GOD-centric :

A life centered on the pursuit of a good and fair God of love

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Ch. 5 The Quest (continued)

Taoism

  Taoism does not get much play these days in the United States but in the 1980s it was popular with the publication of The Tao of Pooh, The Tao of Physics, and a slew of other Tao of books. A self-ordained Tao of Pooh expert, my brother, told me that I was Owl ~ filled with useless knowledge. Down the road, I even married, briefly, an avowed Taoist but I must tell you that sometimes you've just got to swim upstream.

  The Taoist in me embraced its emphasis on living a peaceful and joyful life and finding spiritual harmony within. I was intrigued by the idea that life and death were merely two aspects of the unchanging Tao, the mysterious natural order of the universe. I appreciated Taoism's Three Jewels of compassion, moderation, and humility.

  I was not a Taoist because, as best I could tell, it was pantheistic with its goal of living in accordance with the Tao which was the flow of the universe. My problem with pantheism was that I believed that God was entirely good yet it was not apparent to me that the universe was entirely good so God could not be identified exclusively with the universe. I believed that God called us to use our free will to attend to the good in the universe and to create good in the universe. In my thinking, God gave us in the universe the tools for goodness but we were the means by which goodness would be created; however, a Taoist was not supposed to struggle, oppose, or strive because the best way to live was in harmony with the natural course of things. I believed in some good healthy striving for the good and opposing of the bad and I was not willing to get into the yin-yang flow of accepting that good and bad were merely two sides of the same coin that should be mutually accepted as aspects of the Tao. Furthermore, I was not comfortable with Taoism's rather selfish focus on health and longevity.