The Free Mind

1982
Lakeland

In order to seek the truth, the mind must be free. This summer I visited Monticello, Jefferson’s beloved home. I stood by the iron gates enclosing the cemetery near the tombstone. Chiseled on the stone were the two things he wanted [to be remembered for]: author of the Declaration of Independence, and founder of the University of Virginia. He wanted no mention of his being a 2-term President of the United States, Secretary of State, Ambassador to France, Governor of Virginia.

He wanted to be remembered for his unwavering belief in freedom; freedom requires the free mind. Jefferson, writing to a friend in 1820 concerning his difficult task of establishing the University of Virginia, said, “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error as long as reason is left to combat it.” (Malone, SAGE OF MONTICELLO, pp. 17-18)

A few years earlier he had remarked, “Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.”

That we believe. To maintain the free mind is more difficult than in Jefferson’s day. We face an overload of information plus considerable distraction. We have newspapers, radio, T.V., but still it is difficult to sort fact from fancy, to distinguish between press releases and authentic reporting. The distractions – sports, comedies, commercials. Griping is pointless – if the reading, viewing, listening public demanded more solid reporting at depth they would make that known in unmistakable ways.

No sterner demands are placed on those who value free inquiry. Among the many joys and benefits I have received as a life-long Unitarian Universalist is the exploration of serious ideas and issues to the end that free minds will become, increasingly, informed minds.

A sociologist, Baltzell (PURITAN BOSTON AND QUAKER PHILADELPHIA, p. 247) describes the Massachusetts Bay Colony as the best educated community the world has known before or since – “a thinking community.”

There are many ways in which we fall short, but if we do not relax our vigilance to keep the mind free and inquiry pursued, then we may qualify as a thinking community like our forebears in liberal religion.

Truth

Unitarian Universalists support the free and disciplined search for truth as a foundation of religious fellowship. Pilate asked “What is truth?” Most religions stake claim to all or at least part of the truth. These claims may be based on a holy book, or a divine savior, an infallible church or historic doctrine. But religions do not agree (never have) what the truth is or how we may discover it.

What is truth? How are we to distinguish truth from falsehood? There are guideposts. Protagoras of ancient Greece said in a famous maxim, “Man is the measure of all things.” I believe he meant that in all choices involving truth or falsehood, we have no guides but ourselves and our shared human experience past and present. Even if one may be convinced that the source of ideas is divinely super-natural, invariably these ideas are mediated through someone’s human experience, human expression, and human interpretation. Our values are human and must be. Our scales are human systems, inevitably.

There are tests and measures of truth:

What do we observe? Scientific measurements are accurate enough that they can be deemed precise. The readings on scales, dials, test tubes, and tools enable us to say this is so, or this is not so.

In another dimension of life, where no scientific instruments apply, we can observe relatedness. There is a moral or ethical relatedness. It is good to love and bad to hate. That is a truth we can observe in our own lives, the lives of those around us, and history confirms it.

Truth should be coherent. Does it cohere with what is real? There should be no unexplainable contradictions between two propositions, both of which are believed to be true.

We also affirm that truth is to be known. New truths constantly emerge. New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth. Of course that means that what we believe today may tomorrow prove to be untrue or a partial truth. Because of the incomplete nature of any claim to truth, we may have to alter our premises and conclusions. But the possibility of error should not dismay us. Someone remarked, “Last week I saw a wonderful man who had not made a mistake in 4000 years. He was a mummy in a glass case in a museum.”

Jesus: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

DeRougement: “Ye shall seek the truth and the quest shall make you free.”

Universality

If service is the test of religion, then the measures of creed and doctrine become secondary. There are many cultures, many religions, each with sacred books and holy men and women; each with ritual celebrations that may seem strange and bizarre to the outsider.

The visible forms of religion are like fashions in clothing or styles in architecture. There are differences between north and south, near-East and far-East, Latin and Greek, Anglican and non-conformist, conservative and liberal.

Moslem children, squatting in the shade, monotonously chant the verses of the Koran until their teacher is sure that the sacred words are indelibly etched into their memories. This is religion.

Holy men wash their scrawny bodies in the water of the Ganges as they witness the eclipse of the sun. To them this is a cosmic struggle between supernatural beings. This is religion.

In Vatican Square thousands of devout Catholics gather to receive the blessing of the bishop they believe to be the Vicar of Christ. Millions of their fellow Roman Catholics believe it their duty to witness a miracle weekly: the miracle of the Mass. This is religion.

