I use to occasionally watch Kushal Mehra’s Youtube podcast around 2017 – 2018ish and I enjoyed watching many of his informative interviews with interesting intellectuals, researchers, and journalists in India and I enjoyed learning of his life story from what he explained on his Youtube channel. I have a generally positive disposition when it comes to Kushal Mehra and his friends in their group podcast on Youtube. He even once shared my blog post critiquing the Ex-Muslims of North America organization and the Ex-Muslim movement in the West more generally. He and his two friends are far better orators than I’ll probably ever be. I tend to stumble on words and I’m not very quick in responses during discussions or debates compared to popular Youtube debaters like Alex J. O’Connor. This review is not an attempt to insult him, but just my honest thoughts. I try to never hold back from outspoken critiques that I have with any work. Not to say that I try to exude hate, I don’t. I just want to be as forthright with what I view the material to be, because my review is for people who wonder if a book is worth their time and not to cuddle the author’s feelings. Generally speaking, most true creative people have a survival-of-the-fittest mentality to creativity and view an inability to accept criticism as an acknowledgement that the person doesn’t belong in the creative space. If you can’t take criticism of your work, then what is the true value of your work to other people?
All that said, this book is boring as fuck and nearly put me to sleep near the tail-end of each chapter. I enjoyed the parts of a very lengthy chapter one where he went into his life growing up in India and the usage of Samkhya-Karika aphorisms that he cited to make his case, but then he meandered and kept going into long-winded pabulums about the importance of critical thinking without much substance. His second chapter on New Atheism was even worse. First of all, why the fuck did he choose to title it “Neo-Atheists”? Like, what? Why add even more confusing lingo to what is historically viewed as the New Atheist movement? Nevertheless, I liked some portions of this chapter where he described the acute differences between New Atheism and its predecessors in Western culture; but then he went into a very boring Wikipedia-style explanation of each of the four’s backgrounds and then gave a very shallow set of statements about how Atheism+ may have led to Wokeism without any evidence or valid reasoning to believe such a claim. Overall, Chapter 2’s latter-half felt like a waste to fill-up space. Why did he essentially repeat Chapter 1’s conclusion about emphasizing the importance of critical thinking? This was dull, uninspired, and boring. If you want to inspire critical thinking, then maybe give a critique of God is Not Great instead of just providing a short quote?
Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 were both really boring to read through. He mostly provides extremely basic information and it reads more like he’s giving miniature reviews on each subsection of other people’s books. That’s not why I bought and read your book, Kushal Mehra. Most of these chapters contain a summarization of other books with pros and cons about them regarding their research into religion from a neutral vantage point. That’s great for a brief book review about all these different books that he comments on, but he doesn’t give his perspective, his opinions, and his judgments on them. This is a boring slog, because it reads like he tried to make an academic approach but confused academia for neutrality. Assessing pros and cons of various religious theories is fine, but he needs to give his perspective on what he actually thinks about it and then give his reasons why he thinks these arguments add value to other people’s lives. All he did was give dull summaries that you could read off of Wikipedia about these other books. These two chapters feel like excessive padding throughout most of it. There’s some value with his opinion on why a viewpoint of pluralistic neutrality is harmful to Afghan children suffering under the Taliban in Chapter 4 of his book, but this sort of material is too small and too far between extremely boring Wikipedia-style summaries of other books that read like pointless book reviews that aren’t getting to the point of the main thesis of his book.
