Not exactly Christmassy

I’ve been looking around The Guardian’s Comment is Free Belief section, and it’s pretty good.  (Generally speaking, I preferred The Guardian’s website when they gave more prominence to CIF articles on their main page.  Now you have to make the extra click, and I miss a lot of stuff there.)

This article about modernising Hinduism is pretty interesting.  Apparently, the Hindu America Foundation has a report that tackles the caste system head on.  I was interested to read this part:

Noting that there are defenders of the caste system, not just the curmudgeon and cruel among Hindus, but the likes of Voltaire and Diderot who fought against the monotheistic intolerance of Christians and Muslims, to sociologists like Louis Dumont who argued that the "distribution of functions leads to exchanges", to the great Indophile, Alain Daniélou who argued that caste does not equate to "racist inequality but… a natural ordering of diversity," the HAF report argues that a birth-based hierarchy is unacceptable, that inequities against and the abuse of the Dalits/SCs is a human rights issue, and that the solution to this social ill is available within Hindu sacred texts themselves, and that Hindus should be at the forefront of putting an end to the system of birth-based hierarchy as well as taking the lead in energising the Dalit community to fight discrimination.

It's always good to see how outsider intellectuals justified crap systems.