changes, there might be some hope for it.