A Comparison Of Faith In The Tao Te Ching, And The Book Of Job

Faith is the belief in the intangible, something that doesn’t appeal to the five senses, such as love, hope, karma, God, or some other higher power. It is a form of spiritual knowing which can’t be expressed in words, but expressed through experience. Not all faith is the same because every human being is different. While some people don’t believe in faith because they think that it is affiliated with a religion or a higher power, I believe that everyone possesses some sort of faith, even if it is not religiously based, because in order to survive reality, we need faith. In this essay I am going to be examining faith in the Tao Te Ching, and in The Book of Job. While each of these texts contain different values, beliefs, and higher powers,
From the time I was a baby I have gone to Church and learned about Jesus and God. During high school, I went to a Mission Valley Christian Academy and then transferred to Valley Christian School where I graduated. Throughout my whole high school experience, I was taught about the bible and Jesus by Christian teachers, made Christian friends, and worked with Christian co-workers. I have been surrounded by Christianity and I have never had much of a chance to experience other religious beliefs such as Taoism. I have been taught that we must accept Jesus into our hearts and live out our lives according to his teachings in the Bible in order to go to heaven. If we get lost along the way, if we fail to see Jesus as our savior, if we believe in some higher power other than God, then we are sentenced to a lifetime in hell. I have always had a little trouble with this idea; that just because someone has their own reality, with their own faith, means that they are sentenced to Hell when they die. This idea leads to the idea that these faiths are somehow different and will lead to different
I have read it before but just barely. I knew it was a story about a man who was tested and lost faith in God, but that was about it, I had no deeper understanding of Job’s story. Closely examining Jobs life, I realized that his experience is relatable to everyone which was surprising to me. We all have something in common with Jobs life, maybe not to such extremes but everyone has experienced a death of a loved one, or divorce in the family, or sudden poverty, or severe sickness, just maybe not all at once like Job did. Why do bad things happen to good people? It is the first question we jump to when reading this story. My understanding is that bad things will happen to us, it’s a fact of life, but the question should shift from why to how. How we will deal with the bad things in our lives? Job lost everything and he turned his back on God, he lost his faith. As a Christian I would like to say that I would be different, that I would lean on God in the midst of loss and hardship. But I am human, and I am sure that there will be a time when my faith in God will grow weak and I will turn away from him. I believe that the most important part of the story of Job is the fact that after he lost everything, including his trust in God, that he regained faith in God, and came back to him. He finally realized that his faith in God meant something, because he finally laid eyes on God instead of just