by Tom Endress
March 15, 2015

Readings:

Transcendentalism- Webster’s New World College Dictionary- 1) any of various philosophies that propose to discover the nature of reality by investigating the process of thought rather than the objects of sense experience. 2) by extension, the philosophical ideas of Emerson and some other 19^th century New Englanders, based on a search for reality though spiritual intuition.

Listen and see if you can guess who wrote the following:

“One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes, though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.” From….William James and his 1898 experiment with nitrous oxide recorded in his The Varieties of Religious Experience

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Talk

Good morning! I am so excited to be here. I have been piecing together this particular talk on neuroscience for the better part of a year. It hasn’t been easy because there is so much material that has been coming out within the last decade on the relationship between brain activity and mystical, spiritual, and religious experiences.

But first a disclaimer. I am neither a neurologist nor a neuroscientist by any means. Just interested in neuroscience, especially as it applies to mysticism and spiritual experience. Although retired for over a decade now I was trained as a clinical psychologist.

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by Linda A. Dove
January 18, 2015

Introduction

I grew up in the Anglican Church. For me, its doctrines were a source of puzzlement, skepticism, and anguish—about my sin—my inability to have faith. Finally, I rejected Christianity. And, with the baby, I threw out the bath-water; I turned away from all religion. How many of you had similar experience?

In my 30’s I began to search again. I felt that “holy longing” to understand life’s mysteries. I wanted meaning and purpose; a faith in something larger than myself. By that time I was agnostic, unwilling to throw God right out of the water, but unwilling also to embrace a divinity I was unable to touch, see, hear or talk with. How many of you resonate with this?

My Purpose Today

Now, I’ve been a Unitarian-Universalist for only five years. Quite a few of you are also new UUs. How many of us are fully aware of where our UU faith comes from? I’ll try fill us in with a little bit of our complex origins—the Christian ones—today. And then I hope to encourage us all, both old and new members, to deepen our own understanding and then not to hold back about what our liberal faith stands for. Speaking out takes courage in a conservative, church-going area like the Valley.

Why do we sometimes hold back? An obvious reason is we don’t want to be lumped together with religious theologies like Christianity, Islam or Judaism that we rejected. Many of you tell me UUism attracted you because of fellowship in a like-minded community that is NOT one of these religions.

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by Kevin J. Zimmerman
December 28, 2014

I learned at last, as I came to be about seventeen, that my father was an entire freethinker, as much as I am now. It shocked me much, because he never taught me anything, allowed me to pick up religion from any one around me, and then scolded me because I embraced beliefs which he knew must condemn him. I think this neglect to be honest with children is a terrible evil. I have lost years of thought, and wandered wide and done such unwise conceited things, and encountered risks for soul and body, all of which might have been obviated by his frank teaching. — Moncure Conway –

I grew up in a largely secular household, where books by Carl Sagan and Joseph Campbell punctuated our bookshelves. But like Moncure Conway, I “picked up religion”from those around me, eventually joining the Mormon Church, to my father’s great disappointment. Unsatisfied with the local public schools, my parents opted to send me to a private, Christian school from kindergarten through third grade—a time when children are most vulnerable to indoctrination. I loved the school, but there my child’s brain was infected with the tedious supernatural beliefs of religion, beliefs such as mind reading (prayer), vicarious sacrifice (the atonement), and survival of one’s own death (the afterlife). Once people’s brains have been infected by religious dogma, they are often crippled in their ability to think critically. I had caught a bad case of religion that I didn’t shake until my 30s.

You can read Kevin Zimmerman’s entire sermon in pdf format Parenting Authentically in an Interfaith Marriage

By Linda Dove
Sunday, October 5, 2014

It’s pot-luck Sunday today when we give and receive food and share fellowship among our guests and ourselves. In my recent talk on Giving I said I would follow up sometime with the flip side of the coin, Receiving. Today’s the day. First, I’ll remark on the topic and then I’ll focus on how Receiving fits into our UU journeys together, as I see it.

Of course, we all sometimes receive from one another, whether gifts, services, caring—or even things we don’t want to receive.

Either/Or

The wider culture uses Either/Or thinking—Givers/Takers, Selfless/Selfish, Responsibility/Rights, Generosity/Miserliness. In general, we focus on Givers more than Recipients. We see Givers as acting from a sense of abundance; Receivers from scarcity or greed.

Stereotypes in the media contribute to this. Givers are heroes—deservedly—Iraq veterans, nurses, fire-fighters. Recipients are villains—Labor Unions, Big Banks.

• John Stewart recently did a satire on this. He showed the TV talking-heads on six different prime-time news programs all expressing outrage that people on food stamps were buying— seafood.

• And Annette Bosworth, a political candidate in S. Dakota, wrote on FB that food stamp Recipients are wild animals. She made her point by quoting the National Parks Service asking visitors not to feed the wild animals because that makes them dependent on humans.

