Some wise words from the Unitarians

Out West where I come from, there are many Jewish communities that are small, and can’t afford their own building. When that’s the case, the community’s first choice is usually to find a Unitarian Universalist church to sublet space from.

Why the Unitarians? Recently, I feel like I’ve come to understand. The Rev. A. Powell Davies (1902-1957) gave the following sermon in 1944. Substitute the word "church" for "synagogue," and I think he captured a sentiment of liberal Judaism completely!

In his eloquent speech, the Rev. Davies gives several reasons for coming together to pray.

Do we pray because God needs us to? No. We pray because WE need to.

Let me tell you why I come to church.

I come to church—and would whether I was a preacher or not—because I fall below my own standards and need to be constantly brought back to them. It is not enough that I should think about the world and its problems at the level of a newspaper report or a magazine discussion. It could too soon become too low a level. I must have my conscience sharpened—sharpened until it goads me to the most thorough and responsible thinking of which I am capable. I must feel again the love I owe my fellow men (and women). I must not only hear about it but feel it. In church, I do.

I need to be reminded that there are things I must do in the world—unselfish things, things undertaken at the level of idealism. Workaday enthusiasms are not enough. They wear out too soon. I want to experience human nature at its best—and be reminded of its highest possibilities, and this happens to me in church. It may seem as though the same things could be found in solitude, but it does not easily happen so.

In a congregation we share each other’s spiritual needs and reinforce each other. In some ways, the soul is never lonelier than in a church service. That is certainly true of a pulpit, for a pulpit is the most intimately lonely place in the world—yet it is a loneliness that has strength in it. Perhaps this is because the innermost solitude of the human heart is in some paradoxical way a thing that can be shared—that must be shared—if the spirit of God is to find a full entrance into it.

We meet each other as friends and neighbors anywhere and everywhere, but we seldom do so in the consciousness of our souls’ deepest yearnings. But in church we do—in a way that protects us from all that is intrusive, yet leaves us knowing that we all have the same yearning, the same spiritual loneliness, the same need of assurance and faith and hope. We are brought together at the highest level possible. We are not merely an audience, we are a congregation.

I doubt whether I could stand the thought of the cruelty and misery of the present world unless I could know, through an experience that renewed itself over and over again, that at the heart of life there is assurance, that I can hold an ultimate belief that all is well. And this happens in church.

Life must have its sacred moments and its holy places. The soul will always seek its nurture. For religious experience—which is life at its most intense, life at its best—is something we cannot do without.

Source: from “On Going to Church” by Rev. A. Powell Davies, as reprinted in Without Apology: Collected Meditations on Liberal Religion by A. Powell Davies edited by Rev. Dr. Forrest Church.

Thanks to my buddy Alan B. for passing this along to me.

Is it possible to be a religious atheist?

Martin S. Jaffee offers the following definition of 'religion' in his book Early Judaism.

"Religion is an intense and sustained cultivation of a style of life that heightens awareness of morally binding connections between the self, the human community and the most essential structures of reality. Religions posit various orders of reality and help individuals and groups to negotiate their relations with those orders."

You may have noticed that this definition does not focus on beliefs or rituals. This may surprise you. Jaffee argues that the idea of religion as a collection of beliefs about divine beings expressed in moral behavior, prayers and various forms of communal worship is actually an idea that emerged out of Europe in the 16th century. It was advanced by philosophers, politicians and theologians struggling to define the role of the Church in the emerging national states of Europe.

For that time and place, that definition served a useful purpose: to create societies in which Church and State had separate and distinct spheres of life, enabling citizens of different religious beliefs to coexist as relative equals in society.

This particular definition of religion however, has not been reflective of the many ways in which non-European and non-Christian peoples have constructed their own conceptions of the role of holy communities and their institutions in the larger social and political order. Thus, he offered that alternate definition of religion, broad enough to explain human religious behavior across civilizations and millenia.

