Three closely related observations can be made of the three faiths so far considered in this series, Judaism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism. First, “-ism” presents an unhelpful vision of a monolith where, in fact, there is almost always a complex ethnic, cultural, national, ideological, practical diversity. There is not Judaism but Judaisms, as Aaron Tapper would put it; as there are numerous overlapping Jewish communities that acknowledge a commonality of Jewishness in one another by various, competing metrics, mapping complexly onto the things scholars mean when they talk about religion, especially categories like “belief, behavior, and belonging.” Second, in addition to synchronic diversity at any given moment in a religion’s history, religions are always diachronically mutating, changing not just based on space, place, and “material” substrate of community and culture but also based on time. The Judaism of the Second Temple period is not the religious world of Ancient Israel and Judah and it also is not the Judaism of the Mishnah, Tosefta, and Talmuds, and none of them are strictly the Judaisms of the middle ages or today. The umma of Muhammad and his earliest followers may be the historical origin of contemporary Islamic diversity, but it is simplistic to pretend that Islam has never changed over the course of its history. Zoroastrians look to Zarathuštra as their historic prophet, the author of the Gāthās and the teacher of a new religious wisdom, but what it has meant to follow Zarathuštra’s teachings has never been uniform at any one particular moment in time and it has undergone many phases of development from antiquity to the present. Third, synchronic and diachronic diversity make the category not only of a singular -ism unhelpful, but also the category of religion itself unhelpful. In reality, what we mean by “religion” is usually just a nexus for considering the human experience as a whole, considered from the perspective of how a culture orients itself around the sacred rather than around, say, money, or sex, or politics, etc. Arguably, we can call this the ultimate such nexus, insofar as most people and cultures have been religious throughout human history, continue to engage in religious behavior even when they formally identify as non-religious, and religion expresses and seeks that which is of ultimate value and interest to most people. Philosophically, of course, engaging the human predicament from the vantage of the sacred is appropriate, since it is to think about human being in relation to the world (as the summative catalogue of interconnected, interdependent, contingent realities) and God (as ultimate reality). But there are other such nexuses, that we have to acknowledge include religion even as religion includes them. And so religion is culture considered from the standpoint of a specific modality, not a separate thing from culture, or from life; that is why the word “religion” itself does such poor explanatory work in describing so many different cultures in which things we think of as religious are infused throughout. These observations will repay dividends as we try to think about Hinduism, or Hinduisms, as a collective term embracing a certain large family of religions emanating from South Asia.
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