Once a month (or possibly more often, I didn't keep track), the local Sikhs where I used to live would set up a stall on the high street and give away hot food to all-comers, no questions asked, donations gratefully received but absolutely not necessary, zero attempts at proselytising.
Man, I have memories of helping serve in a inner city "missions" as part of my (evangelical Xian) church youth group and with my parents once as well and in all instances there were so many strings attached -- at the time I didn't see anything wrong with it but the older I got the more it disturbed and upset me and led (in part) in the long run to my atheism.
Was only later that I realized that at its onset Christian theology was novel among ancient religious systems in that it is not content with getting you to do deeds and rituals and be part of a religious community .. that's not enough. It requires complete psychological conversion ("ye must be born again") and subservience to the belief system, and also to get other people to do the same. And the "here's some food but what you really need is Jesus" thing goes along with that and really rubs me the wrong way.
TLDR I respect faith communities that serve only for the sake of serving. I never saw that in mine.
Something I've found helpful in my studies trying to square my own atheism with the faith of my parents and grandparents and trying to figure out how much of Xian faith to throw out with the bathwater, is how much it started to feel apparent that most of the blame for all this rests somewhat squarely with Paul. It's Paul's huge mansplaining-energy Letters that bulk up the New Testament with their Make the Roman Empire Great Again rhetoric [1]. It's Paul's Letters that do so much of the work to set the conservative "faith not deeds" and patriarchal "tithe to the church as the new Empire" problems. It Paul's Letters that most directly retcon the actual "services and deeds over beliefs" (and liberalism and disregard for the Roman Empire) of Jesus' actual messages in the Gospels. It's Paul's Letters that are so especially focused on the afterlife over the current life, in part because Paul wrote those letters as passive aggressive threats of war.
I've about gotten to the point where I feel I can suggest that I will attend services with my family if I can get them agree that there will be no readings from any of Paul's Letters. That's a hard request to make sometimes because my family isn't evangelical but Roman Catholic, and Paul is hugely respected still by the Roman Catholic church (for the obvious reasons that it is the church that Paul most directly built). But it is slowly giving me a framework of being able to say here's where I have problems with your faith and here's what I like about the faith: the gospels minus the miracles, and the actual teachings of Jesus. (Unsurprisingly one of my favorite versions of the Bible is the Jefferson Bible. It's pamphlet sized. It might be so much better for the world if it replaced all the Gideon's Bibles. Also, I can recommend A Gospel for Liberals by Todd Eklof as another great view of the gospels.)
[1] Very literally, so. Most of the "to" groups were conquests of the Roman Empire either threatening to leave or already left.
Man, Langar is always awesome. They are not shy on serving size and the food is almost always legit amazing. Dont' miss out on the halwa!
One of the mind blowing things about this is the sheer amount of people some of the Gurdwaras end up feeding (1000s) and how non-trivial the whole process is from kitchen to serving. All volunteers generally.
A key purpose for langar was to challenge the prevailing caste system — people of all castes would be equalized by sitting together and sharing a community meal, a revolutionary concept.
Exactly. This is in common with Gaudiya Vaishnavism of Bengal, where people has to sit on the floor and eat along with people of 36 castes- (so called) low and high, at the same level at festivals.
Yes Sikhism was a result of/was heavily influenced by the Bhakti movement that started in the south of India around 1000 years ago and then rapidly spread through central and northern Indian. It’s akin to the Protestant movement in that it de emphasized the role of Brahmins and interlocutors and emphasized a personal relationship with god.
It's still revolutionary to sit down with people you don't know and share a delicious meal. Sitting on the floor is something we don't do all that often in the West, so IMO, that also opens one's eyes to a different perspective. Langar was and still is revolutionary!
> still revolutionary to sit down with people you don't know and share a delicious meal
The revolutionary part isn't sitting with strangers. It's sitting with strangers across classes. The equivalent to a langar in the West would be everyone in a community dining at the soup kitchen.
Just to correct a small detail, you don’t need to attend a service to visit langar hall and have a meal. Generally Gurudwaras serve 3 meals a day and you can just visit them. From my experience they will do their utmost to serve you regardless of the time when you arrive.
If you’re ever near one and want to serve they usually are very welcoming of any help and I find the process to be quite meditative, personally.
