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Reading through Will Durant's Story Of Civilization, I've noticed that there's frequently a strong attraction to belief in one god. At first the idea is too abstract but eventually it wins over, e.g., Christianity, Islam. But in India, even after invasion after invasion (the Moguls, Portuguese, French, British) and even after competing religions enter the scene (Buddhism), Hinduism and it's stadium of gods survives and strengthens. For every new god Hinduism would just swallow it up and explain it as a reincarnation of some other God and win over. How is this? Does anyone think it may have something to do with the epics, i.e., the Ramayana & Mahabharata?

Great question. I agree that a move toward a belief in one God may be a natural intellectual progression: much the same way as Thales groped for a unifying theory, or the way others speculated about an atomic theory, religious philosophers might grope for a similar unifying theory. I think the next step up the intellectual ladder is to go from an anthropomorphic vision of God toward a more mechanistic theory: where God becomes almost part of the natural, even though he remains super-natural in the sense that we do not understand the phenomenon. [Somewhere there, just before the mechanistic view, come the deists like Jefferson.] Hinduism is pretty hard to define. As you say, Hinduism often accommodated other Gods. In this regard it was like the Roman religion. When the Romans conquered people, they were not like the later Muslim invaders, imposing their God. Instead they -- and the folks they conquered -- seem to have accepted that there were all these Gods: your Gods, my Gods. Ancient Hinduism (pre-Mahabharata / pre-Buddhism) is quite like Greek and Roman beliefs. In fact, they're quite like most ancient beliefs... from all over the world. Importantly, Hinduism did not merely accommodate various Gods, it also accommodated various moral and metaphysical viewpoints (actually various mini-philosophies) within itself. I believe the same was true of other polytheistic religions. Consider morality. In a polytheistic religion, you might find a story about someone who was destroyed because he was too angry, but you might also find a story about someone who was destroyed because he could never get angry. Someone who is evil because he lies, and another who was moral to lie. So, it would be pretty impossible to say for sure whether a poly-theistic religion like Hinduism advocates anger or lying: it depends... You want a story from the scriptures to justify your viewpoint? We can do that for you. The same with metaphysics. Hinduism (and I guess Greek and Roman traditions) can accommodate various stories about the origin of the universe. Some more educated Romans viewed the specific Gods as concretes that the masses needed to keep them focused and to give them fiction-like non-abstract examples, but not as literal truths. It is the same in Hinduism as it has evolved over the years. One can easily view Brahma (or Zeus) as a "one God" idea. But, more than that, there are ideas of the creation and disappearance of Brahma itself that postulate a more mechanistic view of the universe. There are famous Hindu philosophers who said that Hinduism is not a religion but a philosophy. If you meet 10 educated Indian who're interested in this topic, you're sure to find one who says this to you. It amounts to the view of the Roman intellectuals who loved their religious tales, but did not view them as concretely true. You will even find Hindus who will go the next step and tell you explicitly that Hinduism is atheistic. The Hinduism of the Vedas is very different from the Hinduism of the Mahabharata. The Hinduism in the Bhagvad Gita is actually a negative critique of the older Vedic Hinduism, and has more in similar with Buddhism. It sounds like a Hindu intellectual not merely trying to accommodate Buddhist metaphysics, but accepting it; but, also leaving space for the traditional Hindu social structure of caste. (Not saying it is a response to Buddhism, but that is sounds like a response. It could well pre-date Buddha, with no inconsistency.) I think the likely secret to the question is this: you want one God? Hinduism has that for you. You want atheism? Hinduism has that for you. How do you fight that except by force and by imposition?

You glossed over his proposal of a 14% wealth tax (and unprecedented confiscation of private property never attempted by any western democracy, or for that matter that many socialist dictatorships, either), his promise to tear up all free trade agreements, including with Japan, Canada and Mexico (thus starting a trade war that would jeopardize prosperity in all these countries, as well as the US), his promise to uproot 12 million people currently living and working in the US (again, an unprecedented blow to the US economy and society in general, not to mention the cost in human life and suffering, inflicted on the 12 million victims), his promise to ban entry to all Muslims (which would result in a response in kind from most civilized countries,essentially trapping the population of the United States within its borders), his promise to attempt to force Mexico to pay for a wall along the US-Mexico border (which would be interpreted as an act of aggression, and end all cooperation, even diplomatic relations, between the Mexican and US governments), etc., etc.

I've always associated this type of thinking as moral relativism or cultural relativism, but at least looking at these terms they don't seem to quite fit (though related). So you have someone that is a cultural relativist. They don't view any culture as particularly right or wrong, better or worse, than any other. But when they look at different cultures, they see obvious differences. Some cultures do better than others. Some result in higher standards of living and others are poorer. This also applies to countries. Some countries are wealthier and some are poorer. And this is where the fun happens. There is a balancing act. Since no culture is better than any other, I assume they expect similar outcomes. Since there are obvious differences between cultures, there is some sort of injustice. The culture doing good is brought down and the culture doing bad is often given the benefit of the doubt on its transgressions. An example of this: In the Israel - Palestinian conflict, Israel is often described as committing genocide and the Palestinians are provoked into aggression. Israel is guilty of every evil and the Palestinians are misunderstood, victims that really aren't doing anything harmful. Is there a term that describes this?

I thought it's called multiculturalism. Although I don't think that most people really understand what that officially means. Usually, when we think of culture, we think of everything but abstract ideas. We think of concrete customs, aesthetics, ethnicity and the like. The look and feel of it. For example, if you think of Italian culture, you think of Pizza, you think of Pasta, you think of Opera Music, you think of predominantly European men and women with dark hair, you think of typical old Italian Roman-style houses with thick roofing tiles surrounded by Mediterranean cypresses, you think of Italian language, and on and on. I think that's why most people are just completely flabbergasted and offended when you tell them that some cultures are superior to others. You can easily come across as a racist, because we usually think of and identify a culture on the perceptual level I described. So to most people, you appear to be saying, e.g., that British Eggs and Bacon should be considered something objectively "better" than Pizza. Or that English should be objectively "better" than Italian. Hence they just brush you off as stupid. For the same reason, it is often said by most people that Americans have "no culture", "no cultural identity", just a hodgepodge of elements borrowed from "real cultures", and otherwise just "commercial stuff" from Coca Cola to Nike in a landscape dominated by public advertising and super malls. Its mostly intellectuals who really identify a culture on the abstract philosophical level of individualism versus collectivism, science versus faith, capitalism versus socialism etc. It took me a while, too, to get what certain people really mean, when they talk about the "culture" of a country. So I think its most important to get the terms straight before starting a discussion with people about culture. You could otherwise easily be talking at cross-purposes with people. So you might misidentify their thinking, just as they might do yours.