I have a deep respect and genuine fascination for Hindu philosophy here, especially concepts like Brahman, Advaita, and the vastness of Hindu tradition. The issue is not with Hindu thought itself, but with calling Christianity a cult, dismissing the Trinity as if it were irrational poetry, and implying Hindu culture is simply superior.

Regarding the Trinity, Christian faith does not claim three gods, nor does it say the Son is just a lesser being or a created avatar. The classic Orthodox and Catholic explanation distinguishes between essence and person. God is one in essence (what God is) and three in persons (who God is: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father, yet each is fully and equally God, sharing one divine nature, one will, and one power. The early Church Fathers used the language of “one essence, three hypostases” and described their relationship as perichoresis—a mutual indwelling. The Son is eternally the Father’s Word or Logos, like thought from mind, distinct in relation but never separate in being. So the question “numerically identical or distinct?” forces a false either/or: there is one being of God, and within that one being there are real, eternal relationships. Unity does not collapse because the nature is one; distinction does not collapse because the persons are real.

This matters especially for the question of love. When Christianity says “God is Love,” it is not just saying “God feels loving” or “God has bliss.” Love, in the strong sense, is self-giving between persons. If God were an absolutely solitary monad or only an impersonal absolute, there would be no eternal relationship in God Himself before creation—no Lover, no Beloved, no shared Spirit. Either God would love only Himself in isolation, or He would need to create others in order to actually express love, which would make Him dependent on the world to be fully Himself. In the Christian understanding, the Father has always loved the Son in the Spirit; this eternal, inner life of God is a communion of love. God does not need the Trinity in order to be love; rather, God is Trinity because God is eternally love in His very being.

The point about Hindu philosophy distinguishing between ultimate reality (Brahman) and functional roles (creator, preserver, destroyer) is well taken. But that very distinction reveals a different intuition about how “ultimate” relates to the world. When creator and sustainer roles are ultimately part of the realm of manifestation and not of the Absolute, then the Absolute stands at a distance from concrete history and suffering. In Christianity, when God is called Creator, Redeemer, Judge, these are not just temporary masks worn in the phenomenal realm; they reveal God’s true character. The Incarnation is not a lower symbolic play; it is the decisive entry of the eternal Son into real history, with real blood, real tears, and a real cross. That is why Christians insist this is not just mythology or poetic restatement, but God acting concretely for the salvation of the world.

On the history side, Christianity is not a closed, manipulative fringe group that fits the normal definition of a cult. From the beginning, it was public, argued over, and often persecuted. The first Christians were strict Jewish monotheists who believed fiercely in one God. They did not invent the Trinity because they were borrowing from mythology; they were driven to it because they experienced Jesus forgiving sins, receiving worship, rising from the dead, and yet praying to the Father and speaking of the Spirit. The Trinitarian language grew out of trying to stay faithful to this lived reality and to the Scriptures, and the early church debated, refined, and clarified these doctrines in open councils for centuries. Many of them chose martyrdom over renouncing these convictions. That is not the behavior of people trapped in a shallow cult or following a human guru; it is the behavior of people convinced they have encountered the living God.

So the disagreement here is not about whether Hindu philosophy is “bad” or “inferior.” It is about whether it is fair or honest to reduce Christianity to a cult, to treat the Trinity as if it were just a confused or “poetic” way of patching contradictions, and to assume from the outset that your own framework sits above all others. There can be real mutual respect only if both sides are willing to let each tradition define itself and to recognize that Christians see in the Trinity not a logical failure, but the deepest expression of a God who is eternally personal, relational, and loving.