If you think everyone is not equal just keep in mind that in 100 - 200 years the Universe is going to recycle you and everyone living here and allocate atoms and consciousness somewhere else. There would be no exceptions.
Now meditate on this till you realize your resume or ego or sense of who you are is just a miscalculated compute cache you hold on to keep your mind away from this truth.
My media literacy is not strong enough to understand if all the positive content about Sikh is "organic" or a very successful campaign by them to increase their reputation.
On reddit I keep reading about them doing great things, volunteering, silently providing what is needed to people in emergencies, for example the current wildfires in the US. (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1i0kavt - currently prominently featured on the front page) And now there is even some on Hacker News.
I am not disparaging anyone here, I am honestly curious about this pattern I have recognised.
Between the assassination in Canada [1] and attempted assassination on U.S. soil [2], there is international curiosity about (and default sympathy for) a group most previously didn’t know existed.
(There may have also been awareness in the American and Canadian Sikh communities that they need to educate their fellow countrymen about who they are and why they’re the subject of what looks like a new form of state-sponsored terrorism.)
Government assassinations of exilants... that's sadly not new at all. Back when Yugoslavia was governed by Tito, the regime sent out killer squads across the world for about half a century [1] - mostly Germany was targeted (because most Yugoslavs ended up there as Germany was rich and happily accepted emigrants fron Yugoslavia), but Croats got also targetted in places as far away as Canada, South Africa, Argentinia or Australia.
It's a dark part of history many people to this day aren't aware of, it only made the news again for a short time after the attacks on Litvinenko, Skripal and Khangoshvili respectively.
Sikhs are literally the nicest. Just read anything about them from any source. Best if you can find someone how has ever met any.
I've known some but you don't know me so it doesn't count for much.
for the most part I can concur. I've travelled the world and i've met assholes in just about every race and religion except sihks. and I've met enough sikhs to have a reasonable sample size. I'm sure they have their assholes too but I'm honestly amazed I havent' met one yet.
We shouldnt make general assumptions about any community as a positive on one minority can disparage another community, we are all human, come to see Sikh politics in Punjab and you can make your own judegments.
I get the impression that there's some sort of controversy that brewed over in the US / Canada recently. I'm based in the UK and my opinion of Sikhs has always been positive, as a general group.
The Indian government got caught trying to assassinate some Sikh activists that have previously called for an independent Sikh state. The Indian government considered them terrorists and the US/Canadian governments didn't.
Social media puts us all into an alternate reality.
The video on Reddit is on some level a good example, as the title directly contradicts it's content. In the video you see precisely one person identifiable as a Sikh and many other people, who are clearly not Sikh, performing the same task. Most definitely it isn't "the Sikh community" doing anything. It isn't even clear who provided the resources here.
Reddit especially is full of things like that, small snippets of an event presented as if it were the whole story. It is a very effective propaganda tactic and groups obviously benefit from portraying themselves a certain way and using these tactics to frame an issue a certain way.
I think it's the same phenomenon as with the Kurds. Both groups need the West because they are existentially threatened in their native region and have no other allies.
The Kurds are surrounded / occupied by Turks, Arabs, and Iranians - all who have a long history of trying to exterminate the Kurdish people / culture.
Sikhs aren't any better off with their native lands being ruled by either Hindus or Muslims, two groups who have a long history of trying to exterminate the Sikhs.
That's why both groups - quite frankly - suck up to the West so hard and are often picture perfect immigrants because they really don't want to be sent back. Because whatever "racism" you might think exists in the West, it is nothing compared to the religious hatred coming from Muslims and (to a lesser extend) Hindus.
Interesting parallels, but some important distinctions needed:
- Kurds have at least a millennium-old history [1], while Sikhism is much more recent in comparison. The latter do not share the same level of regional complexities as besides the diaspora migrating in the past century, their presence is shared between two countries split up during their independence.
- In recent history we have seen armed conflicts with Kurd factions, especially in Syria, but this has not been the case for the past decades for the latter. The insurgent movements [2] for the latter were much like the IRA movement, in the past but not forgotten for some.
From my eyes, it seems that a vocal small section of the expat population wants to promote the separatist ideals, for the land they have long left not out of fear of prosecution solely for their identity.
The original article is a reflection of the act of servitude to others, but it is must be viewed separately from the conflicts a part of the group following the faith might have elsewhere.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it were organic, spurred on to some extent by recent news in Canada.