Quakers gather in rooms where bare furnishings are a sharp contrast to the ornaments and artistic splendor of the Cathedral or the Mosque. In Quaker worship, no priest chants a ritual, no host is given to the faithful, but this too is religion.

The American Indian stomps rhythmically in a ritual corn dance in Southwest United States. In the south-eastern mountains of our land, religions persons of Anglo-Saxon inheritance believe literally those words in the Gospel of Mark, (16/18), “They shall take up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.” So they handle rattlesnakes and drink poison in religious ecstasy.

These unlike expressions of religion are not true for me. But, when true for them, I have no quarrel, no wish to proselytize. The peoples of the earth are one human family. From a theological standpoint there are no damned; no special number saved.

The differing ceremonies deserve respect even when there is no acquiescence in belief. Never in history has any one religion been able to claim all the good people. Never have all the bad people been numbered in any one religion.

By whatever path another seeks the highest value or one’s God, he/she merits respect due the worth and dignity which is the birthright of every human under any sky and in every hall of worship.

All human beings deserve the right and privilege to choose their own path to the truth. All humankind are worth saving here on earth, no matter which gods, if any, they choose to worship.

Service

There is more needed than the search for truth and the free mind. The test of religion is service of human needs. Again, let me quote Jefferson. Writing to John Adams in the latter years of both of their lives, Jefferson mentioned that he considered his religion a private affair and that anyone who wanted to know about it must find evidence in the life he lived, saying “If that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which regulated it cannot be a bad one.”

However one may describe one’s religious doctrine or rituals, the test of that religion is service.

Two instances stimulated by the Good Samaritan parable – which tells us nothing about his religious beliefs or the beliefs of the wounded traveler.

The Good Samaritan acted as a nurse and the important matter was the care of the stricken man, not his religion. I’m reminded of two other nurses.

One was Florence Nightingale, a Unitarian. She was not particularly popular, but as her biographer, Woodham Smith, wrote, that in the course of the wretched Crimean War, two figures became transformed:

“Never again would the British soldier be ranked as a drunken brute, the scum of the earth. He was now a symbol of courage, loyalty, and endurance, not a disgrace, but a source of pride. Florence Nightingale taught officers to treat the soldiers as Christian men. Never again would the picture of a nurse on the battlefield be a tipsy, promiscuous harridan. Miss Nightingale had stamped the profession of nursing with her own image.”

Florence Nightingale feared she had been a failure, but the lady with the lamp brought about a revolution. She passed the test with high grades.

Another nurse was Clara Barton, a Universalist founder of the American Red Cross.

A New York Times book reviewer remarked, “Hell hath no future like a woman with an idea.” Clara Barton’s battlefield nursing in the Civil War, her determination to ease suffering and to alleviate the hardships caused by disaster need no re-telling this year. The long story of the struggles of the beginnings of the International Red Cross, and the American Red Cross, the wide range of its activities today ....

Clara Barton has been dead 65 years, yet her name is still honored. On the fields of her family homestead, near the lovely little Universalist church where she and her family worshiped, the Association of Universalist Women established the camps for diabetic children (now carried on by the UUWF). Years ago, children with diabetes did not have the years of life given to them that most of us have. Dr. Joslin’s case studies demonstrate that from 1897 to 1914, children nine years of age and under lived an average of fifteen months when they became afflicted with diabetes. Now, because of insulin, because of the regular program of balanced food, exercise, and testing which children learned at Clara Barton and Ellio Joslin Camps, and other camps all over the world which have been modeled on the successful example at Clara Barton birthplace, this life expectancy has been prolonged by twenty-fold. Each year sees a lengthening of precious time to the diabetic. This is the test of religion.

Countless persons, many of you, meet the test of religion by a helping hand in ways that will never be known. Also, we can play a part in the test of religion by our support of the UUSC or numerous other human need agencies which can perform service organizationally which we cannot achieve individually.

In 1917 the Universalist convention adopted a Declaration of social principles still pertinent: “While in no wise minimizing the responsibility of the individual for his own life, we denounce as superstition the teaching that men are led into sin by inherent depravity and by devils of an unseen world; but we hold it to be self-evident that mankind is led into sin by evil surroundings, by the evils of unjust social and economic conditions.... We conclude also that democracy is not only an inherent right, but also a divinely imposed duty. We find that none of us liveth or dieth to himself, and that true men and women should consider nothing foreign to them which is common to humanity.”

Service is the test of religion.