From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Mon Oct 14 2002 - 11:11:29 MDT
FutureQ wrote:
> Personally I don't think China is that far from religion. Looked at a
> certain way communism is the twin of Taoism. Think about. In Taoism you are
> born into your lot in life and that just as nature is unchangeable. Sound
> any different than the state prescribing one's profession and station? I
> think the chinese so readily accepted communism because to them it was
> little different than what they knew for thousands of years.
Quite a bit of religion is certainly not about accepting one's
current situation as divinely ordained. Whether one agrees with
the packaging or not, there is a strong push for transcendence
of the status quo at the heart of many religions. There are
also twisted variants of most of them that put off real
trancendence to the heareafter or one's next incarnation.
I don't think religion per se is an enemy. I think human
inertia and serious programming not to rock the boat is the real
difficulty. Sometimes that has a religious wrapping or
rationalization but I believe it is a confusion to confuse the
wrapping with the root problem.
>
> They could easily slip back into Taoism if the communist state failed as I
> see coming anyway. Look how quickly the Orthodox Russian church gained
> ground when the USSR fell out of favor. Weak people need their crutches
> either religious or governmental.
Here we go again. The old religion is for "weak people" line.
Sigh.
> The trouble with Taoism is that it's the
> ultimate luddite religion. The chinese could have developed rocketry to the
> point of world conquest and even perhaps taken humanity to space several
> thousand years ago but they didn't because Taoism teaches that nature is
> unchanging so why try? It would be interesting to see how readily or not
> transhumanism takes in China.
>
Actually, the highly intellectualized and rigid Imperial Chinese
court grew more from Confucianism as I understand it. Thousands
of years ago? No, I see little support for that. Nor do I
believe the above reflects real understanding of Taoism.
- samantha
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