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dirtnap

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  1. Hi folks. I'm new here. I found your site after doing a search for christianity and taoism. I see that some of you have done a similar search. I have a few comments Re the compatability of Christianity and Taoism in response to some of what has been written in this thread. I hope none of this is too redundant. first of all, I don't think the way of Jesus, the way of the cross, is in any way incompatable with wu wei. I think Jesus was following his Tao perfectly and went where it led. I assume the will of God is the same thing as the Tao. Ii think the confusion arises from the idea that the course of least resistence is the same as the most easy course. There is a great deal to suggest that this is far from the case. It is, for example, seemingly easy to ignore certain truths about the environment. By ignoring these we can persue a life of ease by, for example, not worrying about how much we throw away. The truth is that this "life of ease" leads to enormous difficulties later for oourselves and others. Another example is the "white lies (or black ones) that we tell to people to avoid difficulties in close relationships. These make it easy for us to avoid a small conflict (or large one) only to have us return to it later magnified 10 fold. Consider the person who is unfaithful to a spose for example. It is easyier to lie about an indescretion BUT this is almost never the end of it. the turth always comes out and then there is not only the original violation but the further one of the lie. All this to say that the course of least resistence is often the harder one. Another point of divergence between Christianity and Taoism is the alleged moral realitivism of the latter. It is important to remember that much of the rhetoric about the e1uality of right and wrong seen in Taoist texts, especially in Chaung Tzu, is in response to the moral rigidity of Confucian society. Institutional morality often serves to cover a lack of real compassion, which is why Lao Tzu points out that the notions of good and evil arise only after humans deviate from Tao. Similarly, Jesus responded in "irreverent" ways to the Jewish morality of his time by doing things like healing on the sabbath and having the timarity of forgiving an adulterous woman her sins. There is so much to say about this but I'll stop here. Peace be with you dirtnap
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