I had a very poor model of what people meant when they spoke of divinity, god, and religion until reading the Tao Te Ching. Whenever I heard god, I just thought of sky daddy. The key is to understand that religion is a map, not the territory. All religions are essentially different paths to the same destination, mixed with varying levels of human interpretation.
> All religions are essentially different paths to the same destination
Just to be clear, many religions and religious viewpoints would vehemently disagree with you.
The idea that all religions lead to the same place is really just one variety of religious belief. There are many others.
Reading the Tao Te Ching is great, but I'm not sure it's going to give you much insight into what Roman Catholics or Sunni Muslims are speaking of when they talk about divinity, god, and religion.
Well of course they'd vehemently disagree, they're on a different path and they believe that path goes to a different destination, while in reality necessarily all those path lead to the same destination.
A Hindu might believe they're on a path that leads to reincarnation, a Muslim might believe they're on a path that leads to heaven or hell. At the end of their path though, necessarily something real is going to happen. Whatever their different paths are, that real thing is going to be the same thing for all of us.
The Tao Te Ching might not teach the specifics of what Catholics are speaking of but it might teach what they are trying to achieve in describing their path and what they think lies at the end of it, and how that might be abstracted over many religions in a common attempt at achieving peace, stability and purpose in civilisations.
Logically speaking I do not follow. Why would it be the same? Why could it not be possible that different religious groups would have a different outcome "after living"? It's just as unprovable, no?
Yeah that's true. Though many (most?) religions believe their path/destination is the only true one, so believing there would be different outcomes for different groups would be a new religion those religions would vehemently disagree with. And of course that belief would be itself one of the possible final destinations of all the paths of which only one is true.
The Roman Catholic Church openly claims to be the one true religion, and that all other religions might have elements of the truth, but not the fullness of the Truth. So Catholicism doesn't fit into this framework.
So none of the exclusive claims of any religion to have the full truth are true, but your personal opinion about all of them is fully true? Your arrogance is unbearable.
Not GP, but I have a similar experience. The Tao Te Ching presents a kind of supreme entity which is the unity underpinning all things. It questions dichotomy and difference and scarcity and control, as these things are only possible in a world of differentiated objects. We can’t always be present to this Unity because sometimes we need to eat a sandwich. But the book is a nice reminder—“hey, we all come from the same place and we’re all going to the same place.”
If you Are extremely analytical, maybe when someone says “God”, do a text replace with “the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the universe”. If what the other person is saying still makes sense, then they aren’t a sky daddy believer.
The universe doesn’t want or command, but it certainly does require and allow.
You share an incredibly tight light cone with all things on earth, living and non-living, so you can assume that your causal relationships with everything and everyone around you are highly intertwined.
For me the fascinating thing about the Tao Te Ching is that it's not a work of philosophy, it's more like Cliff's Notes for the self-evident structure of the Universe.
(The story is that Lao Tzu (which just means "wise old man") was leaving the city never to return and a gate guard stopped him and begged him to leave behind some written wisdom. The result is the Tao Te Ching.)
For example:
Every victory is a funeral for kin.
This is literally true: we are all related, we are all kin.
Or again, the passage on leaders:
With the best kind of leader
When the work is finished
The people all say
"We did it ourselves."
Obviously, there is a universe of wisdom on leadership compressed here into a handful of characters. All conventional ideas on leadership were summarized in the previous few verses, then completely destroyed and transcended in this verse.
And the whole book is like that. Chapter after chapter, the most intense wisdom condensed into the most evocative and inspiring verse.
- - - -
In re: thinking it's true, Like I said above, it's not describing propositions that may or may not be true, like a philosophy or a religion. There's no story in it to believe or disbelieve. There is nothing like "God is Love" or "The Force is 42". There is no "Sky Daddy" in it. It's almost like a manual in Logic, like something Smullyan would write. E.g. "The Tao that can be talked about is not the real Tao." is straight outta Gödel, eh?
Precisely. Also all the other works (philosphy/religion) have elaborate contraptions to describe what it/God/ is. TTC is the only one that starts out with it cannot be told.
Its a pity that you feel it is some made-up nonsense and doesn't reflect the world in some way. Helps us give a different perspective on how or what things are. But that is alright, different things appeal to different people.
It doesn't matter one bit to the things/ideas whether we believe in them or not. It matters to us what we believe in.
Most older religions held the "many paths" view, including Judaism. You don't get sky daddy until the Romans needed a new imperial state religion and started mixing personal cults with monotheist cults.
As in what were my priors and what is the threshold I have for credence in such an idea? I don’t think it’s like that. It’s a story. A fiction. It happens to be a recursive fiction, in the sense that it makes statements about what kind of things are fiction and how we interpret fictions. You can take it or leave it.
As the original poster said, what clicked wasn’t some cosmic sense of religious belonging, just wtf people might be talking about when religious gobbledygook falls out of their mouth.
I also like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and A Christmas Carol and We Should All Be Feminists but I don’t know that I “believe” in these stories so much as they are moving and change my outlook.
The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
We don't know what it is, it is only experiential. Some call it Tao, some call it God, some ... Energy. Some work against it, some work with it in a non-striving way.
When you think about it, energy underpins every single process in the universe, yet we do not know what it is or whence it came, only it's effects and transformation.
Actually there were different veraions of DDJ throughout history. The oldest one was discovered not too long ago and is very different from the popular one.
I've got a similar insight from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. The main theme of this book is creativity, and author explains why it is psychologically useful for creator to think about inspiration and help from higher beings like muses and angels.
One thing to be aware of is that different translations affect the understanding of this book to a certain degree. I do not have a recommendation for English translations, as I read it in a different language, but it is good to compare a few translations in a bookstore before buying.
There are some translations that are more worried about changing the meanings, which makes it harder to read, and others that focus on comprehensibility but arguably could be more distant to the original.
> The key is to understand that religion is a map, not the territory. All religions are essentially different paths to the same destination, mixed with varying levels of human interpretation.
Given that a large fraction of people who self-identify as religious would vigorously disagree with this, I think this insight's of limited—though perhaps not no—utility in understanding religion.
This prompts a perhaps crazy thought: "The mind's poor ability at introspection does not invalidate the observations of another mind about about the first mind."
. o O ( Somehow the wording of that thought makes me want to re-read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid )
