50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know: Religion Read Free

their golden years in the sun. Worse yet, Lao Tzu had so far stubbornly refused to put pen to paper and write down a single word about his unique worldview. And so the old man was about to be gone, vanish forever and be lost to history. The gate guard knew exactly what he had to do.
     
    After several rounds of polite begging only met with Lao Tzu repeatedly turning down his requests, the guard decided to take matters in his own hands: he promptly arrested Lao Tzu, tossed him in jail, gave him all the paper he could need and told him he would only be free when he would finish a book capturing the essence of his teachings. As it turns out, jail is a powerful motivator, so Lao Tzu spent the following three days writing furiously. Eighty-one short poems later Lao Tzu got up, handed his writings to the guard, waved goodbyeand disappeared from the pages of history. According to the story, this is how Tao Te Ching , the most important text of Taoism, came into being.

     
    Just like in the case of most tales about the founding of the various world religions, no reliable data confirming the historical truth of this story exists. But unlike in the case of most religions, Taoists freely admit that this is probably nothing but a legend—one of many versions of an imaginative tale. According to them, it matters little whether things really happened this way. The point of the story is to highlight Lao Tzu's distrust of words. In case the first line of the Tao Te Ching wasn't emphatic enough as a warning in this regard (“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao”), the myth of Lao Tzu's composing the book only under duress makes even plainer a key Taoist concept. Wisdom is something that's alive. On the other hand, words in general, and written words in particular,are an abstraction—too easy to misinterpret. At best, words can give you a glimpse of somebody's wisdom, but far too often people take them too literally and this leads to the annoying tendency of great theories to shape-shift into sinister dogmas. The jail story is a Taoist inside joke to remind us not to take anybody's words as absolute truths. Not such a bad advice considering how often what begin as benign religions turn dark really fast.
     
    So, here's what you can take away from this. Next time you land in jail, you could just follow Lao Tzu's lead, try to ignore the unsavory characters around you, and kill the time by creating a new religion.

04 THE DISTURBING AND UNLIKELY MARRIAGE BETWEEN ISRAEL AND CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISTS
     
    In the modern American political landscape, Israel has no supporters who are as loyal and determined as some of the most right-winged fringes among Christian evangelicals. By looking at the current Israeli-Christian fundamentalist love-fest, it would be difficult to imagine that these two were not always best friends. But yet, anyone who managed to stay at least half awake during history class should be a bit puzzled by this odd alliance.
     
    For the better part of 2,000 years, the lives of Jews in any country dominated by conservative Christianity has not exactly been a barrel of monkeys. On the contrary, religious persecution was the name of the game. Rabid anti-Semitism has been the norm whenever and wherever church and state went hand in hand. And over the centuries hardcore Christians have put to use their imagination in coming up with every conceivable way to squash the Jewish religious minority among them: from the brutality of the Inquisition to forced conversions, from confining them to special parts of a city (the original “ghettos”) to downright expelling them from their lands, from the occasional pogroms to ordinary random acts of violence.
     
    To make matters worse, all of this intense oppression has not been the work of one particular Christian denomination, during one particular point in time. Rather, this has been the norm, and the various branches of Christianity have been outdoing each other in the