thankyousir

k, I am new here so I figured this post would be the best place to start...

I have been a Christian my whole life (and still am). I recently picked up a copy of the Tao te Ching and the Chuang Tzu and I fell in love with Taoism. Overall, Taoism matches up with Christianity pretty well (not judging, a time for everything, etc) except in a few arenas, the biggest being morality.

The Taoist version of morality, at least from how I see it, is: "If you want to be one with the Tao, accept where life takes you and do what your heart (the internal Tao) tells you. If you don't want to do that you don't have to, it is also a part of the way of things for you to not be "one with the Tao". the Taoist is content even with this.

The Christian version of morality is "love your neighbor as yourself. and love God with all of your heart and mind. which means following all of the commandments. Try to be perfect even though there is no possible way for you to even try to be perfect, so drive yourself crazy trying to be perfect"

but "good" needs "bad" else it wouldn't be "good" I could go up to a mountain and try to become the most sinless ascetic ever, but I would be doing the world less good than if I just did what I was best at. In my opinion.

Who says that abortion is immoral? isn't it more immoral to force someone to be "moral" if they don't want to? shouldn't people at least have the option to have a safe clean abortion lest they resort to more barbaric methods? wouldn't that be more loving towards the mother? this is my opinion at least

is the mere act of copying a cd illegal? were our founding fathers disobeying God by rebelling against the governing authorities and starting a great nation? it is like in Chuck

Chuck (when reviewing Harry Tang's rules): No swearing, No expectorating, no fornicating... were people getting freaky in the break room?
Morgan: No, but I like to know I have the option.

Taoism says that when you impose more rules people become less and less moral, which makes some sense, they aren't doing what they are doing because they want to, just out of fear of getting in trouble.

So Taoist morality makes much more sense to me, "do what you do best because you are only a small fragment of mankind". However, I still wish I could reconcile the two systems. Perhaps I am looking at stuff the wrong way.

I hate thinking about ethics because it is so subjective, yet you don't think it should be. Does anyone have any food for thought?

Willravel

Christianity really isn't cut and dry so far as morality as concerned. Some Christians interpret the Bible to say that abortion is wrong, and others disagree. This is due to the Bible having subjective meaning.

I'll give you a basic example: Thou shall not kill. Seems simple enough, but what about capital punishment? What about killing in self defense? What about accidental killings? I think you'll find that each of these circumstances is considered an exception by most Christians (though not all). It's all open to interpretation. That's part of what makes religion so widely attractive.

genuinegirly

I read a book that helped me with a thought process something along the lines of what you describe: The Jesus Sutras, by Martin Palmer. I hope this helps.
There are many, many books on this topic, though, here's another that looks interesting:

Best of luck in your quest for knowledge!

__________________
"Sometimes I have to remember that things are brought to me for a reason, either for my own lessons or for the benefit of others." Cynthetiq

"violence is no more or less real than non-violence." roachboy

ratbastid

Well, first of all, I'm not sure I'd call that Taoist morality, per se. The space of Taoism is all-encompassing and all-accepting. In my opinion, it's not quite accurate to call Taoism a religion, and comparing it with Christianity is a little bit unfair.

Pretty sure Jesus never said that last part. In fact he never said "following all of the commandments". What Jesus actually said was: Love God with your whole heart, and love your neighbor as yourself, and all the rest will flow from that.

It's like Rabbi Hillel's famous statement on the essence of Judiasm, "That which is hateful to you, do not do it unto your fellow man. That is the entirety of the Torah; the rest is just commentary."

I've found that the closer you get to the source document of any religion (and you're holding one in your hand with the Tao Te Ching) the simpler and more, well, Tao-like the message gets. Jesus was way Taoist. Including tearing up the Temple. If you read some of the Taoist parables and stories, that sort of thing happened a lot. If the WWJD crowd actually ever READ the bible, they'd be hanging with harlots and publicans a whole lot more than they do. But they depend on the church-interpreted version of Jesus with the glowing long hair and the beatific smile and the lambies and babies around him.

