> The highest ideal in Hinduism is "Sarve jana, sukhino bhavanthu" (All living things should be happy)
> Spiritually, It is special, in the sense that Hinduism is not a religion but a philosophical way of life, that encourages debate, discussion, logical analysis and introspection. Historically, the only gift for questioning ones religion was a beheading in the case of Christianity and Islam.
More generally, "pride in their past" comes across in every comment they posted and the narrative that "disruption from outsiders caused poverty, before then food was plentiful, poverty as described in European middle ages was not present in India":
> In ancient times, right until the attacks by Islamist marauders and "civilized" Britishers, none of what you have mentioned were an issue. Your statement reeks of colonialist attitudes of seeing natives of other lands as some sort of brutes and degenerates living in destitution in poverty.
In response to someone claiming that there were (like in medieval Europe, the topic of this post) many poor people in India in the same time period:
> Come on, you can't tell me the poor, barely able to feed themselves, lucky to have fuel for cooking food, lucky to get porable water, barely a roof over their heads, had these luxuries?
The user in question replies:
> Yeah, no. Leaving aside a few famines here and there, India was mostly self sufficient and had plentiful of food.
No one said India was not "self-sufficient", we're talking about peasants in those times, having a low quality of life.
The only source the user shared for their assertions, seems to confirm peasants lived in poverty at the time (like anywhere else in the world): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32364750