The Manichean Thread

February 3, 1985
Lakeland

re-written from November 27, 1966, Plainfield

(Reading, p. 29/32 – THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS, Richard Hofstader)

The Manichean Thread is an attitude found in the culture of the Western World for at least twenty-five hundred years. I call it a “thread” because it seems like a decaying strand twisting in and out of the tapestry of history, a thread which again and again weakens the cloth produced by human efforts to weave freedom, reason, dignity, peace, and equal opportunity as the prevailing pattern of living. By the “Manichean Thread” I refer to the belief that evil is a conspiracy which permits no middle ground, no open discussion, but only incessant warfare. Much of this sermon was stimulated by Richard Hofstader's essay, THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS. The historian used “paranoid” to indicate those attitudes which are characterized by delusion of persecution and conspiracy, marked by a completely disproportionate suspicion of all attitudes and actions which fail to adhere precisely to a particular party-line. As he wrote (p. 14), “the central preconception of the paranoid style (is) the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character.”

I would like to speak about the “Manichean Thread” as a strand in our historic religious culture; cite a few parallels in our national political history and associate these with some destructive forces in the present. Then, lastly, I will attempt to say a few words about where one may correctly draw a line between good and evil.

I – In the year 242 of the Christian Era, a young Persian religious enthusiast, Mani, proclaimed himself the Messiah sent to Earth by the only true God to reform and save mankind by teaching right religion and morals.

As a young man, Mani had set out to convert the world. In his travels, he learned something about the religions of India; in the Near East he was exposed to Judaism, Christianity, and Mithraism. But most influential in the formation of his religious convictions was the religion of his own Persian heritage, Zoroastrianism. Mani preached his faith for about 30 years and was martyred by jealous Magian priests. Crucified, his dead body was stuffed with straw and hung from the gates of the then-important Persian city of Susa.

But, as has happened so frequently in history, martyrdom had the opposite effect than that intended by the executioners. Following his crucifixion, the faith of Mani spread through all the Roman world and became the most formidable rival to Christianity in the first few hundred years of the Christian era. St. Augustine, most influential theological figure since Paul, had been a Manichean for ten years before his conversion to Christianity. But Augustine never wholly cast out the Manichean influence.

Manicheanism was outlawed when Christianity became the official religion in the fourth century. One historian remarked that if you wished to curse emphatically, or use an unpleasantly profane slur, you could accomplish this by calling a person a Manichean. But Manicheanism persisted in the East for at least 1000 years, and its distinctive notions have surfaced again and again in the West, even to this day.

Rooted in the teachings of Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), who founded the religion named for him 600 years before the beginning of the Christian era, the distinctiveness of Manicheanism is best understood in its genesis in Zoroastrianism.

Zoroaster was somewhat unique among the religious prophets of his day and succeeding times, because Zoroaster taught that there were two gods – a benevolent god and an evil god. These two deities were equal in strength. Or at least, humans could not know with certainty which god would prevail in the end. Every moment in the life of man was part of the struggle between the good god and the bad god, or as Christianity later incorporated this teaching, between god and the devil. In Zoroastrianism, however, the Devil was not created by God, but existed independently. Zoroaster believed his mission was to call people to become part of the relentless conflict against the forces of evil.

This developed into a theological dualism. The Universe was the battleground of these two vast and infinite forces, good and evil, light and darkness – an unpitying struggle between polar opposites.

Although the early Christian church destroyed most of the writings of the Manicheans, its doctrines appeared again and again in certain heretical groups, the Priscillianists, the Albigenses, and the Cathari, for example. Frederic Speigelberg, one of the most thorough of the students of Manicheanism makes the following comment (LIVING RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD, p. 465-7):

“Christianity is only half-rejected Manicheanism, extirpating it consciously but absorbing much of it subconsciously.... Wherever Manicheanism traveled, it brought about a radicalization of ethical doctrine, presenting extremes of dualism....

“Christianity survived because it was literally driven underground, where it developed and gathered strength and accumulated to itself an impenetrable mystery. Manicheanism has survived by much the same process, for the unknowable has a stronger grip on our minds than the knowable. But we may well ask ourselves which of the two survives primarily today: are we Christians with a Manichean subconscious or Manicheans with a Christian subconscious?”

II – There are parallels in our American history to this Manichean Thread which proposes that life is an interminable conflict between good and evil; and that evil is a total conspiracy.

Historian, the late Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., in an article published Nov. 65 (SR) listed some examples found in American political and social history, although he was not making this “Manichean” analogy.

If you were on the NY Thruway between Rochester and Buffalo, you would see an exit for Batavia, New York, where an event in 1826 illustrated this Manichean Thread. William Morgan of Batavia was abducted and presumed murdered. Popular hysteria soon whipped up a whirlwind of alarm because Morgan, a bricklayer and a Mason, had written a book exposing the secrets of the Masonic order. It was generally thought that an awful fate awaited those who revealed lodge secrets. “When four persons were found guilty of the kidnapping and got off with light sentences,” there was widespread suspicion that the Masons controlled courts, police, and government. Incidentally, Morgan’s body was never found; the disappearance is an unsolved mystery. But at the time, “Manichean” hysteria, paranoid suspicion of all Masonic lodges and members spread like a raging virus. Traveling lecturers “denounced the hydra-headed monster” (the masonic order). “Churches expelled Masonic preachers and laymen. Many lodges disbanded; in New York State alone their number dropped from 600 in 1826 to 50 in 1834.” The hysteria affected legislation and candidates for local, state, and national offices. The anti-masonic movement did not endure; Masonic orders again became not only respectable but an honorable association for men, and still is. But that 8-year hysteria was an example of the Manichean Thread.

