It’s a nervous thing telling people that, after forty years of attending a Christian church, I’m now more a practitioner of Taoism. There are lots of understanding people out there, and those too polite to offer any criticism, but what is being risked is running across someone who thinks of Taoism as a religion and assumes I’ve abandoned my Christian beliefs. Then I’m subject to their judgment.
Such an assumption on their part would miss the fact that I still hold my Christian beliefs, and that I take Taoism as philosophy and not religion. It’s a great supplement and complement to Christian beliefs. It has taken many years of study, observation, and deep internal delving to get where I’m at. And it’s not that I’ve become relativistic; indeed, the more one delves into doubt the more one finds that some things remain constant, and in the process you can parse out the things that don’t stand up to critical analysis. Education and experience with psychology help weed out the dysfunctional human stuff that gets tied to religion. But a suggestion of anything not Christian is threatening to some, and in fear their judgment can be a great force that I will not change. It’s hard to deal with them quietly and compassionately.
Such people are not hypocrites. They’re uneducated. It’s like someone who has never traveled outside the country and has never gotten to know a foreigner well, and who holds America as the greatest country that ever existed. How do they know? What’s their reference point? What experience can they compare it to? There are Christians who have never darkened the door of a temple or mosque, who have never cracked a book on world religions, who shut out any reference to other religions and cling to Jesus as the only way to God, so that any who don’t believe in Jesus are lost. It’s tidy and predictable, but I wonder how they would answer whether they thought Gandhi was in heaven.
Gandhi in heaven…it would present a paradox to an uneducated Christian, but it would foul things up totally to remind him that Hindus believe in reincarnation. Reincarnation doesn’t fit into the Trinity.
There was a German mathematician named Kurt Gödel. He came up with a theorem that claims “every axiomatic formulation of number theory contains undecidable propositions”. In lay terms this means that nothing can be proved to the Nth degree. We all accept that 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 1+3=4, and believe that the pattern follows into infinity. However, Gödel’s theorem says it is possible that at some point the pattern will break down and no longer be true, and in our inevitable limited understanding, to say nothing of nobody having the time to prove something into infinity, we have to admit that it just isn’t possible to say anything is absolute.
Gödel’s theorem destroyed Principiae Mathmatica, up until then the authoritative text of conclusive principles of mathematics.
Apply this to religion. Very little can be proven absolutely. Some things, like practicing the Golden Rule, over time and culture seem to bring about the goodness and aims of all religion. While it’s not absolute, it can be taken as pretty solid. It’s also pretty simple to understand, by the way, but has proven to be very difficult to actually practice. In fact, it’s conceivable that if the majority of humankind were to practice the Golden Rule on a consistent basis there would be no need for religion or – gasp! – government.
It’s not my place to demand that people understand things as I do, or to expect a great deal of social and religious change. It seems to be the lot of humans to struggle with internal and external control. So I guess I’ll just go on practicing Taoism quietly, letting people be at their stages of spiritual development, and work on being charitable with them no matter how they see me or treat me. It would be an accomplishment for me to be able to tell them what I believe without preparing a defense in case they don’t take it so well, and even further to be able to absorb any slings and arrows without being wounded. I’ve got a lot of growing to do yet.
