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Hindu Atheism - The Oxymoron which people do not understand


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 were considered as separate religions. They were philosophically atheist because they rejected the existence of a supreme entity i.e. The God. But there were some Astika traditions too which also rejected the concept of a supreme entity as an individual but sometimes accepted the concept of a cosmic principle.

Samkhya and its closely related Yoga school rejected the concept of God as the universe functions on cause and effects of karma and therefore having the God as a moral judge is unnecessary. Nyaya School that deals with logic rejects the concept of God on grounds of absence of evidences. The school of Mimasa in a sense believe the deities in the Vedic chants to be simply personifications of natural and cultural concepts rather than a group of human like powerful beings. Only some of the Vedanta schools later developed the concept of the God as an all powerful individual.

To simplify it Hindu atheism not necessarily reject the idea of religion and religious philosophy but rejects the concept of God which has human like properties - one who gets happy when praised or gets angry when religious rules are not followed. For them it is simply a cosmic principle related to cause and effect in the universe.
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