Soon after anti-Catholicism became the example of paranoia, with all sorts of defamatory stories, rumors, and gossip circulated by fanatic minds. Anti-Catholicism persisted. The following anecdote from my own experience is illustrative. Some years ago in N.J. on a boiling July Sunday afternoon, ... the glaring sun and 100 degree temperature made a twelve-mile peace march against the Vietnam War trying and exhausting for those of us trudging along. On the way, a nun, a member of a Roman Catholic religious order, saw why we were marching, and joined in. She was the administrative head of a nearby Roman Catholic orphanage. She happened to be walking with me for awhile. First, she gave me hell that more of the religious orders were not on the mailing list of the peace organizations so their members might know the time and place of peace demonstrations. Then, she said, because the evening meal at the orphanage must be prepared, she could not stay with the march. She left; but before long she was back again with other sisters bringing cold watermelon, sandwiches, and lemonade to the thirsty and hungry marchers.

Another marcher said to me as she observed the kind, generous sisters, “You have no idea what an emancipation it is to have some of my prejudices fall away like dead leaves.”

In my own lifetime I can remember the appearance of the Manichean Thread in attitudes toward Roman Catholicism. The election campaign of Al Smith provided too many illustrations to require further evidence, not to speak of the deluge of “sick” mail I received at the time of the John F. Kennedy campaign for the presidency in 1960.

This is not to say that one should not oppose political efforts of the Roman Catholic Church when one disagrees with principles and particulars in such thoroughly basic issues as the separation of Church and State, family planning, a woman’s right to choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy and other attitudes. But it is to say that to attribute all evil to Roman Catholics, calling the Pope the Anti-Christ and expressing crude bigotry and vicious charges without proof, is to become twisted up in the Manichean Thread.

III – Has history turned about? No. Need we fear that the Manichean Thread will condemn persons without evidence; convict without trial; charge conspiracy without proof? Unfortunately, yes. The Manichean Thread still weaves its destructive ways through the fabric of our lives. Bigots and warped persons still speak their baseless, wretched accusations.

Anti-Semitism and Anti-Catholicism still hurt the lives of many persons. But also the Manichean Thread is found on the extremes of political and economic thought in our day.

Some of us are old enough to remember the hey-day of the John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch, who dided not long ago (and at the time of the founding, he was a Unitarian). The John Birch Society falsely accused thousands of being communists or part of the “communist conspiracy.” Welch named President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles “conscious agents of the Communist party” and his organization made fervent and loud cries to impeach Earl Warren, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

And of course the hysteria and fear caused by the late Senator Joe McCarthy needs no rehearsing.

Today the far right, including the religious far right, has been pulling out all stops accusing “secular humanism” of eliminating God from the public schools, of being responsible for all social ills, drugs, morals, lack of patriotism, crime in the streets. Today, whatever is amiss in society, or does not conform to the far right’s doctrines is “secular humanism” which must be wiped out.

As I perceive it, the radical right organizations use a paranoid style of attack – anyone not in their corner is under suspicion. The extremists believe thoroughly that a conspiracy prevails in our land. As the anti-Masons believed that the courts were part of a Masonic conspiracy, so the John Birch Society wanted to impeach Earl Warren. As Senator McCarthy created a vast wave of fear with his ruthless and baseless charges, so the far-right makes humanism a target for equally baseless charges. Another characteristic of the Manichean Thread is that the far-right arouses fear of absolute evil [with] which there can be no authentic communication, only warfare.

Within the memory of most of us, the income tax, the United Nations, fluoridation of water supplies, foreign aid, community mental health programs, the National Council of Churches have been accused of being part of the Communist conspiracy or that they are “communist dupes.” The extremists see themselves and only themselves as America’s savior from international conspiracy. They believe they are on the “good” side against the “evil” - and that there is no middle ground, only extremes.

As Hofstader wrote (p. 73), “moreover the Manichean and apocalyptic style of thought prevalent in the fundamentalist tradition can easily be carried over into secular affairs and transmuted into a curiously crude and almost superstitious form of anti-communism.” And, I would add, the same rigid, uncompromising attack is being made on humanism – an attack without definition, and without serious attention to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The point should be made, however, that conspiracies exist. When two or more persons conspire to break laws and engage in illegal acts, to steal authentic government secrets, to destroy by innuendo, to infiltrate a labor union, PTA, or any other organization for the purpose of subverting it to extremist ends, these are conspiracies. But there is an elementary difference between lawful assembly for political planning and influence and unlawful conspiracy – a conspiracy to plan and execute violations of the law. If one has any qualities of fair play or any respect for the Constitution of our land, he/she will not accuse others of conspiracy unless there is credible evidence. Hofstader has a telling sentence (p. 37-38), “The plausibility the paranoid style has for those who find it plausible lies, in good measure in (the) appearance of the most careful, conscientious, and seemingly coherent application to detail, the laborious accumulation of what can be taken as convincing evidence for the most fantastic conclusions, the careful preparation (to jump) from the undeniable and the unbelievable.” There is only one bridge from vague feelings of hostility to accusations of conspiracy or evil – that bridge is evidence. Vague feelings should not bear the weight for sensible people. Neither is the crossing to the unbelievable accomplished by mysterious sayings or hostile feelings toward one with whom one does not agree. One may not require more than a feeling to believe God is good, but much more authentic evidence is needed to accuse rightfully a person of being a devil.

I like what the late Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in A SENSE OF LIFE, “We must put aside the passions and beliefs that divide us, for once we give them our allegiance, they bring in their wake, a veritable Koran of unshakable truths and all the fanaticism that springs from them. It is possible to align men as men of the Right and men of the Left ... as fascists and democrats; these distinctions are unassailable. But truth – and this we know – truth is what clarifies and not that which creates chaos.”

IV – You may be thinking, if Manichean thought does ill, not good, in its irrational, uncompromising and unreal division of good and evil, where shall we draw the line? As human beings are we prone to such patterns of feeling and thought that we always will respond to the idea that conspiracies exist even when there is no evidence? It is dangerous to assume too much from questionable circumstances. A few years back, it was reported that a high official of our government, in filling out a personnel form, was asked to answer whether or not members of his family had participated in an attempt to overthrow the U.S. Government by force. When the applicant answered “Yes,” there was a startled, solemn request for more information. When asked to specify, the candidate wrote, “my two grandfathers, both of whom fought with the Confederacy in the Civil War....” The information supplied by Dean Rusk, Secretary of State.

