[QUOTE=Sarvamaṅgalamaṅgalā;61539]Have you read this article, already?
http://www.vmission.org.in/files/pdf/radical-universalism.pdf
A truly objective look will show that abrahamic religions are not based on humanistic morals, but violently opposed to them.[/QUOTE]
Thank you for that, and as a dharmin of Vedic dharma, I follow the Vedic ethic of properly understandingly the purva paksha(the other side) So I read most of work you linked. It was well written and argued, but from the very start I noticed that Hinduism as a religion in contrast to other religions is made as an assumption and then the author with this as their main assumption proceeds to argue how radical universalism is not tenable because each differs from one another.
He says that neo-Hinduism has succubmed to the pressures of Western modernity and remoulded itself to be more acceptable in the modern world and Western rationality and skepticism. Even sincere Hindus like Swami Vivekananda have succumbled to this, though they maintained Hindism was the pinnacle of religon, they still said all religions were equal.
But has the author not himself succumbed to Western rationality and skepticism by uncritically accepting Hinduism is a religion? This concept of religion is a Western categorical concept. The author has rightly said that in India prior to neo-Hinduism in the 19th century, nobody in Vedic dharma said all viewspoints were equal and there was a lot of healthy intellectual debate between different viewpoints. It is obviously self-defeating to undermine your own viewpoint by saying it has equal veracity as another. But nobody had a categorical concept of religion either. It is equally undermining to force Vedic dharma to fit into the Western category.
The closest we have is darshana or dharma. There is Jain dharma, Buddha dharma, Charvaka dharma(I will not consider Sikhs as a separate dharma to Vedic dharma, because the differences are not significant enough) Each of these dharma are build on an epistemology(pramana) and everyone one of then accepts perception as their foundation.
Charvaka dharma accepts only perception of your 5 senses, therefore if one is charvakin one is forced to accept only materials exist and life is about feeding the body because your only valid means of knowledge is perception. Actually, it is not true Charvaka rejects inference completely, but it accepts inference only to do with what is known - it makes no inference of unknowns, including atoms.
It is very similar to modern atheism and materialism.
Buddha dharma accepts only perception of experience and only inferences to do with experience. It evaluates life in terms of desires, attachments, personality, ego and stays very clear of metaphysics. Again, if one accepts only experiece as their valid means of knowledge, one is forced to conclude that all is void, dependently-arising, all desire is suffering, there is no self.
Jain dharma accepts perception and logic, but a special kind of relativist logic where no position is absolutely true, because every position is just one angle or perspective on reality. However, this does not mean you can have an illogical position. One is bound by the conditions of their own position and thus must remain consistent.
Vedic dharma accepts perception and inference, but its main emphasis is on causal logic, to adduce the hidden cause of something based on the manifest effect. If you accept causal logic that every effect must necessarily have a cause then you are forced to conclude all the metaphysics Vedic dharma declares: karma and samsara, atman and brahman, samkhya and yoga.
No matter how much you disagree with a worldview, what one cannot deny that each of these worldviews is a systematic, self-consistent and logically constructed based on real empirical facts. This is the opposite of religion where there are no such self-consistent empirical and logical worldview, but rather opinions, untested claims and tradition. It is far closer to science, where every worldview is built up on assumptions based on empirical facts.
Christianity, Judaism and Islam are not dharmas or darshanas - they are opinion, speculation, untested claims, mythology, not a self-consistent, empirical and logical worldview. The word used in the Indian tradition for them is: mat(opinion) They are not even considered worthy of any kind of rational consideration. Many rational people feel the same now days, and would only discuss them as matters of faith and religion.
Just as Christianity, Judaism and Islam, Vedic dharma is not a religion. The closest Western concept is science to Vedic dharma, not religion. This is why Vedic dharma is universal - because science is universal.
