India: Idols Without Conscience
Right next to our college in India stood a temple dedicated to Rani Sati, a woman who committed sati—ritual self-immolation—sometime between the 13th and 17th centuries. The vagueness of the date is telling: Indians—like much of the Third World—did not historically maintain systematic records. The British compiled much of what is known about India’s past, including the lives of its so-called great kings.
Civilizations such as Greece, Rome, and China preserved detailed historical records to extract moral lessons and maintain a sense of continuity. India, by contrast, relied on scattered oral traditions and myths, offering no stable chronology or critical framework.
Without the civilizational anchors of truth-seeking, introspection, and hence a shared moral vocabulary, society was fixated on short-term gain, blind to history’s causes and consequences. Change was viewed not as a moral necessity, but as a threat to the established order. It was Groundhog Day.
Avoiding Western terms—such as justice, truth, honor, fairness, honesty, and system—when explaining India is challenging. Yet, using these words clouds your understanding of its amorality. You are trying to judge an alien culture by Western standards—projecting rather than understanding. These Western concepts hold little meaning in the Indian context. Employing them traps the Western mind in dualities—good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice—while the Indian amoral mindset lacks such binary distinctions. It acts on what is expedient and what maximizes resource acquisition. There is no inner compass, only the shifting logic of the moment.
In such a culture, the abused does not seek redress but instead redirects the injury downward—toward someone weaker—to restore balance or secure advantage. Moral outrage is absent; in its place is a servile ingratiation. As Western ideals circulate today, this mindset stands in uneasy contradiction with imported, superficial notions of dignity and justice—values loudly professed but not internalized. The result is psychological fragmentation: the individual is unmoored, neither grounded in India’s past nor receptive to the ethical demands of the West. Whatever space once existed for moral growth, self-examination, or feedback has been buried beneath a polished, hollow modernity.
The amorality that characterizes Indian society can be traced to its religious landscape. Far from a coherent system of faith or values, Indian religiosity resists unified doctrine and clings to fragmented, local rituals and symbolic acts, divorced from introspection or ethical inquiry.
It is worth asking where Rani Sati fits within the so-called Hindu pantheon. Growing up, few people I knew identified as “Hindu.” Instead, they followed local deities, family gods, or regional traditions. The very idea of “Hinduism” as a unified religion was a colonial construction—an abstract category that was still slowly filtering into Indian consciousness. In reality, there was no singular pantheon, no coherent system. The transition to this manufactured identity met little resistance because Indian religions were not grounded in commandments, moral doctrines, or values comparable to those in the Abrahamic faiths or classical Western philosophy.
One casualty of this misguided fusion—based on the false assumption of a moral foundation—has been the widespread misunderstanding of Indian religiosity, both by outsiders and, increasingly, by Indians themselves. What remained became confused and performative: rituals were preserved, but their symbolic gestures were mistaken for signs of a moral system. Over time, people even projected a structure where none existed. Yet the defining feature of “Hinduism” has been precisely the absence of structure, consistency, or doctrine.
Every morning, at random intervals through the day, and again in the evening, the temple beside our college rang its high-pitched bells for hours, disrupting our studies. No one dared question the noise lest they offend the sanctity of Rani Sati. On the contrary, students regularly visited the temple to seek her blessings.
I urged my peers to report the disturbance, but none supported me. When I went to the police station alone, I was laughed at. This unquestioning reverence—untouched by moral reflection—reveals something deeper about Indian religiosity: a resistance to introspection, a total reliance on ritual, and a deliberate evasion of reason and ethical inquiry.
I bore no ill will toward Rani Sati, but I struggled to find virtue in worshipping
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