The Manichean impulse doesn’t readily, easily, or willingly distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information. We know that anxieties are great in a time of troubles, fears, insecurity, baffling problems – a time such as ours when the overwhelming and prime problems – peace in the world, world hunger, the domestic and economic problems – seem to become more muddled rather than more clear, and responses filled with more malice than good will.

Theologically, the Manichean Thread was correctly rejected because it is neither true to the human condition nor a credit to any God or any system of human values. But where would you draw the line between good people and bad people?

In THE DEVILS OF LOUDUN, Aldous Huxley wrote (p. 237), “No man can concentrate upon evil, or even upon the idea of evil, and remain unaffected. To be more against the devil than FOR God is exceedingly dangerous. He is haunted by the wickedness which he attributes to his enemies; it becomes in some sort a part of him.”

If we want to draw a line between good people and evil people, we will draw the line right through ourselves. An aged man in Ohio told me that he heard that as a boy from a Unitarian minister in Marietta. The thought has enduring wisdom.

It is an ancient verity – true – theologically, sociologically, and psychologically.

We experience strange mixtures and sequences of good and bad feelings surging up from within us, do we not? Who of us has never been selfish, vain, deceitful, antagonistic? Yet now and again we are moved also toward kindness, self-honesty, truthfulness, and peace. The story is told of a youngster in a New York City settlement house who, when asked what he would most want if he could have three wishes, answered, “A machine-gun, a revolver – and everybody should be happy.” This lad was not different from most of us, was he? We do want everybody to be happy, but lurking within us are hostile wishes for machine gun and revolver-like things too. St. Augustine’s painfully honest prayer was in this same vein: “O Lord, free me from sin, but not quite yet.”

If we want to draw a line between good people and bad people we should always divide ourselves as well as labeling others. This I believe is the human reality that is sometimes called “sin” or “depravity” in theological language. This is behind such religious myths. Joseph Campbell (MASKS OF GOD, p. 26-7) remarks, “Whenever a myth has been taken literally, its sense has been perverted; but also, reciprocally, that whenever it has been dismissed as merely priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the door.”

The ancient Chinese were wise in this matter of our divided selves. One of the oldest of their religious symbols is the circle which blends the Yin and the Yang, symbol of the merging nature of light and shadow, male and female, positive and negative – good and evil. These qualities contrast each other; and their blended nature creates the whole.

No one wears an inner garment that is either a seamless robe of purity or a besmirched rag of vice. Blemish and virtue are always there, although proportions differ. Society protects itself from the outlaw who victimizes his fellow men and women. The law limits the ways we may ACT toward our fellow humans. The difference between the captured, convicted criminal and ourselves is not a difference of kind, but of conscience and control – and sometimes, luck. Years ago I knew an aged, picturesque, fulsomely corrupt character who had been a professional gambler and swindler among his more respectable occupations. He would say with a wink of his jaded eye, “I never met a guy who didn’t have a streak of larceny somewhere.”

We are sunk in a sea of riddles and inscrutables, knowing and understanding neither what is around us or in us, completely. When one adopts the absolute ways of Manichean judgment of good and evil, one proceeds not on evidence, but on feelings unfounded in fact. He/she who weaves the Manichean Thread seldom realizes that the soul he is primarily judging is his own.

The Manichean Thread

November 27, 1966
Plainfield (Re-written for Lakeland 2/86)

The Manichean Thread

(Reading, p. 29/32 – THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS, Richard Hofstader)

The Manichean Thread is an attitude found in the culture of the Western World for at least twenty-five hundred years. I call it a “thread” because it seems like unto a decaying strand twisting in and out of the tapestry of history, a thread which again and again weakens the cloth produced by human efforts to weave freedom, reason, dignity and equal opportunity as the prevailing patterns of living. By the “Manichean Thread” I refer to the belief that evil is a conspiracy which permits no middle ground, no open discussion, but only incessant warfare. Much of this sermon was stimulated by Richard Hofstader's book, THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS. The historian used “paranoid” to indicate those attitudes which are characterized by delusion of persecution and conspiracy, marked by a completely disproportionate suspicion of all attitudes and actions which fail to adhere precisely to a particular party-line. As he wrote (p. 14), “the central preconception of the paranoid style (is) the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character.”

I would like to speak about the “Manichean Thread” as a strand in our historic religious culture; cite a few parallels in our national political history and associate these with some destructive forces in the present. Then, lastly, I will attempt to say a few words about where one may correctly draw a line between good and evil.

I – In the year 242 of the Christian Era, a young Persian religious enthusiast, Mani, proclaimed himself the Messiah sent to Earth by the only true God to reform and save mankind by teaching right religions and morals.

As a young man, Mani had set out to convert the world. In his travels, he learned something about the religions of India; in the Near East he was exposed to Judaism, Christianity, and Mithraism. But most influential in the formation of his religious convictions was the religion of his own Persian heritage, Zoroastrianism. Mani preached his faith for about 30 years and was martyred by jealous Magian priests. Crucified, his dead body was stuffed with straw and hung from the gates of the then-important Persian city of Susa.

But, as has happened so frequently in history, martyrdom had the opposite effect than that intended by the executioners. Following his crucifixion, the faith of Mani spread through all the Roman world and became the most formidable rival to Christianity in the first few hundred years of the Christian era. St. Augustine, most influential theological figure since Paul, had been a Manichean for ten years before his conversion to Christianity. The famous saint never wholly cast out the Manichean influence.

Manicheanism was outlawed when Christianity became the official religion in the fourth century. One historian remarked that if you wished to curse emphatically, or use an unpleasantly profane slur, you could accomplish this by calling a person a Manichean. But Manicheanism persisted in the East for at least 1000 years, and its distinctive notions have surfaced again and again in the West, even to this day.