I disagree with his summary of the Bhagavad Gita and I have no idea how he took away that it was about objective moral values espoused by Lord Krishna; Krishna imparts on Arjuna to follow his Dharmic duty in selfless service without any desire for a reward, that is true. However, the beginning has Arjuna contest that mass murder and civil war between dynastic factions is objectively morally wrong because it leads to mass death, cruelty, stupidity, pain, and hardship. Arjuna doesn’t want to contribute to a cycle of human stupidity and that was honestly the most surprising beginning that I’ve read of any religious book in my life. Krishna’s explanation is a counter to that viewpoint. Krishna’s argument is that you shouldn’t think about the consequences, you should just follow your duty to your faith with the explicit understanding that the other side is following their duties to their faith too. It is subjective, cyclical human behavior in nature, and it goes on from the past into the future of human activity, it happened prior to our births, and it will continue even beyond our lives; but Krishna firmly asserts that selfless service to your community is the highest form of a human ideal. Even if all that cruelty and stupidity is true, we must keep striving selflessly to serve others without regard for ourselves as part of a human ideal. Why? Because selfless service ultimately helps the welfare of the world more than acting selfishly towards others and seeking only profits. Therefore, according to Lord Krishna, going to war in the service of Caste duties is justified on the basis of selfless service to others and to the entire world. In modern times, due to rightful criticisms of the bigotry of Casteism, Hindus of India and Hindus throughout the world have replaced Caste duties with national pride to one’s country. A Hindu of India interprets Lord Krishna’s message in terms of selflessly serving their countrymen of India, whereas I – a Hindu Indian American – interpret it as selflessly serving my fellow Americans. Additionally, whenever I see unfairness towards anyone, then I call it out to the best of my ability as an American. There can be overlap, such as agreed upon support for democratic norms and values throughout all democracies; however, Secular nationalism is a coherent position to have in the modern world. Nevertheless, I’d argue that the Bhagavad Gita is clearly subjective on the basis of one’s own perspective and what selfless service means to each of us as individuals. I’ve read the Bhagavad Gita twice from start to finish and I never viewed it as arguing objective morals, because Lord Krishna acknowledges that each side will follow Selfless Service as the ideal.
I think the biggest problem is that this honestly reads like a wannabe-academic pretending to know how to write an academic book. To actually write an academic work, you need a thesis and to give credible arguments for that thesis, while acknowledging both its limitations and possible places where the writer can be wrong. Kushal Mehra’s book spends most of the time giving random summaries of all these various books without giving an opinion on them or sometimes even explaining how they’re relevant to his specific chapter. That’s what truly made it a boring, meandering mess. All these subsections are perfectly fine and helpful for a neutral book review of these varied topics, but it’s at the expense of the specific defined purpose of each chapter and it provides no argument at all for his opinions on different topics.
He has some good arguments against pluralism by pointing out Islam’s problems, such as with Bacha Bazi in Afghanistan, but then he makes a total self-contradictory argument regarding our shared Hindu faith. If everyone in India is a Hindu, and even Muslims are Hindu, then is FGM and Bach Bazi also Hindu? You can’t have it both ways, Kushal Mehra. Hindus and Muslims have totally separate sets of beliefs with different consequences as a result of inherent beliefs. Hindu practices are about regulating the senses and primarily materialized from over 5000 years of Yoga practices, Islam emerged in the 7th century from the deluded ravings of a warlord. Likewise, if everyone is Hindu, then does that mean the Hindu-Jewish tradition of longstanding 2400 years of uninterrupted peace celebrated by both religions as a respect for mutual differences; should this be applied to Islam and Christianity in India simply for being Indian, despite both these two religions having mercilessly persecuted Jews for centuries? Or the fact that Islam mercilessly persecuted both, while Christianity had a mixed history of European Christian persecution of Indians and compassionate American Christian aid towards Indians? These religious faiths are far too different and I find peace can come more from respecting differences than deludedly trying to find the sameness in everything. Without clearly defined barriers and definitions for the basic ideas behind religion, religious value systems become meaningless buzzwords.
True peace doesn’t need faux-unity and sometimes divisional barriers don’t create contempt between groups at all. Judaism is most similar to Islam, but was persecuted by it for hundreds of years. Judaism and Hinduism have clear, strict differences and there’s been uninterrupted 2400 years of peace in which both religious groups have an unspoken rule to never have a violent conflict with each other as part of a mutual and longstanding respect for each other’s religious traditions, likely an openness to criticism of each other’s religious traditions is what maintained these 2400 years of peace, and an acceptance of atheism in both of the respective religious traditions may have played a factor. I believe these facts alone undoes much of the pabulum spewed in Kushal Mehra’s book.
Overall, I’d give this book a 1.5 / 5, so a 2 / 5 in total.