Regardless of the fact that Rama and Krishna were avatars....they were still human. Both were born of a mother and a father.
We Hindus believe in something called the degree of godhood. Krishna for example is considered as a 'Purna avatar', compared to Rama and other avatars. Purna avatar means a complete incarnation. He had a higher level of Consciousness and was always aware of his own highly evolved state. He even used his special knowledge and powers sometimes. But even he was not born miraculously. He had both a biological mother and a father. He lived, had fun and fought battles like everyone else. He had a teacher (Sandipani) and learned from several sages of that time. Many a time he worshipped Shiva before any special event.
Rama of course lived a very normal, very human, if very disciplined life. He learnt under Sages Vashista and Vishwamitra. He also worshipped Shiva before the war.
Sriram
I think I'd always have problems discussing things with you, because you don't seem to adopt a critical approach. You may have noticed that both Jeremy and myself do not approach religious texts as believers, but try and deduce from those texts what true historical elements about the people and their evolving beliefs there may be. This is particularly the case with Christianity - and Luke's gospel in particular makes several specific statements about the events and significant people which appear in his account (other historic accounts around that time indicate he was mistaken on most of these, but at least he mentions a few characters who most surely lived within a space of a few decades of what he was relating).
Hinduism is surely different. You make assertions about the definite details of the life of Krishna and Rama, yet the purported accounts date from an even more misty past than those in the Christian record. Take the Mahabharata, for instance, which many scholars would assert is a purely mythical story with ethical teachings embedded in it.
The Bhgavad Gita, for instance. Ostensibly this takes place on a battlefield of history - though no one is particularly sure whether there was such a battle. Initially, Arjuna and Krishna appear as merely human participants in the battle, the scenario soon changes to a discussion of the various forms of yoga and ethics, and the battlefield is used as an allegory for human life. And then the supposedly human Krishna is revealed as the deathless avatar of God.
The historicity of the Kurukshetra War is subject to scholarly discussion and dispute.[3][4] The existing text of the Mahabharata went through many layers of development, and mostly belongs to the period between c. 500 BCE and 400 CE.[5][6] Within the frame story of the Mahabharata, the historical kings Parikshit and Janamejaya are featured significantly as scions of the Kuru clan,[7] and Michael Witzel concludes that the general setting of the epic has a historical precedent in Iron Age (Vedic) India, where the Kuru kingdom was the center of political power during roughly 1200 to 800 BCE.[7] According to Professor Alf Hiltebeitel, the Mahabharata is essentially mythological.[8] Indian historian Upinder Singh has written that:
Whether a bitter war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas ever happened cannot be proved or disproved. It is possible that there was a small-scale conflict, transformed into a gigantic epic war by bards and poets. Some historians and archaeologists have argued that this conflict may have occurred in about 1000 BCE."[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurukshetra_War
