God is Back! ... for those UUs Who Believe in Religious Freedom

Our faith is a free religious faith. It allows all of us to make a

difference in our community and in our world.

In the latest UUWorld there is an article “Faith in Our Future.” Five UU ministers of some of the largest churches in the UUA were invited to share their thoughts on the future of Unitarian Universalism. The occasion was a symposium to celebrate the fifty years of the UUA. They were supposed to address the challenges of the future and what Unitarian Universalists need to do to ensure the continued existence of, as one minister wrote, our “miniscule” presence.

UUWorld Winter 2011

It struck me that each minister used the metaphor “G-d” in her/his talk. And one even said they pray in his church, even though “… they do not share a common understanding or experience of G-d.” Praying out loud, he wrote, reminds them of “their shared hopes” for their community and for each other.

It wasn’t that long ago when more than half of the men who signed the Humanist Manifesto of 1933 were Unitarian or Universalist ministers, professors, or in some way had a connection to Unitarian or Universalist religion. The Manifesto declared, “We are convinced that the time has passed for theism, deism, modern­ism, and the several varieties of ‘new thought.’"  

Now, seventy-eight years since the first Humanist Manifesto and G-d’s back!

Intense debate at Harvard and the University of Chicago Divinity Schools, Meadville Lombard Theological School, and Unitarian gatherings continued throughout second and third decades of the Twentieth Century. James Luther Adams and Gene Reed were the leading exponents of their rival views: Adams being a Unitarian Christian and Reed being a Unitarian humanist. However, it must suffice, that the debate raged, and sometimes the seminarians and professors were enraged; I’ve heard it said there was more than one time when “it almost came to blows,” whether humanists should leave the Unitarian churches and go down the street, so-to-speak, and join humanist societies or free religious societies.

Eventually, everyone agreed that the free religious church called Unitarian could handle deists, theists, and atheists.

Unfortunately, the atheists soon outnumbered the theists and deists and made anything spiritual, taboo. And there are storical justifications for this. It continued this way until about a decade and a half ago. Then UU ministers began to be brave enough to speak of their personal, spiritual inclinations. Which in turn, gave those deists and theists in the UU congregations the courage to speak out about their beliefs.

So, now, some are beginning to believe G-d has as much to do with science, as it has to do with spirit. And Thoreau said it so many years ago.

"With all your science can you tell

how it is, and whence it is

that light comes into the soul?"

~ Henry David Thoreau

In the book Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili, and Vince Rause study the brain while sub­jects enter deep meditative states. Using advanced imaging equipment, they have found an area of the brain that is affected and acts differently when their subjects meditate. It seems the part of the brain that places us in time and space is affected by meditation, and when this happens, the Self begins to see itself as limitless. They quote Eknath Easwaran to give us an idea of what happens:

As the river[s] flowing east and west

Merge into the sea and become one with it

Forgetting that they were ever separate rivers,

So do all creatures lose their separateness

When they merge at last into … [One]

This brings me to the salient point of my Words today: Our faith is a free religious faith. It allows all of us to make a difference in our community and in our world as One. No other faith—only a free religious faith—can do that. When we believe in something, whether it is atheism, Humanism, deism, theism, Buddhism, Daoism, or Other, if we practice that belief, then we find the courage, strength, desire, and hope to make the world better and to make ourselves better. It doesn’t matter what we personally believe, it matters that we believe.