"I wonder what the world would be like if say 85% of the world professed atheism?"

It would signal intelligence, so I would say better. Isn't most of northern Europe atheist? If more of the world was like northern Europe, to me that would be an unqualified improvement.

I think the Bible-Beating Christians are the biggest problem, in the western world. It's not enough for them to worship their God, they have to make you worship their God, too.

I'm sort of a Taoist/Buddhist/Christian. Catholic by birth, so it's always a part of me. Christian in the sense that I try to behave as I've heard how Christ behaved, not because I have any fondness for most of his followers. I love the man more than the god, and of course, all that we know of the man is mostly a myth.

I'm Buddhist because like any All American boy growing up in the early 1970's, I watched Kung Fu. Later in life I found a book of Zen poems and koans and they really stuck with me, like the story of a cup having to be empty before it can be useful, before it can be filled again.

And Taoism? I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but that I Ching has been talking to me for about twenty years now and I'm always amazed at how...applicable the readings can be. Lately the 23rd passage of Lao Tzu's "Way of Life" has really been sticking with me. I hope you don't mind me including it here; it's kind of long.

lao tzu - Tao Te Ching - 23
Sparing indeed is nature of its talk:
The whirlwind will not last the morning out;
The cloudburst ends before the day is done.
What is it that behaves itself like this?
The earth and sky! And if it be that these
Cut short their speech, how much more yet should man!

If you work by the Way,
You will be of the Way;
If you work through its virtue
you will be given the virtue;
Abandon either one
And both abandon you.

Gladly then the Way receives
Those who choose to walk in it;
Gladly too its power upholds
Those who choose to use it well;
Gladly will abandon greet
Those who to abandon drift.

little faith is put in them
Whose faith is small.

But I wouldn't begin to force anyone to see things as I do. That's a sickness.

(sorry for the long post on your blog)

>> ^Trancecoach:
The hard and strong will fall.
The soft and weak will overcome.

I just dropped a brick on a cockroach and from the looks of it...I don't think either of them ever read the Tao Te Ching.

A man is born gentle and weak.
At his death he is hard and stiff.
Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.

Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.

Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle.
A tree that is unbending is easily broken.

The hard and strong will fall.
The soft and weak will overcome.

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 76

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Dune - Frank Herbert
Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut
Live from Golgotha - Gore Vidal
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller


Those are 10 off the top of my head, in no particular order. Some I consider favorites, others made a strong enough impression that they always come to mind when someone asks a question like this.

I don't know if you meant to confine this to novels or not, but I'm going wider:

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
Dune (whole series) - Frank Herbert
Live from Golgotha - Gore Vidal
Macbeth - William Shakespeare
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

I'm actually in the middle of Cryptonomicon right now, but I'm already confident it belongs in that list. 5 is too short, anyway:

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Galápagos - Kurt Vonnegut
The Hobbit & LotR - J. R. R. Tolkien
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

There's probably a couple dozen I've forgotten at the moment, and there's a lot of other fantasy novels I really enjoyed, like Roger Zelazny's "Chronicles of Amber". But that's a good start.

I knew exactly what I was referring to when I wrote that. No need to remind me. I know exactly how I am.

Here, evidently Tao Te Ching carries the same mentality as you:

Just as a sapless tree will split and decay
So an inflexible force will meet defeat;
The hard and mighty lie beneath the ground
While the tender and weak dance on the breeze above

In reply to this comment by my15minutes:
>> ^rottenseed:
hmmm it seems like most of you choose to adapt rather than carrying the age old Neandertal tradition of smash and oppose all change whatsoever.


funny, that you would phrase it that way.

chapter 2 tao te ching

Under heaven all can see beauty, for there is already ugliness.

All know there is good, for there already is evil.

Therefore having and not having emerge together.

difficult and easy lie opposite to each other .

Long and short compare;

High and low lean upon each other;

Front and back follow each other

Therefore the saint exercises 'non-action' to do things, and

exercises, 'non-talking' to teach.

He initiates nothing, and allows ten thousand things to grow:

Rising, yet not considering he did it;

Achieved, yet he does not consider that he completed it.

Therefore, all the work he did last forever. Lao Tzu

Wow, I can't believe I'm actually going to agree with QM on this. You're absolutely right - the Founding Fathers NEVER imagined a public school system that could and should be attended by anyone and everyone. And agreement ends -- because we're not a nation of slave owning "gentleman" farmers anymore! Public schools are essential to a literate electorate.

Today's word is "literacy." Can you say "literacy?" Oh, apparently not, Mr. Bush.

I don't know one person who has gone through public school in the US who has not had some sort of lesson on the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian dieties. Why not teach the Bible in the same way?

I remember studying the Iliad and the Odyssey as works of classical fiction and oral tradition. But I'm pretty sure they weren't trying to convince us that if we poked out the eye of God's son, that He would condemn us to years of random adventures on the high seas, only to come home to find our wives cheating on us. Yeah, I'm sure that wasn't part of the lesson.

Why not teach the King James' Bible in the same way we learned about other classical and medieval literature? LOL! Just try to pull a stunt like that in any American primary school and watch the fireworks.

Here's a notion - along with math and reading comprehension requirements for graduation, how about a requirement of knowledge of the world's religions? Maybe we could even have a day of reading verse from the Tao Te Ching.

Nothing in the world
is as soft and yelding as water
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.

The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.
Everyone knows this is true,
but few can put it into practice.

Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching