the Dao of Atheism :jeffers' petroglyph, pre-dakota, minnesota : the Shaman Atheist 7/81

7

The sky is eternal,
the earth remains.
Energy is constant,
matter is always.
Why do these things outlive us beings?
Because they do not promote
their own existence.

Place yourself last
and thereby be first.
Keep apart
but thereby be included.

Through this disinterest
and selfless action,
the fulfillment of one's journey
is achieved.

Socrates is the original wise man of the West. His fame survives even though he never wrote anything down about his ideas or himself. And he believed in a god or two, but not in the State as the politicians wanted him to believe. Jesus, too, never wrote anything down, and was a good Jewish theist whose later followers were indicted and executed on charges of atheism against the State. Both men had students who treasured the words of their teachers greatly, and wrote the words of their masters down later.
Lao Dzu and Buddha were great men in the East. 'Old Man' Lao Dzu wrote the 81 chapters of the Dao deh jing himself before being allowed to retire to the wilderness. Siddhartha was a good Hindu who went beyond the gods to comprehend human existence.
Both Lao Dzu and the Buddha are revered as the founders of two of the world's great religions, yet neither said the least in support of the god-idea or -experience.

It is an interesting comment on the history of Western atheism that the ideas of the two men most noted for intellectual and religious development in the West, who were both theists, have been more closely associated with atheism than the ideas of the two men from the East, which have always been inherently god-less and atheistic.




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