Many years ago I worked on a project in Amritsar, which had me regularly engaged with the Golden Temple (the most sacred place in the Sikh religion) authorities. I have to say that all the Sikhs I interacted with were fantastic: honest, generous, hard-working, fun-loving, good-hearted people. I do think a lot of this was grounded in Sikh religious principles, which promote a kind of radical moderation that's actually pretty unique among religions. (the story goes that the founding guru of the Sikhs had two sons, one of whom destroyed his life with gambling and alcohol, and the other of whom destroyed his life with asceticism and abstinence. The guru repudiated both of them, saying that the latter was as much of a vice as the former. Instead, he preached that the point of life was to be happy, and to make other people happy: have a family and take good care of it, take care of other people, don't be an asshole, and have a good time. Balance these imperatives well, and you're doing God's work. As far as organised religions go, it's really pretty great.
And langar at the Golden Temple is a truly amazing experience. Men and women from every strata of society, from every religion, sitting down together to eat good food in silence. No preaching or any other bullshit -- the shared togetherness and humanity is enough. Honestly, it's profound. One of my dreams for later in life, when I have the time, is to go back there for a few weeks and volunteer to cook in their kitchen.
That said: Sikhs aren't all cuddles and sunshine. Early in their history they were strictly pacifistic, and also heavily persecuted. After a while, one of the head Gurus decided that if the way to do God's work was to live a good life, and there were oppressors who were committed to preventing you from doing so, then a necessary part of God's work would require, er, helping those oppressors to reincarnate as quickly as possible. Ever since then, they haven't been keen on turning the other cheek, and have had a very strong martial/military culture. There's still a very strong ethic that you shouldn't use violence unless there's absolutely no alternative -- but if you do have to use violence, then you might as well be bloody good at it. But of course the more that one participates in violence, the greyer the morality becomes. So I wouldn't dare wade into the India vs. Khalistan conflict: I'm sure that many of the beefs on both sides are well-founded at this point. But if you can separate the culture and the religion from the politics -- then yeah, it's a really great thing they've got going on there, and I think it's great for the world to have more exposure to it.
> After a while, one of the head Gurus decided that if the way to do God's work was to live a good life, and there were oppressors who were committed to preventing you from doing so, then a necessary part of God's work would require, er, helping those oppressors to reincarnate as quickly as possible.
That is a viewpoint that I believe was ... either missed, ignored or deemed to collide too much with back-then views on national sovereignty after the world wars. Humanity decided to give itself at least a basic set of rules of civilized behavior - think of stuff like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 or the Hague and Geneva accords on waging war.
But what good are these rules, when there was and is barely any enforcement of them, especially against large/hegemonial powers? The utter majority of war crime tribunals were against African warlords and a couple of the worst actors in Yugoslavia during the 90s collapse/independence wars. Meanwhile, all of the permanent UNSC member countries (especially the US, Russia and China, but also France and the UK) have faced a host of credible war crime or general human rights violation accusations, and so did and do many of their protege countries - in the Western sphere, Turkey is accused of a genocide against the Kurds, Israel with the Palestinians, and on the other side we got accusations of a physical and cultural genocide of Russia against Ukraine, of China against Tibetans and Uyghurs, or Syria's falln regime against everyone but Alawites.
Even though I am Hindu by birth (but not at all religious, personally), I always admire Sikhs culture of service.
I want to post this video[1] because I think the HN crew will appreciate this.
When you feed people for free, more people show up. So instead of turning them away, what do you do? You use machines and efficiency to feed MORE people.
It’s not uncommon for Hindus from northern India to worship Sikh Gurus alongside their own deities. Similarly Sikhs often visit Hindu temples. This is generally not seen as unusual.
While there have been some instances of tension between the two communities, things are not as bad as media might suggest.
I experience good interactions with Sikh people. The local store I go to one is operated by a Sikh and the other is operated by an American - someone I went to school with ages ago. The Sikh store is always in shape and if I forget my wallet he let's me pay when I come back or calls me if I forget my wife's candy bar. The American store never looks up from his phone, when I forgot my wallet looked at me stunned at the idea of coming back next time (I am in daily and live down the road and operate a local business) and the one time I know I forgot something they made no attempt to resolve it and wanted me to buy another all with a very entitled tone.