Rooted in the teachings of Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), who founded the religion named for him 600 years before the beginning of the Christian era, the distinctiveness of Manicheanism is best understood in its genesis in Zoroastrianism.

Zoroaster was somewhat unique among the religious prophets of his day and succeeding times, because Zoroaster taught that there were two gods – a benevolent god and an evil god. These two deities were equal in strength. Or at least, humans could not know with certainty which god would prevail in the end. Every moment in the life of man was part of the struggle between the good god and the bad god, or as Christianity later incorporated this teaching, between god and the devil. In Zoroastrianism, however, the Devil was not created by God, but existed independently. Zoroaster believed his mission to be to call men to become part of the relentless conflict against the forces of evil.

This developed into a theological dualism. The Universe was the battleground of these two vast and infinite forces, good and evil, light and darkness, an unpitying struggle between polar opposites.

Although the early Christian church destroyed most of the writings of the Manicheans, its doctrines appeared again and again in certain heretical groups, the Priscillianists, the Albigenses, and the Cathari, for example. Frederic Speigelberg, one of the most thorough of the students of Manicheanism makes the following comments (LIVING RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD, p. 465-7):

“Christianity is only half-rejected Manicheanism, extirpating it consciously but absorbing much of it subconsciously.... Wherever Manicheanism traveled, it brought about a radicalization of ethical doctrine, presenting extremes of dualism....

“Christianity survived because it was literally driven underground, where it developed and gathered strength and accumulated to itself an impenetrable mystery. Manicheanism has survived by much the same process, for the unknowable has a stronger grip on our minds than the knowable. But we may well ask ourselves which of the two survives primarily today: are we Christians with a Manichean subconscious or Manicheans with a Christian subconscious?”

II – There are parallels in our American history to this Manichean Thread which proposes that life is an interminable conflict between good and evil; and that evil is a total conspiracy.

The late Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., in an article published Nov. 65 (SR) listed more examples found in American political and social history, although he was not making this “Manichean” analogy.

About a half-day’s drive or so by today’s highways is Batavia, New York, where an event in 1826 illustrated this Manichean Thread. William Morgan of Batavia was abducted and presumed murdered. Popular hysteria soon whipped up a whirlwind of alarm because Morgan, a bricklayer and a Mason, had written a book exposing the secrets of the Masonic order. It was generally thought that an awful fate awaited those who revealed lodge secrets. “When four persons were found guilty of the kidnapping and got off with light sentences,” there was widespread suspicion that the Masons controlled courts, police, and government. Incidentally, Morgan’s body was never found; the disappearance is an unsolved mystery. But at the time, “Manichean” hysteria, paranoid suspicion of all Masonic lodges and members spread like a raging virus. Traveling lecturers “denounced the hydra-headed monster” (the masonic order). “Churches expelled Masonic preachers and laymen. Many lodges disbanded; in New York State alone their number dropped from 600 in 1826 to 50 in 1834.” The hysteria affected legislation and candidates for local, state, and national offices. The anti-masonic movement did not endure. But it was an example of the Manichean Thread. [CJW note: replaced by anti-Catholic]

The following anecdote from my own experience is illustrative. Some years ago in N.J. on a boiling July Sunday afternoon, when the glaring sun and 100 degree temperature made a twelve-mile peace march trying and exhausting for those of us trudging along, on the way, a nun, a member of a Roman Catholic religious order, discovered why we were marching, and joined in. She was the administrative head of a nearby Roman Catholic orphanage. She happened to be walking with me for awhile. First, she gave me hell that more of the religious orders were not on the mailing list of the peace organizations so their members might know the time and place of peace demonstrations. Then, she said, because the evening meal at the orphanage must be prepared, she could not stay with the march. She departed; but before long she was back again with containers of cold lemonade. Then, along with other sisters, [she] brought watermelon, sandwiches and other food to the thirsty and hungry marchers. Another marcher said to me as she observed the kind, bustling sisters, “You have no idea what an emancipation it is to have some of my prejudices fall away like dead leaves.”

In my own lifetime I can remember the appearance of the Manichean Thread in attitudes toward Roman Catholicism. The election campaign of Al Smith provided too many illustrations to require further evidence, not to speak of the deluge of “sick” mail I received at the time of the John F. Kennedy campaign for the presidency.

This is not to say that one should not oppose political efforts of the Roman Catholic Church when one disagrees with principle and particulars in such thoroughly basic issues as Church and State, birth control, and attitudes toward “mixed” marriages. But it is to say that to attribute all evil to Roman Catholics, calling the Pope the Anti-Christ and expressing crude bigotry and vicious charges without proof, is to become twisted up in the Manichean Thread.

III – Has history turned about? Need we fear that the Manichean Thread will condemn persons without evidence; conviction without trial; charge conspiracy without proof? Unfortunately, yes. The Manichean Thread still weaves its destructive ways through the fabric of our lives. Bigots and warped persons still speak their baseless, wretched accusations.

Anti-Semitism and Anti-Catholicism still hurt the lives of many persons. But also the Manichean Thread is found on the extremes of political and economic thought in our day, usually, although there are disturbing responses from persons who might be thought to be more enlightened. The extremists of the Left, the orthodox Communist still believes in the conspiracy of the ruling class, allied with the bourgeoisie to keep the working class in chains. The extremist of this variety sees no alternative but a Manichean end to history when the forces of good (to him, the proletariat), finally conquer the ruling class and the classless society will enter in to its marvelous fulfillment. How much of this unmixed, doctrinaire revolutionary solution to history exists outside of China is a question few can answer. Most of the Communist world seems to be reconciled to a historical, co-existing solution which does not require or predict an Armageddon.

