Feeling and Spirituality vs Reason
I had a disagreement with someone recently about what the main focus of being a Unitarian Universalist should be. (Neither of us used the phrase "main focus" - it's the closest I can come to describing the context.)He said that some Unitarians overemphasize feeling and "spirituality" (he verbally put the word in quotes) at the expense of Reason, and doing so "was a slippery slope".
I told him that if I wanted a completely intellectual experience, I'd go to grad school.
Reminded me of a day-long seminar I went to a few months ago that was run by Michael Durall who wrote The Almost Church. The subject of how long people stayed active Unitarians came up. Durall took a quick survey of the audience and determined that those attending (church leaders for the most part) had stayed active Unitarians longer than most people. He asked people why they thought they stayed active.
I said that, if Unitarians are there to learn, maybe we were the slow learners.
posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 8:36 AM
3 Comments:
Matthew,
Thanks so much for responding to my post. You make a good point - one that I know is shared by a lot of UUs.
One of the problems I have with your argument concerning what the charismatic Christian church near you does (and what some other successful conservative Christian churches do) is that we seem to make a causal connnection between an emotional experience of the type those churches provide and conservative Christianity. I'm gonna guess that a 6-piece electrified band doesn't cause people to speak in tongues. My reason (!) tells me that's not possible.
I think that UU churches don't provide that type of visceral experience with a positive UU message because UU churches have never provided that type of visceral experience with a positive UU message. And darn it, we're too intellectually superior to need to stoop that low.
And anyway, our several dozen attendees at a service multiplied by our Individual Intellectual Points gives us a lot higher score than their thousand or two attendees multiplied by their Individual Emotional Points. Yep, that must be it.
Matthew,
More specifically, I meant that a 6-piece electrified band doesn't cause people to *be able to* speak in tongues when they weren't able to do so before. If there *were* able, the music might well motivate them to do so at that time.
Certainly music can be used to incite. But not just to incite people to do things we disagree with. It could be used to incite people to do what we consider good, too.
Matthew,
"the power of emotion in religion is amoral.". Yes. I agree. That's a good way of phrasing it.
I suspect that you're right about using pursuation and logic being superior in some sense to using emotion. You're right - that's the way of liberal religion.
I do think that emotion can induce a deeper committment than logic. That's its danger, of course - it's not necessarily a rational committment. Although I've never been in the service, I suspect that getting soldiers to kill the opposition isn't done purely on logic - although I might be wrong.
Post a Comment
<< Home