My Perspective

I have seen people many times discussing and ridiculing the term 'Hindu atheism' in social media comments. They find it hard to comprehend how can an Atheist be a Hindu or how can a Hindu be an atheist. Hinduism is a religion and so a Hindu must be a believer of God. If he believes in God then how can someone be an atheist? Well it's not as simple as that. Hinduism is not a monolithic religion with one book, one ideology. Hinduism is actually an amalgamation of many schools of thoughts and philosophies that existed in ancient India. These philosophies sometimes disagreed with each other. These schools of thoughts were broadly divided into two types: Astika or Orthodox and Nastika or Heterodox. Today Astika is translated as Believer and Nastika as Atheist, but that was not strictly the case then. It was with reference to simply accepting or rejecting the authority of the Vedas. Nastika schools of thoughts included Jainism, Buddhism, Charavaka, Ajivika etc. which later