Nifty word collage.

Atheism and theism are not natural concepts. They arise when presumptions about cosmology including a creator god appear. Thus you hear atheists ranting about their mimetic Other as the theist, but few people care to say "I am a theist." It's a smear word. And transplanted to non-native soil outside Western discourse, these are especially inappropriate taxonomies.

Daoism as a teaching is especially problematic to view through this lense. While our cosmology is apophatic to an extreme which appears "atheistic" to Westerners, our theology is graduated and affirmative in a way which would be labeled polytheistic. All Daoism believers take refuge in the magisterium, th...

Nifty word collage.

Atheism and theism are not natural concepts. They arise when presumptions about cosmology including a creator god appear. Thus you hear atheists ranting about their mimetic Other as the theist, but few people care to say "I am a theist." It's a smear word. And transplanted to non-native soil outside Western discourse, these are especially inappropriate taxonomies.

Daoism as a teaching is especially problematic to view through this lense. While our cosmology is apophatic to an extreme which appears "atheistic" to Westerners, our theology is graduated and affirmative in a way which would be labeled polytheistic. All Daoism believers take refuge in the magisterium, the highest of Whom are the Celestial Worthies and Realized Beings. But these beings are not gods in the folk sense, but those Who are autoemergent from the Dao and those Who have returned to It through enlightenment.

In other words, these dichotomies between personal and impersonal deity, transcendent and immanent, simply don't apply to Daoism. The Worthies are borne in the Dao, and we return there. (Universal flow) The primordial Dao is "without form" and yet Taishang Laojun *is* the Dao. Form and thingness and lack of form and unthingness are ultimately the same. The work toward helping all beings attain eternal life through this is Daoism.