On the other extreme are the far-right groups, who believe that any ideas different from their own are part of a Communist conspiracy. The John Birch Society seems to have the largest membership and is the most well-heeled of these organization, but there are many others, as has been adequately documented. The danger to life and liberty these extremist groups represent should have been brought home to us by the recent round-up in the Metropolitan area of the so called “Minute Men” along with their hidden guns, grenades and other weapons of their vigilante, violent way of solving problems.

As I perceive it, the radical right organizations use a paranoid style of attack – anyone not in their corner is under suspicion. The extremists believe thoroughly that a conspiracy prevails in our land. As the anti-Masons believed that the courts were part of a Masonic conspiracy, so the John Birch Society wants to impeach Earl Warren. Another aspect of the Manichean Thread is the manner the far Right arouses fear of absolute evil [with] which there can be no authentic communication, only warfare.

You know, and I know, that within our memory, the income tax, the United Nations, fluoridation of water supplies, foreign aid, community mental health programs, the National Council of Churches have been accused of being part of the Communist conspiracy or that they are “communist dupes.” Civil rights movements have been labeled by the far right as part of an international conspiracy, without any basis in fact for the charge. The extremists see themselves and only themselves as America’s savior from international conspiracy. They believe they are on the “good” side against the “evil” - and that there is no middle ground, only extremes.

As Hofstader wrote (p. 73), “moreover the Manichean and apocalyptic style of thought prevalent in the fundamentalist tradition can easily be carried over into secular affairs and transmuted into a curiously crude and almost superstitious form of anti-communism.” [CJW note: secular humanism – w/o definition]

Right here there should be a point made. Conspiracies exist. When two or more persons conspire to break laws and engage in conspiratorial acts, to steal authentic government secrets, to destroy by innuendo, to infiltrate a labor union, PTA, or any other organization for the purpose of subverting it to extremist ends, these are conspiracies. But there is an elementary difference between lawful assembly for political planning and unlawful conspiracy – a conspiracy to plan and execute violations of the law. If one has any qualities of fair play or any respect for the Constitution of our land, he will not accuse others of conspiracy unless there is lawful evidence. Hofstader has a telling sentence (p. 37-38), “The plausibility the paranoid style has for those who find it plausible lies, in good measure in (the) appearance of the most careful, conscientious, and seemingly coherent application to detail, the laborious accumulation of what can be taken as convincing evidence for the most fantastic conclusions, the careful preparation from the undeniable and the unbelievable.” There is only one bridge from vague feelings of hostility to accusations of conspiracy or evil – that bridge is evidence. Vague feelings should not bear the weight for sensible men. Neither is the journey from the unbelievable to the undeniable accomplished by mysterious sayings or hostile feelings toward one with whom one does not agree. One may not require more than a feeling to believe God is good, but much more authentic evidence is needed to accuse rightfully a person being a devil.

In Wilbur’s HISTORY OF UNITARIANISM (Vol I, p. 163), he makes an interesting observation about the laws of Geneva at the time of Calvin’s persecution of Servetus, “for the laws of the republic provided a bar to malicious or unwarranted accusations of crime subject to corporal punishment that the accuser should be held together with the accused – and if the case not established he should himself suffer penalty.”

I like what the late Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in A SENSE OF LIFE,

“We must put aside the passions and beliefs that divide us, for once we give them our allegiance, they bring in their wake, a veritable Koran of unshakable truths and all the fanaticism that springs from them.

“It is possible to align men as men of the Right and men of the Left ... as fascists and democrats; these distinctions are unassailable. But truth – and this we know – truth is what clarifies and not that which creates chaos.”

IV – You may be thinking, if Manichean thought does ill, not good, in its irrational, uncompromising and unreal division of good and evil, where shall we draw the line? As human beings are we prone to such patterns of feeling and thought that we always will respond to the idea that conspiracies exist even when there is no evidence? It is dangerous to assume too much from questionable circumstances. It was reported that a high official of our government, in filling out a personnel form, was asked to answer whether or not members of his family had participated in an attempt to overthrow the Government by force. When the applicant answered “Yes,” there was a startled, solemn request for more information. When asked to specify, the candidate wrote, “my two grandfathers, both of whom fought with the Confederacy in the Civil War....” The information supplied by Dean Rusk, Secretary of State.

The Manichean impulse doesn’t readily or easily distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information. We know that anxieties are great in a time of troubles, fears, insecurity, baffling problems – a time such as this – when the two overwhelming and prime problems of our day – peace in the world and civil rights at home – seem to become muddled rather than more clear and filled with more malice than possessed by good will. One simple illustration, but one I think indicative, Do you know what was the biggest selling product at the NY World’s Fair? Aspirin! In the first six months, there was sold over a half-million aspirin tablets – with more than ten thousand orange-flavored for the children – the brave new world is full of headaches. (See Harper’s Ad for Fresh Every Morning).

The Manichean Thread was correctly rejected theologically because it is neither true to the human condition nor a credit to any God or any system of human values. But where would you draw the line between good people and bad people?

In THE DEVILS OF LOUDUN, Aldous Huxley wrote (p. 237), “No man can concentrate upon evil, or even upon the idea of evil, and remain unaffected. To be more against the devil than FOR God is exceedingly dangerous. He is haunted by the wickedness which he attributes to his enemies; it becomes in some sort a part of him.”

If we want to draw a line between good people and evil people, we will draw the line right through ourselves. An aged man in Ohio told me that he heard that as a boy from a Unitarian minister in Marietta. The thought has enduring wisdom.

It is an ancient verity – true, theologically, sociologically, and psychologically.

We experience strange mixtures and sequences of good and bad surging up from within us. Who of us has never been selfish, vain, deceitful, antagonistic? Yet now and again we are moved also toward kindness, self-honesty, truthfulness, and peace. The story is told of a youngster in a New York City settlement house who, when asked what he would most want if he could have three wishes, answered, “A machine-gun, a revolver – and everybody should be happy.” This lad was not different from any of us, was he? We do want everybody to be happy, but lurking within us are hostile wishes for machine gun and revolver-like things too. St. Augustine’s painfully honest prayer was in this same vein: “O Lord, free me from sin, but not quite yet.”

