This thread about Hinduismhas a very interesting post from Acsenray, in which s/he mentions how some modern reformers present Hinduism as a non-polytheistic religion, while other worshippers ardently believe that all their gods are real and have extra arms and legs, etc. (with a great deal of variation inbetween these two extremes).
This brought to mind a debate I had with my former Americorps teammate, Jon. Jon is an atheist, raised Jewish, from a background in academia. I’m also an atheist, raised in the Deep South in a culture soaked with Baptist and Methodist theology.
Jon’s feeling was that Jesus, as a Christian figure, was not supposed to be understood as a literal son of God, but instead as a symbolic religious figure. I disagreed. I had been taught as a child that God magically put Jesus in Mary’s womb, and he was the one and only son of God (and Jesus was also God, but my little kid brain didn’t grasp all that too well). Now, there may well be sects that consider Jesus a human and son of Joseph and only symbolically a son of God, but that was not what I was taught. When I was a kid, I believed Jesus was a magical human/divine hybrid, just like little Hindu kids believe Ganesha literally has the head of an elephant.
This disconnect makes me wonder, when I read about religions foreign to me, how much of what is reported to me is the academic interpretation of the religion, and how much is actually what the worshippers sincerely believe.
At least in the context of Hinduism, Acsenray and Anamika are right, in that any academic interpretation of the * contents* of Hinduism that you read will be incorrect, at least to the extent that there will be a sizable group of people somewhere in the world who believe something different from, or even directly opposed to, the interpretation at hand. What may instead be much more accurate would be any metareligious(?) account of hinduism, describing the set of beliefs in different areas (and eras) and likely historical path followed by them.
What your teammate Jon might say is “What do you mean the academic perception of religion?” It’s not like there’s some single monolithic ‘academy’ that’s somehow not made up of individual humans. Especially in a field like religion.
Just like there are nearly infinite ways for worshippers to perceive their religion, there are nearly infinite ways for academics to perceive a religion. No doubt some academic descriptions of a religion have made mistakes or misunderstandings; no doubt some are fairly accurate. And, again, given the variety of human beings in the world, for every academic description of a language, there are some followers that fit that description and some that don’t.