By Les Grady
May 22, 2022

At the request of the author, please DO NOT COPY OR REUSE SLIDES.

Climate Change 2022 file is in pdf format.

by Linda Dove
May 1, 2022

Our Conscious Living Adults group has heard this before. A soldier before the battle of Waterloo is reported to have prayed, “Dear God, if there is a god, save my soul, if I have a soul.”

I’ve decided I’m no longer going to tiptoe around the “God” word. As UUs we’re often reluctant to refer to God with a capital “G”  for fear of offending our Humanist or Atheist members and friends. And many of us migrated from religions discomforted by their rituals, absolutist creeds and dogmas, or literal acceptance of scriptures. Or we felt distanced by religion’s imperial, patriarchal set-ups and power-grasping—God distanced at the church altar with the priests, or Gods idolized in statues or icons in the temple, or God literally being born human in an implausible way.

UUs have never tolerated discomfort well and have been rebels and innovators. In the third century AD proto, as you know, the Unitarians broke away from the mainstream Catholic creed because they rejected the anthromorphic image of God as literally three in one, father, son and holy ghost: hence unitarianism. We heard last week how Thomas Jefferson rejected the Son as God but accepted him as a great moral teacher.  The Universalists broke away from mainstream Protestantism discomforted by the portrayal of an angry, jealous father-figure with a dominating ego. They couldn’t reconcile a judgmental God consigning people to heaven or hell with a kindly, forgiving God, a God who cares personally for individuals. There’s a familiar story about the personal God. A rabbi was a poor man and kept praying God would win him the lottery. Eventually, he whined, “God, why won’t you grant my prayer?” God replied, “Rabbi, just meet me halfway. Go buy a ticket!” But, of course, the idea of such a God also makes UUs uncomfortable. We can’t get our heads round the contradiction of a God that intervenes with our free will and personal responsibility for democratic and social justice activism, all ideas dear to our UU principles. And, finally, there’s the big either/or question of God’s part in evil, as well as good.

More positively, many folk, of course, associate God with the beauty of religious worship—music, art, sculpture, architecture—that all religions inspire. For Christianity, one commentator said something like: “Without Bach’s music, God would be a completely 2nd.-rate figure.”  And it’s a common experience for religious practices and artefacts to inspire ecstasy. Ordinary people as well as mystics are sure there’s a God after such transcendental experience. I’ve had three such experiences in nature but they confirmed for me, not faith in God, but an inner knowing that there’s a field beyond what my limited human faculties can grasp. Those ineffable moments enhanced my awe of nature, the cosmos, and the unnecessary fact of my tiny life; and this firm unknowing continues for me to this day—call it spiritual unknowing, if you will. Meanwhile, some atheists and agnostics say the idea of God is merely a place-holder until our minds and technology solve the mysteries of life and death and the cosmic creation.

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by Linda Dove
January 23, 2022

Good morning. I’m going to talk common sense today! But I’ll disappoint you if you think I’m preaching revolution against the Brits as did Tom Paine in his 1776 pamphlet entitled Common Sense.

No, my focus this morning is on everyday sense-making, one of our three HUU tenets, as you know. [#1 Know Thyself-Temple at Delphi] I’ve always been interested in how we humans make sense of ourselves, each other, our world, and the cosmos, and how we come to our truths, questions pondered, of course, by philosophers and spiritual teachers all through the ages.

First, let me confess I’m in love with the proposition that Consciousness is the Cosmos becoming aware of itself and I’m trying to live my life inside the poetry of those words. But I’m not talking directly about all-pervading consciousness as Dave Pruett did so elegantly last Sunday. I do, though, build on a similar perspective.

As Dave mentioned, extreme materialists assert that matter is the stuff of the universe and they dismiss non-material consciousness. That’s a big issue in itself for another time. But others do offer insights on the biology and physiology of our awareness, recently much helped by functional MRI imaging. Antonio Damasio, an influential neurobiologist, says our sense-making is entirely embodied.

Briefly, my nervous system and my five senses send signals to my brain. My brain translates them into feelings of pain or pleasure and alerts me to what I need to avoid or go for. In this way, my feelings help maintain my body in homeostasis, healthy balance. [2. Shakespeare] My brain converts the basic pleasure or pain to feelings of well-being or suffering and to refined emotions—joy, love, grief, say, or anger, envy, hatred. My brain translates all these feelings into what these biologists call mental images, visual, auditory and so on. And my feeling of being aware is also, they say, composed of mental images; basically abstractions of experiences, re-presentations. My sad feeling in my body becomes a mental image.

