by James J. Geary
January 27, 2008

Good morning.

The title of my talk is Evolution versus Intelligent Design. Maybe a better title would have been “Creationists Don’t Give Up.”

I’m sure you understand that I can only touch on a few of the recent highlights of this protracted debate between evolutionists and creationists. It’s been going on for nearly a century and a half. Intelligent design is just the latest effort of the creationists.

UU minister Forrest Church, in a splendid article in the current issue of UU World, writes about the battles in the early decades of the Republic between those who wanted more religion in government and those who were fearful of it. That was well before the Darwinian revolution.

Would you believe the late Jerry Falwell did not believe in evolution? Remarkable. [Read more…]

Rev. Emma Chattin
January 20, 2008

First Reading ~ From Isaiah 43:18, 19

[And God says…]
“Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.

See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.

Second Reading From Zaid Hassan in The… Axioms of Social Change

Problems are tough because they are complex in three ways. They are dynamically complex, which means that the cause and effect are far apart in space and time, and so are much harder to grasp from firsthand experience. They are generatively complex, which means that they are unfolding in unfamiliar and unpredictable ways. And they are socially complex, which means that the people involved see things differently, and so the problems become polarized and stuck.”

When studying mass social change as a phenomenon there is always a temptation to order events as they happened, in a timeline. Then by implication we assume that one thing follows another and one thing neatly causes another. A very real danger for those wishing to learn from historical social change is the trap of seeing social change in a linear fashion. This is a trap is because we know (for example from research on complex systems) that social change… is less about planning and more about creating the conditions for change. To mangle an old adage, no plan survives contact with reality. Mass social change is messy, unpredictable and often ugly.

Modern institutions are not well suited to the work of catalyzing social change because they suffer from a need for linear and predictable processes. Such processes, in turn, demand that risk be minimized and a plan be proposed, a plan which is often used as a script rather than a point of departure. If we’re being honest with ourselves, then we would recognize the function of a plan is purely psychological comfort in the face of unpredictable and frightening change. [Read more…]

A Walk in the Park with Doubting Thomas: the stormy epiphany
by Tom Endress
December 2, 2007

During the past several months, several HUU members and attenders have talked about significant spiritual experiences in their lives. Some short, some long.

I am commandeering a whole morning, possibly two, for mine because the spiritual experience I am about to describe, as best I can, occurred early in my adult life. I have spent almost a half century trying to understand that event. Accordingly, I may need extra time to give you a taste of the many paths and blind alleys I have taken in this effort. I suspect a lot of of the experiences and struggles I have gone through parallel those of many of you.

Relative to the title printed in the bulletin I was affectionately given the nickname “Doubting Thomas” as a child by my mother. She thought I resembled Jesus’ doubting disciple Thomas! The nickname came about because I frequently questioned her Christian beliefs on such things as the virgin birth and the physical resurrection of Jesus. In our home I felt free, even encouraged, to ask her what she believed, why she believed it, and how it was that she knew a particular belief to be true. This has resulted in a life-long curiosity on my part about the what, why and “how do you know?” of peoples’ religious beliefs. [Read more…]

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. [Read more…]

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! [Read more…]

Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalists Sunday service, Sept. 30, 2007
By Robin McNallie

Recently, we have seen a spate of books produced by what The Nation has dubbed “the New Atheists.” These include Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great. We might also add to these Susan Jacoby’s Free Thinkers, written several years ago. I must confess that I have not given much close scrutiny to these books since I heard all the standard arguments against God long ago when I was taking philosophy courses in the 50’s at St. Lawrence University where the logical positivist school reigned over the metaphysicians. I got “the God doesn’t exist” argument from the old atheists, ranging from Voltaire to Bertrand Russell. The new ones don’t seem to have added much to the debate. Indeed, this present no-God vs. God face off seems to bring out the worst in both camps, with the no-Goders assuming a smarter-than-thou stance and the fundamentalist theists assuming a holier-than-thou one. I find it difficult to side with either the superciliousness of the one or the sanctimony of the other. I suspect that the New Atheists’ fight is not so much with God as it is with his, her, its acolytes, the abuses to which they have put religion itself-. Lamentably too much on display in these divided times -not only the 9/11 attacks but Shia and Sunni warfare in Iraq, Jewish and Palestinian violence, and here at home, mindless assaults on Darwinism, on gays, on reproductive choice, on stem cell research, on church-state separation. The list seems endless. [Read more…]

A sermon preached at Harrisonburg UUA, August 19, 2007
by Rev. John Irvine

A perched hawk can often be seen cocking its head and looking up at the sky with one eye.

It may be estimating the catchability of a bird that could serve as its lunch. More likely, it is cautiously watching another hawk flying over that might dive on it and make it lunch. When I have looked up to see what the hawk is watching, I have often been unable to spot anything up there. Yet the hawk keeps following it across the sky regardless, until the opportunity, or the danger, has passed.

That’s an obvious reminder that much goes on around me beyond my range of vision, that my eye does not have the capacity to see. With the cone cells in their retinas packed together far more thickly than ours, hawks can see about 3 times as far as we can. A bald eagle was once observed making an abrupt right turn, then gliding in a straight line for 3 miles to a lake, where it picked a large fish off the surface. Could you see anything even the size of a large fish at 3 miles? No wonder “eagle-eyed” is a compliment when ascribed to a human!

Physical vision is one thing, but “vision” is also a spiritual term. Spiritually speaking, does your vision’s reach embrace enough? Does mine? My attention was captured recently while reading a book by a theology professor, Douglas Ottati. (Douglas F. Ottati, Reforming Protestantism:Christian Commitment in Today’s World. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995, p. 58.) Describing a person whose spiritual vision had been enlarged by developing a religious belief system and practices, he used the phrase “the capacious eye.” That unusual phrase struck me as a worthy subject for this sermon. [Read more…]