Who, even in his complacency can say truthfully that he has never been conscious of wrong-doing? Who, in moments of honest self-examination has no memory of times of insufferable vanity and presumption? Haven’t you sometimes felt like kicking yourself emphatically in that appropriate location?

If we want to draw a line between good people and bad people we should always divide ourselves as well as labeling others. This I believe is the human reality that is sometimes called “sin” or “depravity” in theological language. This is behind such religious myths. Joseph Campbell (MASKS OF GOD, p. 26-7) remarks, “Whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted; but also, reciprocally, that whenever it has been dismissed as merely a priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the door.”

The ancient Chinese were wise in this matter of our divided selves. One of the oldest of their religious symbols is the circle which blends the Yin and the Yang, symbol of the merging nature of light and shadow, male and female, positive and negative – good and evil. These qualities contrast each other; and their blended nature creates the whole.

No one wears an inner garment that is either a seamless robe of purity or a besmirched rag of vice. Blemish and virtue are always there, although proportions differ. Society protects itself from the outlaw who victimizes his fellows. The law limits the ways we may ACT toward our fellow humans. The difference between the captured, convicted criminal and ourselves is not a difference of kind, but of conscience and control – and sometimes, luck. Years ago I knew an aged, picturesque, fulsomely corrupt character who had been a professional gambler and swindler among his more respectable occupations. He would say with a wink of his jaded eye, “I never met a guy who didn’t have a streak of larceny somewhere.”

We are sunk in a sea of riddles and inscrutables, knowing and understanding neither what is around us nor ourselves, completely. When one adopts the absolute ways of Manichean judgment of good and evil, one proceeds not on evidence, but on feelings unfounded in fact. When you are avid to pass judgment, be kind, for when you draw a line between good people and bad people you must draw it right through yourself. The soul you judge may be your own.

The Fire and the Rock

November 23, 1966
Plainfield
Thanksgiving Eve

The Fire and the Rock

Underlying all the dynamics of social change and beyond the undeniable cultural differences in the family of man, there is an imperishable truth which needs emphasis at the time of Thanksgiving. To feel good about the bounty of the earth while being irresponsible about the obligations of proper stewardship is to ensure disaster by remembering the fire and forgetting the rock.

The Promethean myth has remained an enduring symbolic creation, particularly for those who are optimistic about human nature and hopeful about the possibility of human progress by human effort. Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Man’s mind became the difference between human and non-human animals. The fire of the gods symbolized man’s acquisition of the power to reason, the skill to invent, adapt, and use tools. This evening, perhaps, the theft of god-fire represents the discovery and refinement of agriculture. In ancient days, more remote than history records, man learned that he need not wander in search of wild berries, nuts, and game. He learned to scatter the good seed on the land, to domesticate goat, sheep, and cattle, and to wait patiently as the seed germinated, as green broke through the crust of earth, then bud and bloom and harvest. Man learned he had to store his crops in order to live from harvest to harvest. Paying the high costs of experience, man found that soil must be fertilized and fields like fallow now and then if the harvest was to remain bountiful.

The cost of storms and the terrible experiences of flood taught the human family to be wary of weather. So ingrained is the sensitivity to weather that even today with our steam heat and air conditioning, seldom does a conversation proceed without reference to sun and shadow, rain and clear, freeze and thaw.

Much has changed, particularly in the lifetimes of many of us. Our barns are supermarkets or freezers in the basement. Few of us ever till the soil. Our work on the good earth is largely confined to manicuring lawns and tending domesticated flowers. Our milk is powdered; our peas are frozen; our bread is fortified; our diet reinforced with capsuled vitamins; our potatoes come already fried; our meat boned; and in some households, even the Thanksgiving turkey arrives already roasted.

One of the jingling songs one hears around Thanksgiving time is “over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go.” For a few, perhaps this is still true to their experience. But for many of us, one grandmother may have lived in a thickly-populated city; and the other grandmother we never knew because she stayed in the old country. Today when we go over (or under) the river, we are more likely to go through a toll booth than through the woods.

But the basic insight of the Promethean fire remains. Man has converted the powers and abundance of earth to man’s use. Because of man’s ability to think, to reflect on experience, to propose change, to pass on to his posterity the lessons he has learned and the tools he has developed, man has accumulated skills and knowledge in an amount and complexity that is a perpetual astonishment.

Man has converted the plant to fiber; the chemical to fabric; the herb to medicine; the rocks of the earth to shining steel bars and shapes; the sap of trees to flexible rubber.

Man has converted the drops of petroleum to combustible power; man has converted the falling waters to light and power; man has converted mass to energy, unlocking the door to incredible power.

The fire Prometheus stole from the gods symbolizes these – the power to discover, know, re-learn and pass on the tested knowledge so that the new generation does not have to start at the beginning. A son could pick up where the father put down.

But one of the tragic oversights of man has been to forget, or underestimate, the other half of the Promethean myth, the rock. For his presumption and impertinence in stealing the fire of the gods, Prometheus was condemned to be forever chained to the rock in never-ending torture as a vulture continually ate his body. This was the punishment for stealing fire – knowledge. There has been a price to being human because we have not always been proper stewards of the abundance and energies we have converted from the bounty of the earth.

One of the memories our family has of Yellowstone Park is the instruction of the Park Rangers not to feed the bears who beg so cutely (or fearsomely, depending on how scared one is when a ... bruin approaches). Bears should not be fed candy bars or peanuts or crackers or sugar-lumps because then they may fail to eat sufficient wild-berries and other foods natural to them. The bears require this natural diet in order to put on enough fat to live through the hibernation season. When that instinctive diet is upset with tourist food, the bears may die.

This is suggestive of matters more vital. Think of the great rivers of our continent – try to imagine our routes of commerce, our water for cities, our development of homes for man without the St. Lawrence, the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Platte, the Snake, the Sacramento, the Columbia, the Merced; or in our immediate surroundings, the Hudson, the Delaware, the Raritan, the Passaic.

