RELG 270 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, Ganges, Dharma

• School: McGill University
• Department: Religious Studies
• Course: RELG 270
• Professor: Eliza Rosenberg

Document Summary

Some hindus believe it is possible to accumulate good karma, others that all karma is bad and that meritorious actions and attitudes burn it away: majority of hindus believe all karma is bad so you burn away karma by following your dharma, multiple dimensions of karma, but we won"t get into them because they are quite complicated, there is a longstanding tradition of how dharma and karma dictate behavior with ecology and humans. Righteous war of bhagavad gita extended to struggle against pollution and overconsumption: dharma includes individual and social duties to ecosystem, assaults on ecosystem morally understood as demonic attacks on beings needing protection, therefore it is your dharma to protect the ecosystem from these assaults, divinized view of nature can both compel ecoaction and contribute to environmental problems, grand scale of this concept ganges river is considered a goddess that has descended, as such it requires veneration.