I’m not a natural scientist like some of you, but as a lay student I find this approach convincing—up to a point. It leaves some big questions hanging, though. I have time to mention one or two.

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by Dave Pruett
January 16, 2022

The Dilemma

The late cultural historian and Catholic priest, Thomas Berry wrote: “We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story.  We are between stories.”

The “we” to which Berry refers is the human race, certainly the Western world. No one with eyes to see can deny that humanity is facing simultaneous existential crises: pandemics, climate instability, aging nuclear weapons on hair triggers, extreme disparities in wealth and power, failed states, and the rise of authoritarianism.

On the other hand, it seems a tad naïve to suggest that these difficulties all stem from a broken story.

When Berry speaks of our “story,” he means  our “mythology.” Mythology gets short shrift in Western culture. It shouldn’t. Mythology is what anchors the human soul to the cosmos. It’s the metanarrative that patterns through parables how we ought to relate to our fellow human beings, our fellow creatures, our planetary home, and the cosmos at large, including the Creator.  It’s no surprise that things fall apart when we get this story wrong.

When Berry says “we are between stories,” he refers to the tension between established religious mythology and the newer and emerging scientific story.

For centuries, Western humans took comfort from a religious story that went something like this: Humans were created by divine fiat, in the image of God. Thus, we are superior to the other creatures.  We occupy the central point—Earth—of a cozy universe consisting of a few planets and a few thousand stars. And Earth is our resource, over which we have “dominion.”

The scientific story burst on the scene in 1543 with the publication of Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which upended Ptolemy’s earth-centered cosmology.  In the five centuries since, we’ve learned that the universe is anything but cozy. Vast beyond measure, it consists of some 100B galaxies each populated by 100B stars. Nor do we occupy the center of the cosmos. Rather, we exist in an ordinary solar system on one arm of a spiral galaxy, the whole shebang having originated 13.7B years ago in a cataclysmic event called the Big Bang.

Thanks to Darwin, it gets worse.  We’re the product not of divine decree but of random mutations operating over eons. And we differ not in kind from the other creatures, only in degree.

Which story are we to believe? It’s like having two parents, one of whom tells us how special we are and the other how ordinary. “Do we really have to make the tragic choice,” asks Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, “between an antiscientific philosophy and an alienating science?”

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By Rev. Kirk Ballin
December 5, 2021

READINGS

1.Out of the Stars by Robert Weston

Out of the stars in their flight, out of the dust of eternity,
here have we come,
Stardust and sunlight,
mingling through time and through space. Out of the stars have we come,
up from time.
Out of the stars have we come. Time out of time before time
in the vastness of space,
earth spun to orbit the sun,
Earth with the thunder of mountains newborn,
the boiling of seas. Earth warmed by sun, lit by sunlight;
This is our home;
Out of the stars have we come. Mystery hidden in mystery,
back through all time;
Mystery rising from rocks
in the storm and the sea. Out of the stars, rising from rocks
and the sea,
kindled by sunlight on earth,
arose life. Ponder this thing in your heart,
life up from sea:
Eyes to behold, throats to sing,
mates to love. Life from the sea, warmed by sun,
washed by rain,
life from within, giving birth,
rose to love. This is the wonder of time;
this is the marvel of space;
out of the stars swung the earth;
life upon earth rose to love. This is the marvel of life,
rising to see and to know;
Out of your heart, cry wonder:
sing that we live.

2. Empire of Ants: The Hidden Worlds and Extraordinary Lives of Earth’s Tiny Conquerors by Foitzik & Fritsche 2020

Firstly, a note of interest:

“Nobody knows how many ants there are in the world. Some scientists estimate that there could be around ten quadrillion…if you lined up all the ants in the world, they could form a chain reaching from the sun to Earth and back 344 times”

“These days, humans consider themselves rulers of the world. Yet the world would be quite happy without us. Imagine what would happen if all the humans on the planet disappeared…Of course, humanity is a part of nature, but in many ways our behavior is no longer in balance with its natural cycles…You might say that we humans are more of a curse than a blessing for life on Earth.”

3. The Free Mind: William Ellery Channing

I call that mind free which masters the senses, and which recognizes it’s own reality and greatness: which passes life, not in asking what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness.
I call that mind free which jealously guards it’s intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith. Which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven.
I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances, and is not the creature of accidental impulse: which discoveries everywhere the radiant signatures of the infinite spirit, and in them finds help to it’s own spiritual enlightenment.
I call that mind free which protects itself against the usurpations of society, and which does not cower to human opinion: which refuses to be the slave or tool of the many or of the few, and guards it’s empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world.
I call that mind free which resists the bondage of habit: which does not mechanically copy the past, nor live on it’s old virtues, but which listens for new and higher monitions of consciousness, and rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions.
I call that mind free which sets no bounds to it’s love: which, wherever they are seen, delights in virtue and sympathizes with suffering, which recognizes in all human beings the image of God and the rights of God’s children,and offers itself up a willing sacrifice to the cause of humankind.
I call that mind free which has cast off all fear but that of wrongdoing, and which no menace or peril can enthrall: Which is calm in the midst of tumults, and possesses itself, though all else be lost.

