Urgent for Twitterers: Iranian Solidarity

Courtesy of Lizard Eater, via Facebook. I don't tweet, but if you do:

For those who tweet: Change twitter profile to location: TEHRAN, time zone: GMT+3.30. Iran govt hunting 4 bloggers. If we're all Iranians harder 2 find them.

Famous UUs, Part Deux

If it is frustrating to see “Famous UUs” sometimes revered within our little denomination more for their fame itself than for the religious lessons they can help us remember, it is equally gratifying when one of them is honored outside the denomination for his or her forthrightly religious witness.

That’s why, this morning, I almost bounced with glee this morning when I sleepily turned to the editorial page of The New York Times and found an editorial tribute to the not-quite-so-famous-these-days Universalist and Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King, whose statue was removed from Statuary Hall in the US Capitol this week to make room for Ronald Reagan’s. An excerpt:

…King was a big deal in the 1800s, but hardly a Californian alive knows or cares. The vote in the California Legislature to replace his statue was all but unanimous.

…He was a Unitarian preacher, and an amazing one at that; spellbinding, said people who heard him. He spoke up for slaves, for the poor, for union members and the Chinese. Most memorably, he spoke up for the Union, roaming the state on exhausting lecture tours, campaigning for Abraham Lincoln and a Republican State Legislature, imploring California not to join the Confederacy. He succeeded, but he did not live to see the Union victory. He died of diphtheria in 1864, age 39.

“He saved California to the Union,” this paper wrote, quoting Gen. Winfield Scott.

…Here, then, a final toast to the worthy but obscure. To the frail patriot Thomas Starr King.

"Famous UU" revisionism

Oh, how we love our lists of Famous UUs. They stroke our egos. They remind us of how influential past UUs once were in society at large, and they kinda sorta suggest that either we still could be, or at least still have the moral rectitude to deserve to be, just as influential today. We enjoy basking in their reflected glory.

Such lists are often topped by John and John Quincy Adams, two of the four (arguably five, if you include Thomas Jefferson) Unitarians who have become President of the United States. While President, Adams the father signed the Treaty of Tripoli, which declared that the US is not a Christian nation, and which was unanimously ratified by the Senate. After stepping down as President, Adams the son argued and won the Amistad cases, freeing a shipload of mutinous African slaves. That's some mighty righteous UUing, right there.

But a disturbing quality I find in UU hagiography is that it often revises the portraits of our saints to more closely resemble who we would have liked them to be than who they actually were. For example, we like to claim the Adamses as our co-denominationalists, but when you look at them more closely, their religion wasn't one that many of us would want to claim as our own. Yes, they were accomplished politicians and did some things in that field that we still admire today, but few UUs today know that they were also devoutly religious, not in any modern "UU" sense but in the old New England Congregationalist mold, and that John Quincy Adams in particular produced a fairly weighty oeuvre of religious writing that included a new metrical translation of the Psalms for singing in church to replace the older Bay and Scottish psalters.

Here's a stanza from his setting of Psalm 14 that I had to find on a Baptist church's website, because it doesn't appear anywhere in Singing the Living Tradition or Singing the Journey. I think it's obvious why not:

The fool denies, the fool alone,
Thy being, Lord, and boundless might,
Denies the firmament, Thy throne,
Denies the sun’s meridian light;
Denies the fashion of his frame,
The voice he hears, the breath he draws;
O idiot atheist! to proclaim
Effects unnumbered without cause!

When we dismiss and ignore, rather than engage and wrestle with, this sort of challenging material from our denominational past, do we gain or lose?

I think we lose when we bury and forget those parts of our religious heritage we can no longer affirm. They can still serve as a reminder of the crucible of issues that made us who we are today, and help us frame issues that each generation needs to confront afresh in order to pursue a complete, rigorous and truly "free and responsible search for truth and meaning".

"Give then not hell, but hope and courage."

Well, that's certainly one way to do it.

Further reflection on May Day, a day late

How ironic is it that on May 1 of this year, the big headline in all the newspapers was that Chrysler was filing for bankruptcy, and would probably emerge with 55% ownership redistributed to the United Auto Workers?

Somewhere, Marx and Engels are smiling.

Happy May Day!

Luke 23:44-45

And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst.

On this darkest of days, allow yourself an audio treat by listening to the opening chorales of Bach's four Passions -- including not only St. Matthew's and St. John's, but also reconstructed versions of the lost St. Mark's and St. Luke's -- over on Dan Sloan's blog, Culture Choc.

On the road to Emmaus

I believe in science (at least, when it's done right). I believe almost all of God's work is done naturally, not supernaturally, and is revealed to us in the same fashion, through application of our own powers of observation and reason. Even that which has traditionally been called "God" is a construct of natural human apprehension, a mere figure of another reality that cannot be described or experienced in human terms.

Now, I do not necessarily deny that God is capable of acting supernaturally. Science can only explain the natural, not the supernatural. But it's really, really rare and unusual for that to happen. Almost everything in human experience can be understood and explained in natural terms, even if much of it has not yet been understood or explained.

I believe that God acted naturally, not supernaturally, when he inspired human observers to write down their experience and understanding of God. And I believe he did so again when he inspired others to assemble those writings and bestow on them the status called "scripture". And he does so again each time one of us picks up a book of scripture and tries to draw meaning out of it. I believe scripture has true, powerful and timeless things to teach us about God, handed down to us from those who first apprehended these things. However, by no means does that make scripture perfectly, consistently, absolutely, thoroughly, literally, and inerrantly true in every word and detail, as some would claim. Scripture is still a human witness, not a supernatural revelation.

Do I believe that God in reality acted supernaturally in every instance where scripture portrays him as having done so? No, although I don't deny the hypothetical possibility that he might have done so in some of those instances. But whether he did or not in any one instance, all these instances are first and foremost one human being (the author) earnestly telling a story to another human being (the reader). When scripture portrays a supernatural occurrence, it's as if the author is slapping your face and shouting, "HEY! WAKE UP!! I'M TELLING YOU: THIS IS IMPORTANT!!! SOMETHING REALLY UNUSUAL IS GOING ON HERE!!! YOU'D BETTER TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY AND FIGURE OUT WHAT IT MEANS!!!!"

So, in the middle of Holy Week, we might ask, what does the Resurrection mean? Did Jesus's corpse literally, physically, come back to life after death? I can't say, categorically, no, but I deeply doubt it. God may be capable of supernatural things, yet it would be really, really unusual, so skepticism is warranted and understandable.

However, something most people on either side of the literal question miss is that, whether he did or he didn't, the meaning of the story is exactly the same: Long ago, Jesus the man revealed something new about God to us. God can be present with and among us. God somehow entered the human condition to be with us. Jesus the man lived and he died. But the Body of Christ rose again, and remains alive eternally.

And here's the most important part, the deepest meaning of the story: we, the gathered community of faith, are now that Body, whether we call ourselves by that name or any other.

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

--St. Teresa of Avila

Bicentenary Twofer

On February 12, 1809, two of that century's greatest freethinkers were born.

Happy Birthday, Abe and Chuck!

Howard Dean for HHS Secretary

Daschle dodged taxes and took big dough from the companies he was going to have to regulate. We've all heard that song before, and we're bone tired of it.

Dean, in contrast, is squeaky clean, he's wielded executive authority as a governor, he's built winning political coalitions against long odds as a party chairman, but even more than that, he's a real live M. D.

Pick a primary-care doctor rather than an industry lackey to run health care reform? How novel is that?