What’s your take on this passage from 365 Tao Daily Meditations!
This passage of the book for me has conjured a thoughtful revelation of religion itself -especially with the many denominations etc.
I have wrote my own take on this but this is my first post in this forum and I’m kind of shy with sharing my thoughts at the moment.
Every god can be defied. No choice, no devotion.
There have been many rebels who have chosen to defy their gods.
Without this option, there can be no true devotion to a holy
concept. For devotion is only valuable when a conscious decision is
made to follow that course, even in acknowledgment of the
difficulties ahead. Choosing to be a devout person is good.
Choosing to defy the gods is also good, for it reaffirms the basic
ability of human beings to make choices. We cannot support
religions which say that there are no choices. Metaphysical totalitarianism of any kind stifles the freedom we have as human beings. It is not acceptable to have a religion where
the alternative to faith is punishment-that’s how you train dogs,
not develop people. Spirituality is only great when it allows that
utmost freedom to follow it. If we suffer from difficulties, that is
not holy retribution, and we should not allow it to create
debilitating questions.
If you endure a crisis in your life, it may well challenge your
faith. Perhaps you will even respond bitterly to your gods and cry out: How could anything holy permit this atrocity to happen to
me? But gods are not our parents or protectors. They are there only
to inspire us to be better people. They symbolize the inherent
choice of this existence. It is secondary whether we choose belief
or defiance. What is precious is that we are always able to choose.
This is one way of explaining the more precise meaning of secularism.
In the West, we tend to think that secularism is the absence of faith. Or, a slightly more sophisticated view: a leveled playing field where a plurality of believers and non-believers can take up equal public space. Charles Taylor would argue that secularism is actually the space that opens up to consciously and freely choose the belief in the transcendental.
This mirrors your point about metaphysical totalitarianism beautifully. For Taylor, as for this Taoist meditation, faith loses its transformative power if it is driven by fear. Genuine spirituality can only exist in a space where the individual is safe to explore, doubt, or even defy.
This passage seems to say that defiance is a measure of faith or true devotion. I disagree. One does not need to defy God to feel true devotion. And this is true of devotion to anything. One can become devoted through an understanding of what it means to follow spiritually. Choice should not be compromised just because there isn’t an opposing force against a belief.
This is standard, low-Q bad metaphysics. It relies on totalizing concepts through cheap, circular contradictions: “Faith requires non-faith,” “Devotion requires defiance,” etc. Blah, blah, blah.
This kind of low-resolution thinking immediately leads to blatant falsities:
False. Faith is 99.9% cultural impregnation and herd conditioning. It is almost never a “personal conscious choice.”
And naturally, this faulty premise leads straight to the production of lukewarm moral platitudes
LOL! The rest of the post is drowning in the exact same sanctimonious hot air.
This writing doesn’t sound ancient or classical in the slightest. It just reads like a lazy, contemporary New Age word salad.
I think I understand - blind obedience requires no thinking, but those people who come to their own conclusions about existence and the whole damn thing, based on their own experiences and analytic (hopefully well-informed) powers, might very well be considered rebels if they go against the status quo.
“the gods” here might also be open to interpretation. It may take the form of those opinions put forward by the group with the condition that belonging to the group requires you “think like us” - and what could be more against independent thinking than that?
Indeed, it is devotion to one’s own ideals and principles in the face of blowback from the group that, imo, makes the condition for the best self-actualization.