The claim that "all religions kill" has become a comforting refrain in the modern West. It sounds fair. It sounds mature. It sounds neutral.
It is none of those things.
In All Religions Do Not Kill: Why Shiva Never Needed Holy War, Dr. Sunayana Pandé-scholar of psychology, neuroscience, metaphysics, and religion-exposes the historical and philosophical error behind this belief and traces its consequences for indigenous cultures, ethical clarity, and civilizational survival.
At the heart of this book is a simple but devastating distinction:
Some religions are built on exclusivity.
Others are built on nonduality.
Shiva, the oldest known god in human history, represents a worldview in which there is only one being experiencing itself through many forms. In such a system, violence against the other is violence against the self. Conversion is unnecessary. Holy war is incoherent. Commandments are redundant.
Drawing from archaeology, comparative religion, Shaiva metaphysics, and civilizational history, this book demonstrates:
Why Shaivism never developed holy war or forced conversion
How nondual metaphysics structurally prevents sacred violence
Why pluralistic civilizations functioned without erasing difference
How the myth of "all religions kill" protects exclusivist theologies from scrutiny
Why modern Hindus and indigenous cultures are pressured into historical amnesia
What is lost-ethically, psychologically, ecologically-when nonduality is forgotten
This book does not argue that individuals of certain religions are violent.
It argues that theologies are not interchangeable-and that metaphysical assumptions reliably shape ethics, power, and history.
Written with clarity, restraint, and moral precision, All Religions Do Not Kill is a work of remembrance, correction, and civilizational insight.
In an age saturated with absolutism and sacred certainty, Shiva's refusal to conquer may be the most relevant spiritual inheritance humanity has left.