We have used the fire of the gods to make servants for us of these great arteries of civilization. But also we have abused them. Did you swim this summer in the Hudson, the Raritan, the Passaic? Our own man-made pollutions have placed us on a rock of torture.

There has been a ruination of the Redwoods and other forests. The air is unhealthy in our cities; the skylines obscured by the smoke of our indiscriminate use of the powers we have acquired and our heedlessness for our long-run welfare.

One of the favorite themes of horror movies is the man-made monster. The scientist experimenting in the lab creates a Frankenstein [monster] he cannot control. Terror, death, and destruction inevitably are in the plot. Or the experimenter makes a mistake and is exposed to terrible radiation or electricity. In the fantasy plot, he does not die but loses his humane qualities while gaining immeasurable strength and immunity to the usual weapons of man. There seems to be something obsessive about this theme, as it appears again and again.

The Promethean myth of the fire and the rock is relevant enough so that man should never forget the controls needed for his marvelous devices and astonishing technologies.

Amid the abundant thanksgiving for the majority of Americans, can there be reflection on the fire and the rock? The conservation and pollution studies as well as efforts to increase controls receive too little attention. Beyond those, we should realize that the problem goes deeper. As we overpopulate the earth, we undermine our reserves in the soil, air, and water. Failure to establish international controls on nuclear weapons ensures that the atmosphere will become increasingly poisonous as tests will multiply on the part of nations who are not parties to the agreement to test underground only.

If we people of the world are to come to grips with such awesome problems, we must learn from the ancient of days. The ceremonies and celebrations of primitive man were founded on the belief that human survival was possible only with a correct relationship with the powers that provided growth and harvest, the forces resident in the universe.

We no longer are naïve about fertility rites and sacrifices to the gods to ensure harvest, but the need is great, still, to recognize the relational nature of man and his world of sea and oil and air and climate.

May not only our thankfulness be plentiful but also our responsibility deepen.

Addendum: handwritten by CJW

As is a ceremonial custom, the President’s proclamation was read. There are those of us who would assert that there is an overflowing of pride and an insufficiency of humility in the nationalistic rhetoric. Penance is more appropriate than boastfulness.

Yes many of us are better fed and housed, but not all – extensive pockets of poverty still prevail. Inequality is a grim reality.

Yes, our men are fighting on a foreign field. But the cause for which they sacrifice is still unconvincing. We must dis-enthrall ourselves. When one believes in his cause, particularly when it is held by a minority, he has an obligation to persist in that for which we should be truly thankful – the right of dissent, the process of searching for truth – examining all claims, even those asserted by those with the greatest power.

Addendum: From John Masefield

Might not the birth of every man be hailed
As a divine appearance, come to lead
Men to the living brotherhood they need?
Each brings a person hitherto unknown,
For want of whom man travails and has ailed.
Might not this reverence for life prepare
A state more worth, wherein each citizen
Should have, for faith, the world of fellowmen,
For charity, a paradise on earth,
For hope the beauty of the singing there?

The Christmas Plot and the Passover Plot

November 13, 1966
Plainfield

The Christmas Plot and the Passover Plot

Dr. Hugh J. Schonfield’s book, THE PASSOVER PLOT, is creating some interest and discussion because his interpretation of the life of Jesus is somewhat shocking to many Christian scholars, not to speak of the average Christian believer. We may be able to widen our appreciation for Dr. Schonfield’s proposals if we remember that the prevailing Christian belief about Jesus is also a plot. With some stores already displaying Christmas trees and gadgets, it is not untimely to speak of the “Christmas Plot,” even though Thanksgiving has not yet arrived.

The author has devoted forty years of his life to a scholarly attempt to discover “the man Jesus Christ actually was.” This has been a goal for many scholars through the centuries of the Christian era. Unfortunately because the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” begins with inferences from uncertain traditions rather than from documented facts, any interpretation of Jesus’ life and death will be elaborated within one’s theological pre-suppositions. If one is a believing trinitarian Christian who is convinced that Jesus was a God/man, the “Passover Plot” will be dismissed as thoroughly unbelievable, if not offensive. If one assumes, as most Unitarians and Universalists do, that Jesus was human, no more divine than any other outstanding prophetic reformer, then the conclusions at which Dr. Schonfield arrives provide an interesting contrast to the naïve image many Unitarians and Universalists have of Jesus as a modern, liberal reformer, unaccountably 1900 years ahead of his time.

Because some reviewers seem impatient or resentful that Dr. Schonfield has given the title of “The Passover Plot” to his interpretation of the motives of Jesus and events of his life, it is in point to observe that the prevailing Christian interpretations of Jesus can also be called a plot – a theological plot – but a plot nevertheless.

Today I call it the “Christmas” plot, because of the nearness of that season, but “Good Friday” plot or “Easter” plot would be equally descriptive, because these three celebrations are necessary theological propositions in the old Christian scheme of salvation.

The “Christmas Plot” is that man can not save himself from the burden of sin which all men inevitably inherit because of Adam’s original failure. Death comes to all persons because Adam sinned.

But God wanted to give men the opportunity to be saved. As sinning man could not accomplish his own salvation, God supernaturally caused Mary to conceive, but she remained a virgin. Later, theological consistency made it necessary to assume that Mary too was born free of original sin and taken up into heaven without experiencing death.

Because Jesus, son of God and son of a virgin mother was born free of man’s universal congenital disease of sin, he alone by his sacrifice on the cross could atone for the sins of all mankind. In addition, because of his sinless condition, Jesus could conquer death and come alive after being dead in the tomb, thus enabling all persons who are saved by Christian salvation to overcome death and be resurrected to an infinite heavenly life.

