Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.This is the last of the biblical commandments. God tells us that we should not wish longingly for those things owned by someone else.
~ King James version ~
Everything is of the cosmos.
~ possible Taoist alternative ~
From the Christian perspective, this commandment is all about property rights. It seeks to distinguish and separate what is yours from what is mine. Taoism, on the other hand, seeks to be impartial and show that all things are interconnected.
While most Taoists would agree with limiting one's desires, the concept of property is a human construct and, consequently, of no concern to Tao at all.
Beyond this, if your neighbor has far more than he/she needs and you don't have enough to live, it is the way of the universe to try to secure enough necessary provisions in order to survive. In such a situation, who is to say that such an appropriation would be wrong?
If you're interested in reading more from this experimental series, go to the Tao Bible Index page.
My mother (who always gave people the impressions she was a Reform Jew, not the Lutheran she was raised as, always taught me that the 10 commandments were "guidelines," good rules to follow if you wanted to live a good and decent life. And of course Jesus said only the first two were really the important ones (all others flowing from those). My father, rooted in Presbyterianism and later, weirdly, married to a Catholic, was always a little more rigid about these things. My mother died young and happy; my dad died old and kind of miserable.
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