Readit News
Was only later that I realized that at its onset Christian theology was novel among ancient religious systems in that it is not content with getting you to do deeds and rituals and be part of a religious community .. that's not enough. It requires complete psychological conversion ("ye must be born again") and subservience to the belief system, and also to get other people to do the same. And the "here's some food but what you really need is Jesus" thing goes along with that and really rubs me the wrong way.
TLDR I respect faith communities that serve only for the sake of serving. I never saw that in mine.
I've about gotten to the point where I feel I can suggest that I will attend services with my family if I can get them agree that there will be no readings from any of Paul's Letters. That's a hard request to make sometimes because my family isn't evangelical but Roman Catholic, and Paul is hugely respected still by the Roman Catholic church (for the obvious reasons that it is the church that Paul most directly built). But it is slowly giving me a framework of being able to say here's where I have problems with your faith and here's what I like about the faith: the gospels minus the miracles, and the actual teachings of Jesus. (Unsurprisingly one of my favorite versions of the Bible is the Jefferson Bible. It's pamphlet sized. It might be so much better for the world if it replaced all the Gideon's Bibles. Also, I can recommend A Gospel for Liberals by Todd Eklof as another great view of the gospels.)
[1] Very literally, so. Most of the "to" groups were conquests of the Roman Empire either threatening to leave or already left.
One of the mind blowing things about this is the sheer amount of people some of the Gurdwaras end up feeding (1000s) and how non-trivial the whole process is from kitchen to serving. All volunteers generally.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhakti_movement
The revolutionary part isn't sitting with strangers. It's sitting with strangers across classes. The equivalent to a langar in the West would be everyone in a community dining at the soup kitchen.
If you’re ever near one and want to serve they usually are very welcoming of any help and I find the process to be quite meditative, personally.
Now meditate on this till you realize your resume or ego or sense of who you are is just a miscalculated compute cache you hold on to keep your mind away from this truth.
e.g. Someone can think everyone worships the flying spagetti monster or UFOs or whatever. And I’ll merrily go on life not knowing or caring.
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Deleted Comment
On reddit I keep reading about them doing great things, volunteering, silently providing what is needed to people in emergencies, for example the current wildfires in the US. (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1i0kavt - currently prominently featured on the front page) And now there is even some on Hacker News.
I am not disparaging anyone here, I am honestly curious about this pattern I have recognised.
(There may have also been awareness in the American and Canadian Sikh communities that they need to educate their fellow countrymen about who they are and why they’re the subject of what looks like a new form of state-sponsored terrorism.)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/what-is-known-about-m...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/12/01/1216647148/after-foiled-assas...
You didn't grow up in the UK then. Made me laugh to think of not knowing Sikhs exist.
Government assassinations of exilants... that's sadly not new at all. Back when Yugoslavia was governed by Tito, the regime sent out killer squads across the world for about half a century [1] - mostly Germany was targeted (because most Yugoslavs ended up there as Germany was rich and happily accepted emigrants fron Yugoslavia), but Croats got also targetted in places as far away as Canada, South Africa, Argentinia or Australia.
It's a dark part of history many people to this day aren't aware of, it only made the news again for a short time after the attacks on Litvinenko, Skripal and Khangoshvili respectively.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Attentaten_auf_Exilk...
Dead Comment
They are the real deal.
The video on Reddit is on some level a good example, as the title directly contradicts it's content. In the video you see precisely one person identifiable as a Sikh and many other people, who are clearly not Sikh, performing the same task. Most definitely it isn't "the Sikh community" doing anything. It isn't even clear who provided the resources here.
Reddit especially is full of things like that, small snippets of an event presented as if it were the whole story. It is a very effective propaganda tactic and groups obviously benefit from portraying themselves a certain way and using these tactics to frame an issue a certain way.
Deleted Comment
The Kurds are surrounded / occupied by Turks, Arabs, and Iranians - all who have a long history of trying to exterminate the Kurdish people / culture.
Sikhs aren't any better off with their native lands being ruled by either Hindus or Muslims, two groups who have a long history of trying to exterminate the Sikhs.
That's why both groups - quite frankly - suck up to the West so hard and are often picture perfect immigrants because they really don't want to be sent back. Because whatever "racism" you might think exists in the West, it is nothing compared to the religious hatred coming from Muslims and (to a lesser extend) Hindus.
