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“If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
-Lao Tzu

This puzzling advice by the famous Chinese philosopher is perhaps the wisest words ever uttered. Can you figure out what it means?

My take on it: Don’t rely on outside influences promising to get rid of all your problems. You have to deal with it on your own. All the self-help books, motivational speakers, and religious promises are for the weak. And they don’t work. The only person that can solve all of your problems right now is you. Lao Tzu is telling us that when we run across these “Buddahs” in life, it’s better to kill them than to risk being swindled by their schemes that don’t work.

This is what I meant when I said “Religion promises false hope” couple of posts back. Any mode of thinking that believes your life can be improved by superstitious and supernatural beliefs (including prayer, divine beings, and miracles) has to be utterly worthless, not to mention duplicitous. Because we know (to the most practical and rational way that we can) that supernatural things do not exist. So if religion, or anything else, promises things in the name of supernatural beliefs, it is false hope. How can we be so sure that supernatural things do not exist? After all, there is always some slight possibility? Of course, but there is always a slight possibility for anything. For all we know, Santa Claus and the Toothfairy might still exist. Science can’t disprove that these things exist. But it doesn’t make it rational to believe in them.

I suppose what religion has to offer is very attractive. After all, how wonderful would it be if there was a divine creator who cares for us, and who rights all the wrongs. Believe me, I would want to live in a universe like that. Unfortunately, all the evidence is to the contrary. And this is the most striking part about this conversation: many people say they believe in God because they wouldn’t want to live in a world where there wasn’t one. But this isn’t even an argument. What you want the world to be and how the world actually is are two completely separate things.

The fact that that you believe in a God is NOT an opinion. It is either right or wrong. It is either fact or fiction. Yes, one is entitled to their own opinions. But one is not entitled to their own reality. We call these people delusional or crazy. As far as we know, there is an objective reality. One is not entitled to believe that he himself is Napoleon if he is not Napoleon. Likewise, one is not entitled to believe in the supernatural if there aren’t any. Religion is not a matter of taste or preference. It is a matter of truth.

Lao Tzu was truly a smart man.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Philosophy, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.