Direwolf

I think often enough we overlook the beauty and usefulness of those weeds too. Often times those weeds were beneficial to earlier people in the regions where we live for medicinal or for food purposes. Sure enough, some of them have no direct usefulness for humans, but they may have other usefulness in nature. I guess one could also ask what usefulness does a lawn of grass have other than to look nice when compared to another person's lawn. Why is one better than the other, in a sense. Nature itself is diverse, you rarely will see a field of grass without a variety of other things as well.

Thank you for sharing this, I've been interested in finding different translations of The Lord's Prayer and I'll definitely have to go through this and give it a study.

I'm not sure Christianity can be compared in that way. The 'Yahweh' of the Bible doesn't allow other Deity concepts, it's pretty explicit in the Bible when there are verses such as Exodus 20:3 "You shall have no other gods before me." The bible is very exclusive towards the God that is represented by 'El Shaddai' 'Yahweh' 'etc'.

True, but the flower has a purpose, bees and other parts of nature use them for their functions, by plucking it out we are removing it from that function, and the seeds of the plant come from the flower as well.

It's quite possible that our reality is an illusion, it's definitely been said that our perception of it can be. I mean, our eyes are merely optical receptors, and our brain is interpreting the information. One person may see green and another red, are either wrong? No, to both of them they are correct from their own view point.

I started reading the forum periodically and I've decided to join it and have discussions with fellow members here about Dao philosophy and to learn more about it. Hope to participate in healthy discussions around the board.

Beautiful quote and I can agree to that. It reminds me of when I was a child picking up insects and other wildlife, not putting them back where I found them, picking up plants despite the fact that they would wither and die. Sometimes it's best to observe, and appreciate the beauty in nature instead of reaching out and taking it when it will merely wither away when we do so.

I think we fear death because often enough, it's out of our control, whether we like to admit to it or not. You could do the best that you can do to not hit by a car on the way to work but statistically there's still a reasonable risk of that happening. Furthermore, as you say it's inevitable, our clock is ticking, has been ticking and will continue to tick, until it breaks, it is ultimately inevitable.

I'd like to echo this in that I've noticed throughout life, even in my own, if we blame others for our own failures, short comings, health, anything really, we're merely providing an excuse for our own self defeat. We make our lives, we decide whether or not we become stressed or emotional over something, and that too plays a role in our physical and mental health.

I like to think of an afterlife myself, I suppose you could go through life considering that you merely return to the earth and that your life is merely a temporary existence, a temporary combination of elements that simply return to wince they came. But I like to consider the latter the worst case scenario myself.