How Daoism is Different From Christianity
And why I adopt one and discard the other.
I have strange sympathies with Christianity. Maybe because I have a rather long personal history being a Christian believer in the past, and I know many Christian people that I respect. I know what it is like to pray, to read the Bible, to praise God in church. I know how people’s lives have changed because of Christian faith. I still listen to some Christian teachers, and especially Eastern Orthodox perspectives on Christianity have been very inspiring. Also, people in the West who uphold traditionalist, life-sustaining values are most likely to be Christians. I find myself be aligned with Christians both spiritually, socially and politically, to a great extent.
Nevertheless, Christianity is not my faith, and here are my most basic reasons why.
God
Christianity teaches that God is personal, who has a will and feelings. He communicates through prophets, or at least used to do so, and he speaks through a collection of books called the Bible, and maybe through the subsequent tradition of the true church (whichever it may be). A believer can also talk to God through prayer, whether by speaking out aloud, or through thoughts inside one’s mind. God created this world and everything in with intention. The purpose of all created things is to glorify God. For human beings, it means to talk and sing praises to God, and do whatever God wants people to do. Through this kind of obedience and faith, the whole world should be an expression of people praising God. This state of the world is called the kingdom of God.
This is what I used to believe. However, I no longer do, and there are several reasons why not.
One of the most important objections to Christianity’s view of God is that I completely lack the experience of God’s personhood. I was an actively practising Christian for about fifteen years, I prayed several times for God to make himself better known to me, and yet, I never heard him actually speak. No one among my family members or friends experienced the same thing either. Or at least, I was never convinced that they did even if they told me so. The reason for this is that God speaking to us is not audible or verbal. And even if someone claims that, I have never heard of a case when several people heard the exact same words at the same time. It has always been a matter of one’s subjective experience.
People report meaningful coincidences in the context of the person having prayed for a sign, for example, and they claim that God was speaking to them through this coincidence. However, the problem with signs and events like these is that they are subject to perception and interpretation. What you make of a meaningful coincidence is up to you. If God’s personhood is so open to interpretation, instead of just hearing him speak audibly, I have no reason to believe in a personal God who speaks to people. I believe people just experience things. It could be the Dào at work in those experiences, but I don’t believe there is a divine personality behind it.
One might say that God speaks in the Bible. This means that a certain collection of books, written by some people and compiled by others several generations later, are regarded as divine words of God. But are they really? Having studied the original languages of the Bible, as well as the complex history of textual variants, and read holy texts from other religious traditions, I am fully confident that there is nothing that sets the Bible apart from any other text or collection that is treated as holy by different religions all around the world. There are good reasons why certain texts are treated as holy, because they can offer guidance to make decisions in life and uplift one’s soul and mind. On the other hand, they tend to have factual errors, nonsense and even moral problems as well. There are some texts that I think are wiser than others, but I haven’t seen a text that is so obviously different from other texts that I should treat it as uniquely holy.
I also see a problem with the idea that our purpose of life is to “glorify God”. It is seen as the highest purpose of human beings. But if I am an image of God, and meant to imitate God’s characteristics, then why is craving for other people’s praise and glorification despicable for human beings, whereas for God it’s okay? There is a double standard, and the whole idea of praising and glorifying God for who he is sounds narcissistic on God’s part. Even though Jesus, as God Incarnate, lowered himself and suffered on the cross, he eventually became exalted, and his purpose was to bring people to praise God. Those who do not want to praise God forever are treated as evil rebels and they should therefore be punished in hell for eternity. This does not sound like a good story, but more like a totalitarian dystopia that instills fear to obey authorities. I don’t think truly spiritual people are big fans of this narrative, but would rather rebel against it.
In Daoism, the conception of “God”, or the Dào, is very different. Most people would not even identify the Western conception of God with the Daoist conception of the Dào. There are valid reasons for this, but personally, I don’t have a problem identifying the ideas of God and the Dào. These two terms are very vague anyway, so they are open to many interpretations. I embrace that when I talk with people about religion and God. They are of the Dào just like I am, and they give different words to their meaningful experiences than I do. However, I believe we have a lot in common especially on a level that is beyond languages, cultures and traditions. We have the same Source, after all.
According to the Dàodé Jīng, the Dào is that which has generated every being in the universe. It is the fundamental unity between different beings, living and non-living alike. It is called the Mother of all beings. From a scientific perspective, the generative process in our universe began with the Big Bang, and from that point on, a constant process of differentiation into atoms, molecules, galaxies, solar systems, cells and organisms has taken place. This description has similarities with how Daoism has viewed the beginning of the world. The Dào also sustains and nourishes all beings. But unlike the Christian conception of God, the Dào is regarded as impersonal, and the constant creative and transformative process does not have any particular intention or purpose. Just like water runs its course simply because of its properties, the Dào flows the way it does simply because of what it is like.
The Dào does not ask to be praised. Instead, “Water is adept at benefiting the myriad beings because it does not contend. It resides in places that the multitude dislikes. Thus, it is close to the Dào.” (Dàodé Jīng 8). Water flows downwards and adapts its shape based on its environment, but at the same time it serves as the basic necessity of life. The Dào is similar, it is found in lowliness, humility and open receptivity. It does not assert itself aggressively and does not expect worship. Instead, through humility and openness, one could be filled with the life-giving power of the Dào. It does not have a will, because it is a force that simply acts out of its own nature.
This also means the cosmos it generates works the way it does, and it doesn’t have any special interest in human concerns. Dàodé Jīng says in chapter 5 that heaven and earth are not humane but treat people as straw dogs. This is a harsh teaching, but I think it is a very mature one as well. People have different lots in life, and life doesn’t treat us fairly. Fairness is a human or animal invention, based on our needs and interests. In this way, I see Daoism as a more spiritually mature, enlightened and realistic tradition than Christianity for this reason. In Christianity, theologians and philosophers try to reconcile God’s goodness with the suffering of the world. God has to be perfectly loving, perfectly just, all-knowing and yet the world he created is full of suffering. There is a certain anthropocentrism at play in having to have a God with such qualities. Daoism doesn’t have a problem with theodicy, because the “dicy” part is a mere human concern.
One question that lingers in my mind is whether the Dào is just another rather unnecessary word for arbitrarily lumping all natural laws and “the way things are” under one label. If it is, there would not be a reason to have that concept at all. I think the Dào is a religious / spiritual concept that should not be, and cannot be, explained scientifically. It falls into the same category as the question of whether my mother loves me. It is a matter of meaning and experience, not science. For me, the Dào is a word that I use to describe how I relate to the universe. I feel that a meaningful life is found in a sense of flow, and that is called realising the Dào. It is an open question to me whether there is something “supernatural” about the Dào. I have had mystical experiences when I have practised Daoism, but I don’t treat them as evidence for metaphysics, nor do I run to reduce those experiences to mere psychology either. I just let them be, and keep practising.
Ethics and Morality
The “big story” of our existence in this universe is very different in Daoism than in Christianity, and this sets these two religions widely apart from each other. I am a result of complex transformative processes, one thing leading to another, until my mother was conceived and I was born. There isn’t any particular purpose to my life. I am just a product of the flow of life itself. Suffering does not result from any kind of rebellion or perceived crime against the Dào, because the Dào is not offended by anything. Instead, we cause suffering to ourselves and others by asserting our will, desires and ego in a distorted and over-emphasised way. We do not see ourselves as part of the bigger whole, but want to make ourselves the centre of our world. Therefore, if something goes against our will and plans, that becomes like an end of the world, and we freak out. Our primal instinct tell us to survive and be comfortable, and when that does not happen, we are unhappy.
The remedy for our ailments is to cultivate the stillness and calmness of the mind, and health and vitality of the body. It is not a story of submission, obedience and praising a divine ruler, but a story of finding harmony with others and the world around us, and a flow of life where we feel alive. Where the Christian spiritual concepts are primarily legal and political in relation to God, Daoist think more in medical, psychological and cosmological terms in relation to the Dào. This is why Christian evangelists and apologists seem to have come from a different planet, from a Daoist perspective. They speak a different language when it comes to ethics.
Because I do not see a cosmic personality overseeing my life, it is more natural for me to view my life in Daoist, impersonal terms. I do not think about whether I commit a crime against a divine system of law or offend a ruler, but instead I am concerned with how I hurt other beings and myself, and whether my actions lead to spiritual disease or health. Instead of talking to a personal God through prayer, I connect with the Dào through the clarity and stillness of the mind. Everything falls into place, and I find peace. This is where the natural flow of effortless action begins. This is life in the Dào.
You have a deeply flawed perception of God.