totally irrelevant yet interesting

Since I do not have the resources to set out on great adventures to exotic parts of the world, I do what I've done since I was a kid and I just end up reading a lot. I walked down to the Cleveland Public Library on my lunchbreak and picked up a few volumes worth of travel writing about Southeast Asia, Morocco, and Cape Town.

So I was reading about this one girl backpacking through Vietnam and she mentioned this temple for this religion called Cao Dai, which evidently is a combination of pretty much every major world religion imaginable but mostly Catholicism and Taoism.





and I guess the Illuminati is somehow involved in this. I'm waiting for the Art Bell types to jump on this one



From wikipedia:

According to Cao Dai, before God existed, there was the Tao, that nameless, formless, unchanging, eternal source referenced in the Tao Te Ching. Then, a Big Bang occurred, out of which God was born (emanationism). The universe could not yet be formed and to do so, God created yin and yang. He took control of yang and shed a part of himself, creating the Goddess to preside over yin. In the presence of yin and yang, the universe was materialized. The Goddess is, literally, the mother of the myriad of things in the Universe. Thus, Caodaiists worship not only God, the father, but also the Goddess, literally refer to as the Mother Buddha. Note that God's importance and role is higher than that of the Mother Buddha. Also, the Mother Buddha is male, as are all buddhas. The Mother Buddha only oversees yin and is not a part of yin, which is female.


Anyways, that has no real bearing on my life or that of anyone else I know, but it is interesting, I guess...