4. P.T. Barnum:

“I base my hopes for humanity on the Word of God speaking in the best heart and conscience of the [human] race. The Word heard in the best poems and songs, the best prayers and hopes of humanity. It is rather absurd to suppose a heaven filled with saints and sinners shut up all together within four jeweled walls and playing on harps, whether they like it or not… To the Universalist, heaven in its essential nature is not a locality, but a moral and spiritual status, and salvation is not securing one place and avoiding another, but salvation is finding eternal life. Eternal life has primarily no reference to time or place, but to quality. Eternal life is right life, here, there, everywhere…The present life is the great pressing concern.”

5. Review of “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” (Graebner and Wengrow, 2021), from the Atlantic Monthly periodical, October 2021, by William Deresiewicz

“The bulk of the book…takes us from the Ice Age to the states (Egypt, China, Mexico, Peru). In fact, it starts by glancing back before the Ice Age to the dawn of the species. Homo Sapiens developed in Africa, but it did so across the continent, from Morocco to the Cape, not just in the eastern savannas, and in a great variety of regional forms that only later coalesced into modern humans. There is no anthropological Garden of Eden, in other words – no Tanzanian plain inhabited by “mitochondrial Eve” and her offspring. As for the apparent delay between our biological emergence, and the actual development of culture—a gap of many tens of thousands of years—that, the authors tell us, is an illusion. The more we look, especially in Africa (rather than mainly in Europe, where humans showed up relatively late), the older the evidence we find of complex symbolic behavior.”

HOLDING THE HUMAN STORY: AN ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM

Emerging on Earth as single-celled somethings roughly 4 billion years ago to the current species of Homo Sapiens who can go to the moon and back and do a few other things, that is the Human Story.

The Soul Matters (curriculum guide) for this month is Joy. But I already spoke to Joy and Courage some months ago. November’s theme was Holding the Human Story. November was also Indigenous Heritage Month. So, I was interested in this topic from a desire to look at the whole human story. But I found that I was particularly challenged when I came across by chance or divine intervention the very recently published book I referred to in the Atlantic Monthly Review. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. I just couldn’t ignore this remarkable and inspiring undertaking of a book, but neither could I read the entire thing in a week! Over 550 pages of text plus 166 pages of footnotes and bibliography! Yet, it caused me to pause and realize that so much of the point of addressing the Soul Matters: Holding the Human Story is to address how our understanding of human history has failed to address the injustices inflicted upon groups of people by a male dominant and often white culture. That if we are to hold the human story in the metaphorical cup of our hands we must hold all of humanity in our cupped-hands, not just the human story as told to us by a dominant, exploitive, unjust self-serving culture that thrives on inequality and exploitation for its power and existence. Instead, a critical and transforming perspective must be practiced and taught that rectifies and rewrites this self-serving history of inequality and exploitation, and thereby, instead, empowers a humanity that witnesses freedom as a universal condition, not something meted out and defined by an authoritarian culture that is sustained by inequality – regardless of the social and governmental pretense of equality and liberty for all. Confronting institutionalized racism in our American Democracy, founded upon principles of all human beings being of equal value, is a case in point. These are efforts to address the inherent historical inequalities of our human cultures.

The book, the Dawn of Everything, however, which was initially intended to address this historical inequality, essentially holds that we can’t truly address these inequalities while continuing to uphold the system that is dependent upon inequality for its existence. A cultural system founded upon and grounded in inequality will always revert to some kind of inequality to perpetuate the system.

Reforming a cultural system that has sustained itself on the exploitation of others will only find other ways to exploit others.

When the reality of the ideals of the equal value of all human beings as held up by our Declaration of Independence is consistently and fundamentally compromised and undermined by the technocratic reality of the directing dominant culture, those ideals will never be truly realized.

