The myth and the truth
Hinduism -the myth and the truth
It s frequently asked why Hindus are worshipping so many Gods? During a browsing in the net, I found an answer to this question," It is because they are misinformed" It made me laugh. Are Hindus misinformed? definitely not. Even before thousands of years, even before the emergence of the existing popular religions, Hinduism declared" There is only one God and only one mankind"(Thirumoolar- a Tamil saint) Then why Hindus are worshipping so many gods? Meditation is one of the main activity in Hinduism.In the begining of the meditational practice, each individual has to concentrate in some image. For this purpose many deities are created to suit individuals according to their mind set. Hinduism mainly preached the following types of worship.
1) Saivism--- To worship God as Shiva
2) Vaishnavism- To worship God as Vishnu
3) Saktham-To worship God as Devi,Godess
4)Ganapathyam-To worship God as Vinayaka who has elephant head and human body
5)Kumaram-To worship God as Murugan, a cute child
6) Cowmaram-To worship God as light
Due to the ignorance of the followers of this segments, they quarrelled themeselves that their God is superior to other Gods.To put a full stop to this Bhagavat Gita clarrified that doing their job in perfection and sincerely itself is enough to reach God.
Tamil saint Thirumoolar explained that "Gold is one. But different types of ornaments can be made out of it. Like that God is one, but deities are numerous"
Hinduism gives full freedom of worship.It never compels any body to worship this way or that way. No stringent rules. It believes that existence of God should be experienced by individuals and it can not be acheived by stringent prayers and other things. It wont prohibit worship of deities of other religions too. Hinduism believes that relegions are many roads to a single city, that is God. There is a motto in Hinduism that God is love and love is God.
So Hindus are not blindly worshipping many deities. They know that there is only one God and he can be worshipped in many forms.They worshipped every thing in this earth, the sun,moon,planets,sea etc as all are created by God. Hinduism is an ocean and it can not be narrated in a single page.