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.

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

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.

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.