On a side note, I was watching one of Michael Palin's BBC travel shows yesterday, and he was in a Zen monastery in southern Japan and was going to join them for a meditation session. He asked the master of the monastery, "You and your monks sit for 18 hours a day every day. What am I going to get from meditating for such a short time?" The monk said, "You?" Pailn said, "Yes, me." The monk said, "Don't ask me. That's your problem." It was like watching a zen teaching story happen right there on TV. Very cool.

robot_parade

Bear in mind that it's pretty hard to understand writings that are so far out of our cultural context, not to mention being thousands of years old and translated from a different language. We (at least, Westerners) have generally a much easier time with Christianity, because we're steeped in it's context.

At least some theories of the Tao Te Ching that I've read are that it is more targeted at a Ruler (the Sage) that the common man. Christian teaching is targeted towards the common person (the salt of the earth).

I disagree pretty strongly with your last sentence. That's not Christian morality as I understand it at all. Your first two sentences are straight from the gospels (Matthew, IIRC), but in reverse order. Love God, with your neighbor (and, by implication, yourself), being the second commandment (and "like unto the first").

Christian morality asserts that there is such a thing as absolute good, embodied by God. That there are consequences for turning your back on God (Hell). That *all* have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God. No person can be perfect. So instead of beating yourself up about it, and becoming obsessed with meeting a standard that no one (except, according to Christian tradition, Christ himself) can meet, one accepts one's flaws and mistakes (sins), admits them to God, asks for forgiveness, and tries to live a life guided by love.

That concept is what draws me to Christianity - that instead of a fixed set of laws (though Christ says he does not do away with the old laws, a bit complicated there), or being guided by not hurting other people, or somesuch, one is to be guided by love. Love for God, "thy neighbor", and oneself. It seems pretty hard to come up with a situation where you could be too wrong being guided by that principle. Most of the 10 commandments follow pretty directly from those principles.

Not quite sure what to make of that, except that I think one should not be motivated by avoiding sin, but instead by...yeah, the L word again. :-)

Well, the gospels don't refer directly to abortion - but they do assert that there is more to life than just the physical body. That all people have a soul. Many Christians take that to mean than an unborn baby is just as much of a person as someone else, and has the right not to be killed. Some Christians disagree. The abortion debate is a long one, and isn't split on Christian/non-Christian lines.

I don't know if I follow you here. Illegal and immoral are two different things.

I don't think the two are all that different, or irreconcilable. Christianity is difficult for me because it still has the underpinnings of legalistic, 'old testament' thinking, which Christ explicitly supports. It also requires accepting things that have no proof on faith alone - that there is a God, and it's the Christian one. That there's a Hell, and people are really sent there. Taoist philosophy is difficult for me because a lot of it sounds very much like navel-gazing mumbo-jumbo. It doesn't include the exhortation to Love. Much of it seems more geared towards a leader, not a 'normal' person.

guyy

I wouldn't put too much stock in the wording of any particular English translation. The original is pretty spare; that's why it is so cryptic. It is said that scholars have gone over the hill when they begin work on new translations of the Tao Te Ching.

Here's mine!


道可道，非常道。
The way [that] can be walked, [is] not lasting way.

名可名，非常名。
The name [that] can be named, [is] not lasting name.

無名天地之始；
The nameless [is] the origin of heaven

有名萬物之母。
Names are the mother of all things.

And so on... Having done this little exercise, i'm surprised at how poetic some of the English translations are.


Anyway, the cultural context of Taoism is Confucianism. The target audience for the Tao Te Ching is an older, literate man who has studied and lived the straight and narrow. Obviously, in ancient China, this was an elite crowd.

The Beats and the hippies who seized on Taoism (often through Zen) positioned themselves more combatitively. I don't think it would be entirely fair to say they were in a symbiotic relationship with the man in the gray flannel suit or the other-directed drones in the lonely crowd.