Quote Originally Posted by Polymirize
so, if I'm hearing this correctly, it sounds like your problem is much less with religion and more with the closeminded tendency to make realworld truthclaims out of religious "knowledge". As was already discussed, buddhism and taoism are much more philosophical in outlook, or at least, neither claims to truth in such a way that renders other religious views false.

Is the problem religion then? of the fundamentalist outlook?
I think this kind of outlook is inevitable in those belief systems which are more "religious" than "philosophical", that is, they make claims which cannot be verified or falsified by observation and logic. Whether you accept the entire Bible as literally true, or just believe vaguely in God and the divinity of Jesus and such, you're going to need such an outlook. You're going to have to make claims that you just can't prove to disbelievers. But Buddhism and Taoism don't make any wild claims about invisible creatures like gods and souls, so they don't have anything which needs to be taken on faith.

If you want to find out why something is about the Buddhist or Taoist worldviews, there's usually a logical answer to be found, and if you don't agree with something that's okay. There is no such concept as "heresy", because there is nothing to be heretical about. In Taoism, the Tao is just a metaphor for how the universe works, it isn't a real entity that you have to believe is "out there" somewhere, ready to intervene in our world if you ask it real nice. Taoism doesn't pretend to have all the answers on how the universe works. It's just a way of trying to find out. When the Taoist disagrees with someone, he tries to talk it out, because it usually can be talked out if you're not discussing invisible worlds full of invisible creatures that we can't detect.

But in Northern Ireland, they can't just "talk out" whether or not the Pope is God's spokesman. There is just no real logical way to settle that argument with words since it deals with things which can't be measured or observed, which is why they resort to violence to solve their dispute. The "pro-life" extremist can't just prove to the abortion-performing doctor that God considers fetuses sacred, so he resorts to bullets to deal with the problem. The Chechen independence movement can't prove to the Russian government that Allah wants Chechnya to be a separate country, so they resort to terrorism to get their point across. This is just what happens when people make up gods which they deeply believe in but for which there just isn't the slightest bit of evidence.