According to Jaffee, religious patterns of behavior encourage human beings to interpret themselves as moral beings whose destiny is bound with others in a project that brings them into relationship with the fundamental reality of things. In religious systems, the self identified through personal, autobiographical memory tends to be enlarged or enriched as it is interpreted in contexts well beyond personal experience. Personal identity includes a conception of how all these relationships are connected to generations of the distant past and the far-off future, as well as to the forces and powers that are held to account for the world as it is. (page 7)

Finally, while most religions have gods, not all of them do. (Certain types of Buddhism, and even, Judaism come to mind). What all religions share though is the desire to participate in the essential structures of the world -- to those spaces beyond our immediate world where "God" or "enlightenment" or "consciousness" reside. The means of transport and the conceptualizations of these alternate worlds differs from religion to religion, but constant is the tendency of religions to puncture the apparent solidity of mundane experience and to privilege intimations of other worlds at profounder levels of being.

I don't know about you, but I love this way of describing religion. Perhaps this is because these days, I can personally relate to it so much. So many times when I'm praying, the concept of "God," no matter how nonauthoritarian and nonpersonal I make it, simply doesn't work for me. I feel my consciousness strive and lift toward another dimension, to reach out toward some ineffable connection beyond my material world, but what is traditionally called theism doesn't enter the experience.

I wrote the title on this entry in jest, but it is not entirely a joke. It's answer all depends on your definitions.

Is it possible to be a religious atheist? Well, if you take Jaffe's definition of religion (above), and a fundamentalist definition of God (an omnipotent, authoritarian entity concerned with the daily affairs of humanity) -- then yes, I think you can be.

Leaving the Saints

I'm reading a fascinating book by Martha Beck, a therapist/life couch and columnist in O Magazine. It's about her upbringing and official abandoning of the Mormon religion, with some amazing fascinating details about the inner-workings of the church.

Did you know that Bringham Young University, in its library of over 1 million volumes, actually goes through and censors out any published article that criticizes or contradicts official church doctrine?

Did you know sexual abuse and incest rates are probably far higher in Mormonism than any other religion in the U.S.? (And you'll have to read the book to understand Beck's theories why).

Did you know it is still the official church position that women are lesser forms of men who cannot get to heaven without marriage to a Mormon man (who, conveniently, upon his death, will turn into a God himself, with his own planets and wives to rule over)?

Uhhhh ... yeah ... I didn't know that. Fascinating stuff. Here is an excerpt I found particularly shocking:


Latter-day Saints are taught to test religious claims against their own sense of truth. This approach of learning, encouraged by (Mormon founder) Joseph Smith and his successors, made Mormonism very appealing to the religious seekers of the 19th century – but of course it has its exceptions.

One day, when I mentioned Mormon truth seeking to a non-Mormon friend, she said “Wait – I’m utterly confused. Wouldn’t that mean they’d encourage discrediting Church claims that aren’t true?”

“Utterly confused” is exactly how I felt most of the time I was Mormon because the “seek your own truth but believe in the Gospel” tradition is one huge double bind. It goes something like this: Before you accept any religious claim, you must scrutinize it to see if you really believe it’s true. However, if it’s an official church doctrine and you feel that it isn’t true, this is the work of a sloppy soul, or, worse, the devil. On the other hand, if you accept the advice of a Church leader, which then turns out to be wrong, it’s your own fault for not “discerning” that in this particular case, the leader was mistaken.

To deal with these contradictory instructions, Mormons are advised to use something called “the shelf.” “Put it on shelf” is the phrase used to describe the tidy act of deliberate denial that allows the Saints to keep occasional surges of disbelief from troubling them.

If it bothers you to know that Joseph Smith said the moon was populated by small humanoids who dressed like Quakers, “put it on the shelf.” Likewise if you find it improbable that God gives his favorite Latter-day Saints their own special magic rocks, called “seer stones,” which allow them, among other things, to find buried treasure. Or if you don’t wholeheartedly believe that there is a trio of immortal pre-Columbian American Jews, known as the Three Nephites, who were spared by Jesus from the curse of death and have spent centuries wandering the American continent, assisting Latter-day Saints with anything from missionary work to flat tires.

The improbability of these ideas needn’t inconvenience any Saint who has a sturdy, commodious and well-maintained shelf.

“Leaving the Saints: How I Lost Mormons and Found my Faith” by Martha Beck (p 230)