So, the authors of the Dawn of Everything, purposefully discard the intention of reforming this gross pathological clash of the ideals of equality vs. the reality of the inequality practices of our culture. Instead, they try to identify how this dominant arrogant culture of exploitation came to evolve by redefining our understanding of human history. The authors particularly take to task the influences of the western philosophers, Rosseau and Hobbes, whose ideas shaped the lens through which the human story we have been taught came to be written. For Rosseau, it was the idealized and glorified image of the Noble Savage, of indigenous early peoples who are a closed system of goodness uncorrupted by so called civilization. The perhaps unintended consequences of such thinking has been to actually minimize and dehumanize the Noble Savage, indigenous peoples as not really being part of the human reality. The authors liken this to treating  indigenous peoples as sock-puppets.

 While Hobbe’s philosophy added to the image of the indigenous people as being reflective of a humanity that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”! A modern society is thereby requiring a commitment to a centralized state of a government of bureaucracies and required standards, with a single, central authority. Material gain, as provided by increasing technological accomplishments, is the measure of progress. The authors hold out that this historical template designed by the Rousseauian influence that boxed and labeled indigenous people and their cultures as separate from the collective human story, and the arrogant Hobbesian autocratic and technocratic flavored society became the map that has brought us to a current point of evolutionary crisis.

What the authors are advocating is that a true knowledge of human history is one that is grounded in and includes understanding of the creative, experimental, and multiple environmental and social contexts of early human societies, what the Authors call the “indigenous critique”. The authors do this through an incredible investigation of anthropological and archaeological data, while confronting and even refuting the established interpretations of human history that have shaped our dominant world view. The authors very effectively, meaning through rigorous academic research, show that the myriad of indigenous, early human cultures are a profound source of insight, information, and inspiration for not only the rewriting of human history but for the re-creation of what being human is all about.

The authors contend that we are stuck in what we think being human is; stuck in an idea as defined by the narrow, arrogant, original sin, technologically driven, aggressive culture shaped by the dismissive act of simplifying and thereby dehumanizing the made-up Noble Savage in contrast to the Enlightened modern human beings that further evolve as masters of the world. Instead, we, masters of the world, are being faced with an existential crisis never known by humanity, as highlighted by the excerpt from the Empire of Ants. “These days, humans consider themselves rulers of the world. Yet the world would be quite happy without us.”

Instead, the authors of the Dawn of Everything plea for the fostering of what they call the “ecology of freedom” where the creativity and imagination of being human is freed from this stuck idea of what it means to be human. Our fostering a culture in “an ecology of freedom” is one that must seek guidance, education, and inspiration from our indigenous early human past, a cultural ecology that expands our understanding of what freedom truly is. A culture that is not being dictated by what Channing infers to be the culture of tyranny. “I call that Mind Free which resists the bondage of habit and, which does not mechanically copy the past, nor live on its old virtues, but listens for new and higher monitions of conscience, and rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions.”

Which brings me to Unitarian Universalism. What a profound and powerful expression of this “ecology of freedom”! 

Both Universalism and Unitarianism emerged out of denouncing and breaking away from the dominant and theological tyrannies of their days. Universalism gave freedom to the literal human soul in affirming, within the Christian concept of Salvation, that Salvation would be for all human beings not just for the chosen few. That God Loved All of His Creation. As P.T. Barnum stated: Universalism “is the best heart and conscience of the [human] race!”

Unitarianism challenged the tyranny of the mind as imposed by the authoritarian interpretation of the Bible. Instead, the early American Unitarians saw that God gave humans the gift (freedom) of reason to understand scripture, and that Jesus was a gift in true human form to be an example of how to be a godly human. And then some of those Unitarians like Emerson, Fuller, and Parker expanded that to a Transcendentalist understanding of the Divine, the Oversoul being inherent in all of Creation. This freed the authority of religion from any one belief system to the authority of religion being inherent to the conscience of each human being, fostering the evolution to the UUism of today rooted in and nourished by our 7 Principles.

Probably, more than any other American religious movement, Unitarian Universalism most poignantly reflects the American ideals of human freedom as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. And in doing so, UUism, at least in word, seeks to counter the dominant human culture of inequality, exploitation, and injustice as fostered by our myopic interpretation of human history. UUism, in spirit, seeks to foster this necessary “ecology of freedom” to engage with our evolutionary and existential crisis. That is what drew me to this body of human intention, to Unitarian Universalism!

But an “ecology of freedom” demands not being confined by the tyranny of the dominant culture. Yet every second of our waking lives and probably even in our sleep-dreams we swim in the dominant culture of tyranny. But our 7 Principles are like the protrusion of the leg-like appendages of the early forms of life crawling out the Sea. “Out of the Sea to the land…rising to walk and to fly out of the sea trembled life”.  It is only in actually exercising (not just reading or saying) our 7 UU Principlesthat our ecology changes from one of resigned accommodation of tyranny to one of an initially trembling ecology of freedom. Our 7 UU Principles as inspired by the ecology of freedom given shape by our American democratic ideals fertilized by the historical experiments and creativity of our indigenous ancestors contain the means to change the course of human evolutionary history.  

