Religions in India

When we think about Indian religion, the most common thing to do is to imagine an elephant goddess with many arms, but there is way more than that in today's indian culture. Even though almost 80% of the population believes in Hinduism, which by the way is the world's third largest religion by population and probably the oldest one, there are other religions that are very important in indian culture such as Islam (14%) or Christianity (3%). Those percentages might not seem very high, but if we take into account that 1.275.000 people live in India, a 14% means a lot.

There are also other minor religions like Sikhism (1.5%), Buddhism (0.7%) or Jainism (0.4%) that, even though they do not have a big representation, make indian culture a bit more interesting.



The most impressive thing about Hinduism are probably the temples. There are more than 600.000 temples and almost each of them is a fantastic work of art. In this image we can see the Meenakshi Amman Hindu Temple. It was built in the 7th century for the god Meenakshi and it is located on the southern bank of the Vaigai River.

One interesting fact about Hinduism is that there are not religious orders, authorities, governing bodies, prophets or sacred books. Hindus are free to choose to be polytheistic, pantheistic, monotheistic, monistic, agnostic, atheistic or humanist. Other religions like Christianity or Islam should learn from Hinduism and start being more tolerant. That way there would not be so many religious conflicts like the jihad.