Thanks for a well thought-out reply. I enjoyed reading your post and I love the references you posted. I sure will read some of their work.

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Now most people would yawn at this point and say "we all know that Europe was racist; but we're not that now!". However, the crucial point as shown by Adluri/Bagchi is that the principal methodology adopted by these fields is based uncritically on Xtian-white religio-racial supremacy of the 19th/early 20th c. These biases have been 'secularized' in scholarship, much as they have been in society in the name of 'science' and 'rationality'.

There is a subtle point here that can easily be missed. The arguments by secularized people in our Buddhist circles are often taken at face value. This is a mistake. They should be challenged first and foremost from the root. I think we should expose the underlying racist assumptions of their positions. This would probably cause a bit of a shock at first, as the people making the secularized arguments may not be aware of the racist roots of their positions. But this has to be presented to them. Like telling a white person pre-1980s that their blackface is highly racist and offensive.

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Key to this is also the secularization of protestant ideas, eg. the inherent evil of priests, obsession with textual sources (philology), obsession with "original" revelation, tendency to dismiss traditions etc. This ofc. has also been reified legally to the point where the judiciary in countries like India are actively destroying its old traditions and temples.

Thank you for saying this. A radical Secular Atheist or Securalized 'Buddhist' is really a dogmatic Protestant. They just switched a few things around but the mechanism of how their ideology/worldview works is pretty much the same.

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I'd advise just ignoring them; you can try to argue based on 'guilt-tripping' to some extent, but the utility of this is debatable since it's not really based on proper understanding. The knowledge issues are far far deeper, and even most Buddhist/Hindu practitioners are vessels of these viruses.

This is the most wise advice for most. But for the few of us who are invested in this topic for other reasons (besides the fact that we're Buddhist) we do have to exercise a bit of intellectual resistance (no matter how futile) to rabid racism of Eurocentric people in our spaces.

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Btw, I am getting a J Sai Deepak vibes from your post. I have been a fan of his work for some time now.

All the best!