But that can only happen if more and more or us nurture the means to foster the ecology of freedom, to truly exercise and live out our 7 Principles, and thereby extract ourselves out of this culture of tyranny in which we live.

Unfortunately, we humans have come to accept, to be resigned to, that we are the best we humans can do. This doesn’t have to be, and, frankly, it can’t be the best we can do, because, otherwise, we are more of a curse than a blessing.

The Earth can live quite happily without us….

And in that Spirit, let me share with you this excerpt, from In the Spirit of the Earth, published in 1992 (Johns Hopkins University Press), by, and get this, Calvin Luther Martin, a once acclaimed mainstream historian (Rutgers University), whose perspective on history was profoundly changed by indigenous perspectives. It reads:

“…we stand in urgent need of a new center of historical consciousness…one that does not forget. History must bite the bullet and drastically redefine its context -its memory… But many will reply, we can’t go back!… to which I reply, we never left, we never left our true real context. Homo [Sapiens] is still here on this planet, abiding in our most fundamental and necessary nature by its fundamental and necessary terms. We left that context only in our fevered imagination. It all began as an act of imagination, an illusory image – most fundamentally an image of fear, and so the corrective process must likewise begin with an image. Let us relearn what hunter-gathers knew to the core of their being, that this place and processes (even death) always take care of us – that Homo’s citizenship and errand rest not with any creed or state but with “that star’s substance from which we have risen.”  May our 7 Principles help give shape to the image of our trembling legs emerging out of a culture of tyranny into an ecology of freedom.

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November 21, 2021
by Linda A. Dove

As you all know, one of the earliest Thanksgiving celebrations was in October 1621 when the Plymouth colonists, together with the Wampanoag people, gave thanks for the harvest. Or perhaps it was earlier in Virginia in 1619, or later in Winthrop’s Massachussets in 1637, or even President Lincoln’s Union victory celebration in 1863. But nowadays, we celebrate the holiday this week, the fourth Thursday in November, thanks to FDR’s official edict in December 1941.

Thanksgiving was new to me when I came to this country. And I had to research its history from scratch. A kind American acquaintance once invited me home to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. But I learned I would be the only stranger at the table among 17 family members, all of them devout Southern Baptists. So I said thank you, made my apologies, and chickened out. That was a lost opportunity on my part.

As a new and naive immigrant I was puzzled about what I heard about this supposedly giving-of-thanks holiday. It seemed, strangely, that lots of families dreaded the occasion. People worried about chaos at airports and on the roads as they travelled far and wide in snow and storm to join distant relatives and friends! They worried about all the household preparations, having enough beds and, of course, the meal! About abandoning their diets or upsetting their digestion because they faced the prospect of stuffing themselves (sorry) with rich food—turkey, ham, sweet potatoes, green beans, pumpkin pie—and at a very strange time—late afternoon!

And on top of all these worries, I heard people complain about having to stay tight-lipped, as Dee’s hymn mentioned, and as Paul Britner said last week, to avoid big fights or conflict over controversial issues—granddad’s politics, sister’s flirting with anyone in pants, second-cousin-once-removed boasting about cheating on his taxes, Dad getting drunk and kissing everyone.

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by Linda A. Dove
September 26, 2021

Good morning.

Our long absence from HUU has made me realize how attached I am to our schoolhouse in its lovely gardens and location. This gets me thinking about the physical aspect of church buildings, what religious meanings they convey, and how they do it.

My mother and I used to explore old churches in England. She loved the modest ones in country villages—every one unique in style. We also visited the early-Gothic cathedrals like Lincoln, the late-Gothic like Salisbury, and the classical Romanesque like Wren’s rebuilt St. Paul’s.

In America, from the 1500s, European settlers built churches that reflected the denominations of Britain, Ireland and Europe—mostly Catholic in Maryland, Episcopalian in Virginia, Puritan in New England, as well as Methodist, Congregationalist and Universalist. Soon immigrant Quakers entered Pennsylvania and spread out, as did Mennonites, Brethren, Baptists in the mid-west and south, Scots-Irish Catholics from the northeast, and Hispanic Catholics in the south and west. All these, and more, immigrant denominations, of course, had different takes on Christian theology, its practice, and church building styles.

Of course, this is a sweeping historical simplification, but I hope it’s a bit of context for my talk. And I choose to talk only about western Christian churches, not, say, temples and mosques, because it was this Christianity that gave birth to UU-ism.

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