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J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.
Delivered at Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalists, August 17, 2014

In each of the major northeastern Asian nations one finds three religions practices among others. One of these is the international religion of Buddhism, which originated in South Asia and entered China from Central Asia to the northwest, then to move on into Korea and then to Japan. Another is Confucianism, which originated in China and then also moved through Korea to Japan. Finally, each of them has a much older traditional religion that is shamanistic in practice, animist and polytheist, emphasizing divinities in mountains, rocks, trees, rivers, and other local sites, and rituals to stimulate fertility in people as well as agriculture, and also protection from evils and bad health, and so on, with critics sometimes arguing that these older shamanistic religions are “superstitious.” In China there were many local ones, with most of them becoming subsumed into Taoism, which also has a more esoteric aspect as shown in the book, Tao-De-Ching, by Lao-Tse. In Japan this ancient local religion is Shinto, and in Korea it is Sinkyo (pronounced “Shinkyo”), with it likely these last two names come from a common root in Central Asian or Siberian shamanism, Japanese and Korean being related languages.

In these nations and with respect to these three religions there tends to be a very different attitude than one finds in western monotheistic societies, and even among monotheists in those societies, such as the substantial Christian population in Korea, now 29% of the population, with Pope Francis visiting South Korea during this talk, and the current president, Park Geun-ye, nominally a Roman Catholic, as was her late father, Park Chung-hee, who was president and military dictator from 1960-1979. In the West, one can only belong to one religion at a time, and even only to one sub-sect of that religion, such as Wenger Old Order Mennonite Anabaptist Protestant Christian. Someone raised in that tradition may find family members upset if they even go to another branch of Old Order Mennonites (not to pick on the Old Order Mennonites particularly). However, it is fine to belong to all three religions in these northeastern nations. It is said that a Chinese person, “wears Taoist sandals, a Buddhist robe, and wears a Confucian crown.” In Japan, the typical person will get married in a Shinto temple and take newborn children there to be blessed while having a Buddhist funeral. Not a problem.

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August 3, 2014
© 2014 by Paul Britner

Poem: The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

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I’ve got good news! There is a place of faith where people can believe what their conscience calls them to believe, a place of hope that accepts both the responsibilities and possibilities of humankind, and a place of love, where all people are accepted for who they are and who they were created to be. That place is our Unitarian Universalist movement, which nurtures my spirit and, to borrow a phrase from our poem, sustains me on the inside when all else falls away.

Yet, I’m uncomfortable standing on a street corner and shouting out this good news to all who might hear it, including some who might desperately need it. We’ve all seen people with those sandwich sign boards walking up and down the street that read “Repent or go to hell.” I guess they’re trying to scare people into their pews. If I were so inclined I would walk up and down a busy street with one of those sandwich sign boards with our Universalist message on side, “Don’t worry—you’re going to heaven!” and our Unitarian message on the other: “You’re OK—God doesn’t make junk!” Of course, if people saw that, they might think, “Wow, a church that says I don’t need to go church!” Well, that’s true. You don’t need to go to church to be a good person.

The truth is, though we lack the leverage that fear mongers have, we have much more to offer: the affirmation of inherent worth and dignity, the responsible search for truth and meaning, and the encouragement to spiritual growth, to name three. Generally speaking, though, we are not the kind of people who would tap a stranger on the shoulder and say, “Let me tell you my good news.”

I wonder, though, if in our enthusiasm for reticence, we sometimes go too far. We choose to err on the side of privacy and leaving people alone. I believe we are so afraid that someone might be offended by our even talking about our faith that we say nothing, and we deny our good news to people who want what we have and don’t even know we exist.

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Andy Schmookler’s June 22 Message in Summary

Andy Schmookler delivered the sermon at HUU on Sunday, June 22, 2014. The title of his talk was “What Liberal America Should Know about Evil.” He says that America faces a crisis in which the stakes could not be higher. Both the right and the left play a role, he says, but the roles are very different.

He drew upon a line from William Butler Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are filled with a passionate intensity.” Likewise in America now, the heart of the crisis is that the political right has been taken over by an “evil force,” while the response from Liberal America has been woefully weak.

The first step in the necessary change in our destructive political dynamic, Andy said, has to be a change on the liberal side. A fire must be lit, and he believes that the way to light it is to present a clear and compelling picture of the nature of the force we are up against.

With a series of articles — presently appearing only on his own website but soon to be launched on major national websites — Andy is painting the picture that America needs to see. It’s a picture of a coherent force that moves through the culture, consistently imparting a pattern of brokenness, as well as exploiting the brokenness it already finds in the culture and in individuals.

And he is addressing the elements in a worldview held by too much of Liberal America—one that does not regard things like “value,” or “evil,” or the sacred as entirely real. You can’t hit what you can’t see, and you can’t see what you don’t believe can exist, he says.

America needs an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment of realization. Here’s an unprecedented force that’s pushing to change our democracy into a plutocracy, and blocking our nation’s acting responsibly to protect our children and grandchildren – and indeed all life on earth – from the potential catastrophes of climate change. Andy’s campaign is an attempt to help drain the power from that force.

Here’s how people can help this campaign to get our national conversation to focus on the real truth about our national crisis, and perhaps reach the “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment of realization so sorely needed:

1) Check out Andy’s message. Go to The Series: Links to All the Entries , which presents the sequence of articles with which Andy hopes to light that fire in Liberal America– to move it, in the words of his motto, to “See the evil. Call it out. Press the battle.”

2) Spread the word by emailing all your liberally-minded friends and neighbors and associates – everyone potentially receptive to this message – to invite them to check out this series and join the “campaign.”

3) Contribute financially to help cover the costs of a publicist, an overhaul of the website for the new campaign, and the production of a book based on the series.

4) Ask yourself “What can I do to help this effort succeed?”

Andy can be reached at andybard@shentel.net.