- Kurds have at least a millennium-old history [1], while Sikhism is much more recent in comparison. The latter do not share the same level of regional complexities as besides the diaspora migrating in the past century, their presence is shared between two countries split up during their independence.
- In recent history we have seen armed conflicts with Kurd factions, especially in Syria, but this has not been the case for the past decades for the latter. The insurgent movements [2] for the latter were much like the IRA movement, in the past but not forgotten for some.
From my eyes, it seems that a vocal small section of the expat population wants to promote the separatist ideals, for the land they have long left not out of fear of prosecution solely for their identity.
The original article is a reflection of the act of servitude to others, but it is must be viewed separately from the conflicts a part of the group following the faith might have elsewhere.
[1] http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/kurdish-language-i
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalistan_movement
From my one experience at a Langar event, it really was as advertised - very welcoming, zero pitch or expectation and quite refreshing.
Many years ago I worked on a project in Amritsar, which had me regularly engaged with the Golden Temple (the most sacred place in the Sikh religion) authorities. I have to say that all the Sikhs I interacted with were fantastic: honest, generous, hard-working, fun-loving, good-hearted people. I do think a lot of this was grounded in Sikh religious principles, which promote a kind of radical moderation that's actually pretty unique among religions. (the story goes that the founding guru of the Sikhs had two sons, one of whom destroyed his life with gambling and alcohol, and the other of whom destroyed his life with asceticism and abstinence. The guru repudiated both of them, saying that the latter was as much of a vice as the former. Instead, he preached that the point of life was to be happy, and to make other people happy: have a family and take good care of it, take care of other people, don't be an asshole, and have a good time. Balance these imperatives well, and you're doing God's work. As far as organised religions go, it's really pretty great.
And langar at the Golden Temple is a truly amazing experience. Men and women from every strata of society, from every religion, sitting down together to eat good food in silence. No preaching or any other bullshit -- the shared togetherness and humanity is enough. Honestly, it's profound. One of my dreams for later in life, when I have the time, is to go back there for a few weeks and volunteer to cook in their kitchen.
That said: Sikhs aren't all cuddles and sunshine. Early in their history they were strictly pacifistic, and also heavily persecuted. After a while, one of the head Gurus decided that if the way to do God's work was to live a good life, and there were oppressors who were committed to preventing you from doing so, then a necessary part of God's work would require, er, helping those oppressors to reincarnate as quickly as possible. Ever since then, they haven't been keen on turning the other cheek, and have had a very strong martial/military culture. There's still a very strong ethic that you shouldn't use violence unless there's absolutely no alternative -- but if you do have to use violence, then you might as well be bloody good at it. But of course the more that one participates in violence, the greyer the morality becomes. So I wouldn't dare wade into the India vs. Khalistan conflict: I'm sure that many of the beefs on both sides are well-founded at this point. But if you can separate the culture and the religion from the politics -- then yeah, it's a really great thing they've got going on there, and I think it's great for the world to have more exposure to it.
That is a viewpoint that I believe was ... either missed, ignored or deemed to collide too much with back-then views on national sovereignty after the world wars. Humanity decided to give itself at least a basic set of rules of civilized behavior - think of stuff like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 or the Hague and Geneva accords on waging war.
But what good are these rules, when there was and is barely any enforcement of them, especially against large/hegemonial powers? The utter majority of war crime tribunals were against African warlords and a couple of the worst actors in Yugoslavia during the 90s collapse/independence wars. Meanwhile, all of the permanent UNSC member countries (especially the US, Russia and China, but also France and the UK) have faced a host of credible war crime or general human rights violation accusations, and so did and do many of their protege countries - in the Western sphere, Turkey is accused of a genocide against the Kurds, Israel with the Palestinians, and on the other side we got accusations of a physical and cultural genocide of Russia against Ukraine, of China against Tibetans and Uyghurs, or Syria's falln regime against everyone but Alawites.
I want to post this video[1] because I think the HN crew will appreciate this.
When you feed people for free, more people show up. So instead of turning them away, what do you do? You use machines and efficiency to feed MORE people.
It is absolutely amazing.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FWWe2U41N8
When I think about how our schools (in America) mostly feed kids processed frozen sad looking food, I think about videos like this.
Where there's a will, there's a way... to feed kids and others fresh food with real ingredients with the help of automation.
While there have been some instances of tension between the two communities, things are not as bad as media might suggest.