Please, you can’t scare them off. ISKCON is militantly Anti-Intellectual, only met one I could ever hold a in depth conversation with. I’ve been to several of their temples, read their anti-defamation league forum, and even took on a forum ISKCON member (he was in it for 30 years) as a student in the philosophy of statecraft (he was also a airforce vet, and a Cynic.)
I know enough about them that they recoil, but aren’t scared off. Its like Mormons when you bring up Swedenborg, they leave for a time bewildered, but its just to call for backup.
Had he approached us differently, knowing this was a philosophy site, and jumped into a analysis of the Soul-SuperSoul relation, or “What is transcendentalism in the Upanishads vs Kant” I wouldn’t of responded. But he had to muck up and force obviously heavily contradictory dogma down everyone’s throats here. Its not easy to advocate Buddhist Ethics in the garb of Vedic Warrior Lore, I can’t imagine two more hostile, mutually annihilistic systems of philosophy contrasting one another. You can’t preach one thing and claim it is the wishes of a guy who lived doing the exact opposite, on a very consistent basis.
Closest Krishna came to being like the Buddha (who ethics are advocated in the OP) was the talk he gave to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Calm, collected, intellectual, spiritual. Missed the whole nonviolence ideal however completely, as the story is told on a war chariot between battle lines, in a effort to goad Arjuna into fighting a massive battle. Arjuna was having conscious pangs about the coming slaughter. Buddha would of taken that conversation in a whole different direction. There would of been no battle, and any prescriptions for ethical nonviolence would of been more believable.
Likewise with the lust. 16000 women a night, plus extramarital wood orgies with all the women who could manage to escape to fuck him. Buddha left his wife and child, to become as ascetic, in a effort to conquer lust, not Krisna. Krisna heavily engaged in it.
In the history of India, after Alexander the Great invaded India, India reorganized under Chanakya and Chandragupta to drive the Greeks out, conquer and unify the Vedic Republics, and create the Maurya Empire. Very soon, they adopted Buddhism as the state religion. It wasn’t until the 7- 9th century AD, right before the Muslim conquests of India, that the Vedantic religion returned to a kind of prominence, and quite frankly, I think its because they took the banner of all of India in resisting the Muslims, not in strength of logical arguments.
They tried fixing it by saying Buddha was a absolutely insane later incarnation of Krsna, accept the non violence, but reject absolutely everything else, as it only applied to that era.
I find the whole operation rather absurd. Plenty of sects in India I have respect for, but why this one group, of all the groups to come, had to flood the west is beyond me. I’d feel better about them if the produced more philosophers. Its not exactly the environment for critical thinking.