HUU Community Cafe

Judith Hollowood
November 25, 2007

“If we choose to let conjecture run wild,” Darwin wrote in his personal notebooks, “then animals …-our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements-they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor-we may all be melted together.”

From these cautious early thoughts, Charles Darwin went on to develop the theory that most educated Western thinkers believe to explain the proliferation and variety of life on earth. Darwin published his theory in 1857. In the 150 years since then, the core ideas of Darwin’s theory has achieved acceptance as science. Sometimes I wonder how this happened. Learning about the life work of Thomas Henry Huxley, I understand this outcome a little better.

I grew up a hundred years after the emergence of evolutionary thought and have always glibly supposed that people who did not grasp Darwin’s ideas and support them immediately had small minds. However, when I read more about the times, in the words of the people who lived through them, I began to form a more generous understanding of their quandary. First, there was legitimate difference of scientific opinion as to whether enough evidence had yet been found to support the new theory. Second, from the very beginning, Mr. Darwin’s theory challenged the religious basis of personal morality, family relations, and public order. Continue Reading »

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It’s All About Relationship - (The Pieces of a Puzzle)

(talk given at the Harrisonburg UU October 14, 2007) by Rev. Emma Chattin

“Cultivate your own relationship with God, but don’t impose it on others. You’re fortunate if your behavior and your belief are coherent. But if you’re not sure, if you notice that you are acting in ways inconsistent with what you believe—some days trying to impose your opinions on others, other days just trying to please them—then you know that you’re out of line. If the way you live isn’t consistent with what you believe, then it’s wrong.”

From Romans 14:22-23, The Message Translation

“I think Christianity has created a great problem in the Western world by repeatedly presenting itself, not as a way of seeing all things, but as one competing ideology among many. Instead of leading us to see God in new and surprising places, it too often has led us to confine God inside OUR place. Simeon Weil, the brilliant French resistor, said that the “tragedy of Christianity is that it came to see itself as replacing other religions instead of adding something to all of them.”

- From Richard Rohr in Everything Belongs

Religion… the final frontier….
This is a part of the voyage we will take today
in the UU @ Dale Enterprise.
Our 25 minute mission:
to seek truth, to explore new thoughts,
to try to understand civilization…
… to boldly go where few souls have ever gone before! Continue Reading »

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