Killing the Buddha makes religion interesting again

Killing the Buddha describes itself as a "forum for the supposedly non-religious to think and talk about what religion is, is not and might be... For people made anxious by churches, for people embarrassed to be caught in the spirituality section of a bookstore and for people both hostile and drawn to talk of God." So says their manifesto. "We believe it’s high time for a new canon to be created, and that the Web is just the place to collect it. We refuse to accept the Internet as a world wide shopping mall. We know intuitively it can be a sort of Talmudic cathedral, a tool of transcendence made of words. We’re here to build it." (Read the complete manifesto.)

Coolness aside, one of the site's contributors Ananya Vajpeyi wrote an exegesis The Moon is Elsewhere, which talked to me as a Hindu but for the first time, on my frequency.

"[A]sk me if I am a Hindu," she says, "a monist, a dualist, a monotheist, a polytheist or an atheist, ask me if I am believing or agnostic, and I would be stumped. That’s not the way we think about it, I would be tempted to say. And in this regard, the confusion of categories in my life is by no means unique or even unusual. I am pretty much like most Hindus: we take our gods seriously enough to not confuse them with humans."

Vajpeyi is a professor of South Asian History at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.