Hinduism: Religion, Culture or Way of Life or an arrogant belief of its elite

One of my free thinker buddies sent me this link from a blog thread:

Hinduism: Religion, Culture or Way of Life? 

I am sure many will find this interesting and engaging. But this led to a different perspective on the thinking and motives of Hindu intelligensia.

This video  of a Chinmayananda speech about Hinduism, where he himself is blabbering while accusing  others of  blabbering is even more amusing and facetious

It is typical of the Hindu intelligentsia to entangle themselves and others in  hair-splitting about this triad of its distinctiveness and uniqueness. Yes Hinduism and its members are distinctive, just as Christians and Muslims are in their own way. All this and song and dance about the fuzziness of distinction between these  3 aspects of  Hinduism is the irresistible urge to steal a march over the other 2 dominant faiths. This also serves a good smokescreen for the need to get away from the truth of owning up to its paganism and polytheism. The hard question of the inherent dilemmas and confusions involved in defining Hindu faith was raised by Ambedkar in his 'Riddles of Hinduism'. But why face such issues squarely when circumlocution can be such a delight and provide respectability to our weaknesses. The Indian govt went even one step further by banning that book. Censorship is such an easy solution to the pestilence of dissent!

Hinduism revels in its own species of temerity or sanctimony as you have termed it. That is to declare its faith as Sanatana (preexisting) and its scriptures as apaurusheya (author-less or beyond human composition). That kind of  Hindu oneupmanship brings our religion or rather ex-religion on par with the preexisting Universe (even the evolutionists would not be so confident of their hypothesis) .  If one is to relate to the analogy of the chicken and the egg, and pose to the Hindu seers which of the two preexisted first, the chicken of the Universe or  the egg (Hiranyagarbha) of our  dharma, one must expect some sophistical dribbling and side-stepping by such artful dodgers, so that the Hiranyagarbha does not land up as an egg on their face. I will reserve treatment of the fiction of the 'apaurusheya' for another day, since that involves going into, apart from other things, the incredulous arguments of the Mimansa Sutras and the delusive rhetoric of Adi Sankara. 

If the brash confidence and effusion displayed by defenders of 'Sanatana Dharma' were to be reduced to a maxim, it would be that "the swelling pride of the Hindu faithful in their religion is in direct proportion to their ignorance of its underlying scriptures". I can safely wager that none of these vociferous spokesmen on the thread have really read most of major Vedic/Hindu scriptures or are blithely ignorant and nonchalant about its contradictions and cross-purposes.