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.
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.