In Contrast to the Shiʿah

Western religion and do not fit Chinese religion, which has never conceived the two things as opposites. Besides the traditional worship of these entities, Chinese folk religion, Chinese Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and formal thinkers in general give theological interpretations affirming a monistic essence of divinity. Taoists historically worshiped them the most and Chinese folk religion practitioners during the Tang dynasty also worshiped them, although there was more skepticism about the goodness, and even the existence, of xian among them. Chinese folk religion that incorporates elements of the three teachings in modern times and prior eras sometimes viewed Confucius and the Buddha as immortals or beings synonymous to them. Tian is both transcendent and immanent, manifesting in the three forms of dominance, destiny, and nature of things. Dì is a title expressing dominance over the all-under-Heaven, that is, all things generated by Heaven and ordered by its cycles and by the stars. He does bad things and gets into trouble. For a regime that has always been keen to avoid bad surprises, this approach may leave much to be desired. Yet, Confucians and Taoists traditionally may demand that state honours be granted to a particular deity. Ideas born from such a state cannot help but surpass the more mundane ideas of an unenlightened mind.

The distinction between organs of the state belonging to the public realm and religious institutions belong­ing to the private realm does not represent reality. ­Smith’s overall view is that an “invisible hand” guides the economy through the combination of self-interest, private ownership and competition. Many are worshiped as deities because traditional Chinese religion is polytheistic, stemming from a pantheistic view that divinity is inherent in the world. Many gods are ancestors or men who became deities for their heavenly achievements. Anyone who follows a religion should be respected for that. A modern view, described by Stephen Jay Gould as “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA), is that science and religion deal with fundamentally separate aspects of human experience and so, when each stays within its own domain, they co-exist peacefully. There are a variety of immortals in Chinese thought, and one major type is the xian, which is thought in some religious Taoism movements to be a human given long or infinite life.

Since all gods are considered manifestations of qì (氣), the “power” or pneuma of Heaven, in some views of tian, some scholars have employed the term “polypneumatism” or “(poly)pneumatolatry”, first coined by Walter Medhurst (1796-1857), to describe the practice of Chinese polytheism. The stability of the empire only suffered further when Incan emperor Huayna Cupac and his chosen successor died within days of each other in 1525, creating a vacuum of power which two remaining sons fought to fill. By December 2007, the series had registered sales of more than 500,000 copies. By August 2021, series has cumulativated over 15 million copies in circulation. By May 2021, Drops of God had sold over half a million copies, more than 3.5 million. In the depiction of Drops of God: Mariage, they wanted to emphasize how food and wine were intrinsic with each other, as there “are combinations that complement each other and that work against each other”. However, there is a significant belief in Taoism which differentiates tian from the forces of earth and water, which are held to be equally powerful. Tian bridges the gap between supernatural phenomena and many kinds of beings, giving them a single source from spiritual energy in some Chinese belief systems.

The Daodejing (ca. sixth to fourth centuries BCE, hereafter “DDJ”) is the earliest Daoist text that reads these natural patterns as evidence of a single force or principle of all that there is-as a single metaphysical ultimate-and “tentatively”, as Perkins (2019) says well, names this ultimate “the dao” or in some translations “the Dao” or “Dao”. Well, yes, but this statement is actually more problematic than many mainstream economists may realise. Gods are innumerable, as every phenomenon has or is one or more gods, and they are organised in a complex celestial hierarchy. Although religious groups are hardly the only sources of support in people’s lives, for believers, they can be important ones. When your wishes remain unfulfilled and your life feels like one long, unremitting, struggle to overcome an endless array of obstacles, can you tell the difference between God’s will and your will? On the other hand, you hear about skirmishes over labels on textbooks denouncing evolution or whether you can say “Christmas” in a school newsletter.