Why can't we believe
Philocrites provided a cogent response to my recent post called Affirming vs believing. I asked the question "why do Unitarian Universalists have to affirm everything - why can't there be anything we can believe?His answer - worth reading in its entirety by going to the original post - is summed up in his first sentence:
Our bigger problem — and the reason we can't say "we believe" — is that we have no idea by what authority we'd make substantive religious claims.Ok, I'm pretty much persuaded by that argument. His last sentence, though, got me to thinking:
In the end, you — just you — are still going to have to make up your mind.It's not that this is the first time I've heard that thought, of course. That's what UUs are all about. But I'm going to toss out one final attempt at a shared belief:
Unitarian Universalists believe that their ultimate truth comes from within themselves.Thoughts? Agreements? Disagreements?
posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 10:40 AM
4 Comments:
Seems pretty close. I'd only say that rather than putting it as the ultimate truth comes from within us, I'd prefer to put it as we believe that we each decide for ourselves what the ultimate truth is. Saying that the ultimate comes from within each of us sounds like we actually produce that truth. I'm more inclined to think that the truth is the truth, regardless of whether human beings are hanging around or not. There's nothing special inside of me that somehow creates the truth. Rather, I interact with the world and come to decide on my own what the shape of truth is.
I need to raise this objection because there are people who truly believe that they _create_ reality by the power of their beliefs, that their beliefs actually give rise to the substance of the world in some way. I'm not in that camp.
As for our preference for affirmation over belief, I don't think it's all that deep a difference. It seems to mostly just be a cultural allergy to "belief" as something that may be irrational; it subconsciously contrasts "belief" with "knowledge" or "fact."
No, not true. Despite the profound respect for freedom of individual conscience, Truth in Unitarian Universalism is found *through the discernment of the covenanted community.* Our freedoms are therefore more properly identified as corporal (corporate?) freedoms, and come from a commitment to the gathered community walking together in bonds of love and "seeking the ways of truth" TOGETHER. We owe this to our Puritan forebears, no matter how much ahistorical "You-You's" scream and rant that they're something new under the sun and owe nothing to the Reformation foremothers and fathers.
That's why UUs who aren't involved in a congregation ARE NOT TRULY UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS. Unitarian Universalist practice happens in the context of the local congregation (or the rough facsimile thereof, as through the CLF). To claim to be "UU" because of broad agreement with our Principles is to reduce the Principles to a creed (ie, the thing you have to subscribe to in order to belong), and ignores the heart and soul of the faith identity.
Sorry to be so incoherent --it's late and I'm exhausted.
And yet, Peacebang, not one of the five Unitarian Universalist congregations I've been involved in has ever really engaged in a process of congregational discernment of the Truth. The closest any of them has ever come was in a very well run long-range visioning process in Salt Lake City, where I chaired the Membership Committee. Even there, our focus was on successful church, not the nature of reality.
I share your idealization of congregational polity in many ways, but having seen how little effort our congregations invest in discerning the truth, I'd say we really have few models for how to do this central task.
I also realize, guiltily, that although I'm a parishioner at two UU churches (and pledge at one), I'm a member of neither -- and therefore am not actually a Unitarian Universalist. How involved must one be in order to be a Unitarian Universalist?
Philocrites! Join! Join! Join!
More on all of this later...it's obvious that I just spent four days with Alice Blair Wesley, our generation's foremost (to my mind) noodge/prophet of the power of the largely lost art of congregational discernment...
I'll be posting more extensively on Peacebang about this...
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