I'll tell you the same thing I told a friend that was too deep into W40K: you can enjoy the characters without making the lore a central part of your life!
I’m guessing you don’t come from a region that has been historically Abrahamic. I’m secular myself but it’s interesting that you would throw Satan in there with the rest.
I do, and I'm not sure why what I said would make you think otherwise. The way Satan is popularly depicted today makes him indistinguishable from the "evil gods" of other religions.
The way I look at it is basically the Bible is up for interpretation. Because if you read it literally it uh.... Well it's not good.
So if you think about it, there are actually several. Christian gods. Each one slightly different based on which verses of the Bible you interpret literally versus figuratively.
Not exactly. For some yes but that's the polytheistic part. Different from (early) Judaism, monotheistic Hinduism isn't "my God is the only one" but more like "the god we already agreed to be one of the main gods is actually the only one and the others are expressions of this one or lesser beings". There are 2 or 3 candidates for that but all are very canonically important in all of Hinduism. There is still a lot of diversity and it's more about which school you belong to. I think some have a more abstract way where it's not a specific god but more the dualistic idea of a Big Other if that makes sense. There are also non dualistic schools which fit more into pantheism (god=universe). I simply a lot and I'm already no expert. Let's Talk Religion has a good series on YouTube about Hinduism.
The way that someone explained it to be once is that if we think about the typical monotheistic, omnipotent, omniscient God — surely a God would be far more than what humans can comprehend at all, right? So any single characterisation of God is going to seem weirdly limited, because it'll be grounded in our human perspective. So the idea is sort of like God(TM) is like a diamond, and each of the Hindu Gods is like a facet of that gem. The problem is that our human perspectives can't understand the diamond (similar to how visualising 4D shapes like a tesseract is trippy and hard) so we have to try to understand the diamond by looking at each of its facets and trying to imagine an entity that can be all of those things at once.
As someone who is neither Hindu or Christian, it reminds me of the Holy Trinity: that God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Hindus believe in a universal consciousness, of which there are many facets which manifest deities such as Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva, but there are dozens, and their wives. People pray to one for financial matters, another for health, and another for happiness.
Ultimately though, the peak of divinity is not asking for anything, but contemplating the divine spirit, the universal consciousness and accepting that he is within uus, and we are within him, and that our lives are karma-bound, and benevolence towards others regardless of our station in life is the only goal and the only way to move up the karmic ladder towards eventual oneness with the UC. Yogis believe they can speedrun the karmic ladder, for want of a better term.
Full disclosure, I'm a hon-hindu white boy
Edit: The audiobook Everyday Gita, by Sunita Pant Bansal is an excellent, down to earth, non-preachy guide to Hinduism and my main source for this description. I don't agree with everything in it, as it defends the indian caste system and seems to defend capitalism and tolerates billionaires, but it's still a useful text/audiobook
Hindu lore hosts many characters, but in actuality they believe in only one god, the godhead that you are i.e. the universe, man, life, existence is all one thing and you're it.
I don't see the history of Hinduism with Christianity. Back in the day when Christians went to just and set up missions in Hindu regions they were successful. They built missions and the Hindus started attending churches of Catholics.
With some time passing the Catholics noticed that the Hindus still went to their own mosques AND went to churches. So they asked why. The Hindus response was "It's all good. You are all part of Hindu."
I learned about this in World Religions in college. Loved the high road troll. The one thing that I find interesting about most Christian sects is that they take the teachings literally. Whereas most other philosophies are fully aware of the fables they teach their young is to convey morality.
They do believe in their deities. But they acknowledge that most stories are not historically factual. At least this is what I was taught. I'm not an expert on any of it.
Hinduism is a mish mash of beliefs with no standardisation. Hindus commonly pray and offer puja to many deities but many consider them to be manifestations of a single higher power.