In other words, if I have no personal authority to regulate my neighbor’s behavior or morals, then that is a power I cannot lawfully and rightfully delegate to anyone else as my agent so they may do in my stead that which I cannot lawfully or rightly do personally, ever.Īgain, in MY personal opinion, when it comes to the PEOPLE, the ONLY valid laws our public servants can write are those stating a particular standard of punishment and process for the apprehension, prosecution, conviction, appeal, and the carrying out of the sentence (incarceration, death, etc.), for an unlawful or unjustifiable harm to the rights and property of any of the People. I don’t see ANY authority that was delegated by either the federal OR state constitutions that allows our public servants to create laws REGULATING the behaviors or morals of men who are acting only in their private and personal capacities when those acts result in no identifiable tangible harm to another.
their constitutionally proper application and impact. Taoism does include many deities, but although these are worshipped in Taoist temples, they are part of the universe and depend, like everything, on the Tao.The REAL question, in MY personal opinion, is not IF a government of the People can write laws, but rather, what authority can we delegate to them, which then determines what our public servants in government can write those laws to actually DO, i.e.
The Tao is not God and is not worshipped.
Glimpsed only through its effectsĪ good way of avoiding the Tao-as-object error is to see the various concepts of the Tao as doing no more than describing those effects of the Tao that human beings are aware of. And if one does this one can translate 'achieving union with the Tao' into 'developing oneself so as to live in complete conformity with the teachings of the Tao' which is easier to understand, and closer to the truth. It might be more helpful to regard Tao as a system of guidance. That sort of thinking is misleading: Thinking of the Tao as some sort of object produces an understanding of the Tao that is less than the reality. They feel that using 'the' gives Westerners the idea that the Tao is a metaphysical reality, by which they mean a thing (in the widest sense) or an absolute being like a god.īut even the name Tao can lead Westerners to think of Tao in the same way that they think of objects. Although it gives rise to all being, it does not itself have being.Īlthough it's conventional to refer to The Tao, some writers think that the "the" should be dropped because it isn't in the original Chinese term. It cannot be perceived but it can be observed in the things of the world. The Tao is not a thing or a substance in the conventional sense.