And that's why if someone says they hate gay marriage, I just tell them not to have one.
My only issue with the plurality you mention, with everyone expressing their individuality, is when it collides with someone else's expression. I mean, maybe someone truly wants to murder someone. And that person truly doesn't want to be murdered. Then what?
But that's the only real flaw I've found with it. I'm a total pluralist at heart. The uncertainty can be scary, but it just feels more natural to me. My favorite professor used to say you have to learn to just embrace the Mystery. He used to say that's his religion, too: Mystery.
I don't know much about Taoism other than the bare basics, so reading this makes me want to look into it again.
Hi... thanks for the comment.
And I’m with you on the inevitable flaws in the notion of plurality (or polyculture). Murder, violence, rape.... what if the murderer’s True Nature is to murder others? Etc.
Interestingly, Confucius and Mencius (later Confucian philosopher) tackled this problem explicitly.
Mencius’ argument was that all people are born inherently good, and it’s family/society/cicrcumstance which adds layers of conditioning which influence their behaviour as an adult. His solution was to educate and cultivate the Virtues so that the true goodness lying within each person could come out.
Confucius (who started all this) brought in the concept of wu-wei, and then later Taoist influenced by Confucian philosophers used this idea to solve the problem of ‘evil’.
Most of us in the west who know of the concept of wu-wei know it be something along the lines of “effortless action”. The idea is that if your true nature is being expressed, then all your actions will be effortless and life will flow.
But what happens when your true nature bumps up against mine? Confucius solved this by stating that part of acting in a wu-wei manner involves also behaving in a manner that does not impede another from behaving in a weu-wei manner.
Confucianism and Taoism make a big deal about relationships, the inherent paradigmatic understanding that everything exists in relationship with other things - it’s very proto-ecologism, hints of systems-thinking.
So you can’t be living effortlessly, unless your true nature is being expressed AND it isn’t being impinged on or impinging upon others.
It’s tricky to live this way.
But I don’t think that makes it somehow not worth trying one’s best.
Thanks for the conversation!
😊🙏🏽☯️
Thank you so much for taking the time to write all of that out! I really appreciate it.
That argument makes a lot of sense to me. I'm really happy to have seen it worked out like you showed. I don't know much about Taoism and Confucianism explicitly, but I do have a good feel for Eastern worldviews, so it makes perfect sense to me. Especially when you throw in that it's all about relationships, too.