Why Hindus worship so many gods and goddesses is a real mystery for most people. In the West, where the mass majority of people are part of the Abrahamic faith tradition with one God, the concept of polytheism is nothing more than fantasy or mythology worthy of comic book material. The interesting thing is that one culture can see this as fiction while most Hindus, without a second thought, can walk into a temple with multiple deities, bow down and offer prayer and worship with devotion treating that deity as much like a person as you and me.
The Bhakti tradition offers an explanation for this complicated theology of millions of gods. I find this explanation quite satisfying. For a country, state, or city to run properly, the government creates various departments and employs individuals within those departments -- teachers, postal workers, police and military personnel, construction works, doctors, politicians, and so many more. Each of these departments employs hundreds or thousands of individuals carrying out their respective duties and each sector has an individual or multiple individuals that oversees the activities of that one unit. Each head of an area is endowed with certain privileges and powers which facilitates them in their tasks. It's safe to say that the number of individuals working for the United States government goes into the millions. This is just to keep one country working. Multiply that by all the countries on the planet, which is around 200, and all the people working for these governments, the total would easily come out to tens of millions of people employed by the various governments of the world to run one planet.
The way it's explained is that in order to keep the universe running, Krishna, the supreme being, has put into place individuals that oversee different parts of the material universe. These individuals are powerful beings that have been appointed by Krishna and have been bestowed with the necessary powers and abilities to manage and govern their area of creation. They can be referred to as demigods. For example, there is someone responsible for the sun and his name is Surya. The goddess Saraswati is the overseer of knowledge. The creator of the material universe is known as Brahma. The destruction of the universe is overseen by Shiva and Vishnu serves as the maintainer. There are individuals overseeing the oceans, the wind, and practically every facet of creations. When seen from this perspective, 33 million is not that big a number.
We take it completely for granted that the sun is always perfectly fixed in its position. If it were to move even slightly closer to the earth we would burn to a crisp and if it were to distance itself from us, we would become popsicles. We also take it for granted that all day and all night, there is oxygen in the atmosphere for us to breathe. It's not by chance that all this is existing. It has been placed here and someone has been put in charge of each aspect of it. For example, we plug our electronic gadgetry into power outlets. That's not magic and it's not by chance. It was constructed into the building to facilitate our needs. If for some reason, there's a massive power outage, then the person in charge would have to take responsibility for its maintenance.
The material universe functions like a big governmental structure with heads of departments managing their respective affairs. These heads or "demigods" have also been endowed with abilities to grace humanity with certain boons and that's why so many people pray to the different gods to have their material wishes fulfilled. Granting boons to whatever degree deemed appropriate is up to the individual god.
According to the scriptures, the gods live in different realms with life spans that are much longer than ours. For example, when six months pass here on earth, only one day has gone by in the upper realms. Another six months equals one night. When a full day goes by for them, a full year has passed here on earth. According to human calculation, their lives span to a few billion years. This may sound quite fantastic to one who is hearing it for the first time, however, it's not much different than what Einstein said about the relativity of time. Einstein's hypothetical experiment known as the "twin paradox" suggests that if one of a pair of twins travels to outer space at the speed of light, while the other remains on earth, when the space traveling twin returns, he will be younger than his counterpart on earth.
There is also a story from the Puranas which parallels Einstein's hypothetical experiment. A yogi, by the power of his trained mind, exited the earthly realm for the higher planetary realms, was informed by the inhabitants of these higher realms that millions of years had instantly passed on Earth in the mere moments since he had entered the higher realms. They also told him that all of his relatives and everyone he had ever known was deceased. The understanding that time is relative is nothing new for the Hindu tradition. It was quite common knowledge for most Hindus.
Even though the gods live for billions of human years, for them one of their years feels like a year would feel for us here on earth. After their allotted span of time, most of them will also die and then different living beings are placed into those positions to continue overseeing their duties. This is similar to most governmental posts. Each person in that post can serve in that capacity for a certain duration and then is replaced. It's not an eternal post. I'm trying to keep it somewhat simple, as it's a bit more complicated than that. There are realms that go beyond the heavenly sphere. The highest realm within the material cosmos is Satyaloka, where Brahma resides. His entire life span, if calculated in terms of human years, is 311 trillion years. Within the material sphere, he overseas everything, including all godly beings. They all work under his jurisdiction. After his allotted time of 311 trillion years which feel to him like a 100 years would to us, he also has to die. The conclusion is that nothing in the material world is permanent. From his perspective of time, our existence is similar to that of bacteria or some kind of microorganism. There are some organisms that only live for a few minutes or a few hours, but for that organism, it lived a full and complete life. From our human perspective, it was just a blink of an eye.
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Qasim Rashid: The Honorable Lord Krishna: A Prophet Of Allah
Thank you, GPD.
Which is why religion (any religion) is not qualified to talk science.
The sun moves -- along with the planets. We are in a spiral arm of our galaxy and have been moving since formation. Relative to the earth, the sun is at one of the foci of an elliptical orbit. That means we are closer to the sun at some points of the year than we are at other points of the year. Due to the axial tilt of the earth, it turns out that we are closest to the sun at the Winter Solstice (for the Northern Hemisphere). Good thing, otherwise the Northern Hemisphere would have even wilder extremes of temperature. The Southern Hemisphere (including Australia) gets more severe heat during its summer than the Northern Hemisphere does.
As for the distance from the sun in our orbit, we do know that orbits change. We have evidence that the moon was once much closer to the earth than it is now. It is gradually receding from the earth, but by very small amounts.
If it comforts someone to think that somebody is in charge of the sun and the moon, have at it. But don't think it speaks about reality, because it does not. I find this explanation no more appropriate than Christianity's Creationism.
Also I think you will have fun skimming through this: http://vedabase.net/sb/5/21/
It is a roughly 5000 year old ancient text called Srimad Bhagavatam; the above is a chapter titled "The movements of the Sun"
Neils Bohr: "We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections."
Neils Bohr: "Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems."
Heisenbrerg: "There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality."
more complex, but it was helpful to my understanding.
We must interpret the 33 million with reference to the core ideas - namely that divinity is all pervasive, that we too therefore are a part of that divinity, a manifestation of it. Our challenge is to realize this unity in us and everything around us. Our ego prevents us from doing so. Spiritual practice is the quest to realize this unity and identity with the divine.
That this single unifying idea implies manifestations, makes it easy to understand the 33 million gods and goddesses. The number does not mean anything - it is synonymous with infinity.
Which aspect of that divinity, which manifestation you choose to accomplish that spiritual goal, starting with the destruction of the ego is completely immaterial. They are just means to an end.
What we Sanatan Dharmis have failed to do, is to communicate this essential simplicity of our belief system to the world. Their confusion is our confusion.
What's happened is many Hindu (not Indian) concepts have been taken, and then taken out of context, and then redefined,... all the while never acknowledging Hinduism's gifts to humanity (the Vedic principles of living life, science, etc.). Many Hindus are quite content with letting others define them (their thinking is "as long as I know the truth" let the 'others' think what they want"). This is ridiculous thinking to say the least.
Dharmis need to (re) educate themselves - the Dharmis who do know their faith tradition are trying to educate but it's challenging when there's apathy and ignorance along with arrogance coming from non-Dharmic adherents.
One god would be like a celestial tyranny, a kind of universal North Korea. At least polytheism had some variety
This the materialists have in common with the religious about their concept of a god made in the image of a human superman. neither has a clue this is a reflection of a lower level of consciousness dev.
Smart has little to do with consciousness dev contrary to what the world teaches.