To phrase the “Christmas Plot” another way, in a once and forever event, God broke into history as a God/man to save man. This is the old story of salvation which can be readily seen in the doctrinal emphases of most Christmas carols, when one considers the meaning of the lilting verses one is singing.

There are numerous theological elaborations and extensions, but such is the basic plot of orthodox Christianity.

To illustrate what I believe to be the mechanical nature of this fore-ordained salvation system, it is difficult to understand why Judas has had to carry the burden of being labeled the worst of traitors. For in the working-out of the Christmas salvation plot, Judas was a necessary instrument in the events of redemption. If Jesus saved the world by his death and resurrection, the one who made his death occur on schedule should have been praised, not condemned. Without betrayal, no atoning death. Without an atoning death, no salvation for the believing Christians. Or so it seems to me.

What about THE PASSOVER PLOT? The credibility of Dr. Schonfield’s thesis has appeal for Unitarians because he provides an explanation for the gospel stories and traditions about Jesus that assumes a natural, human sequence of events rather than the creaking machinery of a rather clumsy supernatural plot. One of the assumptions of reasonable learning is that when two differing explanations fit the experience, the simpler explanation usually possesses more credibility than the more complex. Dr. Schonfield’s explanation is the simpler and fits the scanty sources equally well.

Dr. Schonfield believes that an understanding of the religious and political forces of the times in which Jesus lived, [relying upon a] study of Roman and Jewish sources as well as Christian, lead to the conclusion that Jesus lived, believed himself to be the Messiah, planned to be seized and crucified. The “Passover Plot” consisted in the painstaking planning and careful timing by Jesus to make sure that he would survive the crucifixion, emerge alive from the tomb, thereby be recognized as the Messiah by all his countrymen and bring to fulfillment all the scriptural predictions of the arrival of the Messianic Age.

First of all, the author believes that Christian theology has always underrated the conflicts and expectations of the Messianic Age in which Jesus lived. It is not always easy to remember that “Christ” is not Jesus’ last name, but the title placed upon him by his followers. “Christ” is the Greek translation of “Messiah,” the Hebrew title for “the anointed one.” The fundamental belief and teaching of the first followers of Jesus was that he was the Messiah and had arrived in fulfillment of prophecy. The world, perhaps because of the emotive associations with the Greek word, “Christ,” rather than the Hebrew word, “Messiah,” has largely neglected the reality of Jesus’ time that it was never presumed that God [would] come to earth as man. Such a proposal would have been blasphemy in the view of the image-hating people of the Covenant. Not until decades later was the “paganized doctrine of the Godhead” to replace the original Messianic belief.

Jesus lived in a time of intense expectancy because it had been computed that the time for Messiah was at hand. The book of Daniel predicted that the Messiah would come seventy weeks from the date Cyrus had commanded the rebuilding of Jerusalem. The seers came to believe that this represented seventy weeks of years – 490 years – which would bring the expected time to about 46 BC. Thus those living in the years immediately following would look with great expectancy for the Messiah.

Jesus was from Galilee. Dr. Schonfield emphasizes certain differences of culture and attitude that prevailed between that provincial area and the more cosmopolitan/urban atmosphere in Jerusalem: “In Galilee those who were of Hebrew stock could be called Jews in that they served the God of Israel but they differed in many ways from the Judeans. Their Aramaic speech was hard to follow ... and their customs and religious observances were distinguished in a number of ways from the Southerners. The Galileans were proud, independent and somewhat puritanical, more resentful of alien domination and infringements of their liberty. They were to be found in the forefront of the resistance movement to the Romans and the Jewish authorities subservient to them. When the imperial capitation tax was levied on the Jews in A.D. 6-7, it was the rebel Judas of Galilee who raised again the battle-cry, ‘No ruler but God.’ It was with these stubborn, hardy, and intensely patriotic folk that Jesus, himself a Galilean, had to deal.” (p. 38)

Dr. Schonfield asserts that Jesus must have been entirely sincere in proclaiming himself the Messiah. One of the tantalizing mysteries of religious tradition is the sudden appearance of Jesus as a mature man with messianic and ethical conviction. The subsequent course of events was brief in the time but long in influence.

According to the author’s thesis, Jesus, born of Galilean parents of the line of David, may have been encouraged to think on his possible messiahship. Such expectancies would not have been unusual. In our day, how many boys day-dream of being President of the U.S.; how many of their mothers have let that vision cross their minds? Galilee was tense with hatred of Roman occupiers and their collaborators. The patriots hoped fiercely that the Messiah would no longer tarry.

Schonfield attaches considerable importance to the disclosures of the Dead Sea Scrolls as an indication not only of how strong the Messianic hopes of the people were but also of the probability that Jesus was influenced by the Essenes. Jesus “accepted some of their tenets ... but he also repudiated much that they represented, their asceticism, secretiveness, rigidity of discipline, harsh judgments and uncompromising attitudes.” (p. 63)

No other scholar I have read makes such careful note that Jesus must have planned the whole course of events from his baptism by John to the crucifixion. Schonfield carefully records the movements, the sharp calculations, and the precise timing of Jesus in planning to influence the events.

The happenings of the crucifixion represent Dr. Schonfield’s most startling proposals. It is not a new theory that Jesus did not die on the cross, but survived long enough to be seen alive a couple of days later. This has always seemed to me to be the most probable of explanations for the so-called “resurrection.” [CJW note: “Roland E. Wolfe”] But what is novel is Dr. Schonfield’s insistence that from the Triumphant Entry to the Resurrection the events represented an intricate plot, fully known only to Jesus, which succeeded only partially because of the unexpected.

Carefully planning that his stay on the cross would be only three or four hours, arranging to be drugged (the sop of vinegar) so that death would be assumed, the plot would have succeeded but for the Roman soldier who stabbed Jesus in the side with a lance. This would prove ultimately fatal, although Jesus was revived and made appearances which later were the basis of Christian dogma [of] the resurrection from the dead.

Dr. Schonfield’s plot will not be persuasive unless one has an affinity for this way of arranging traditions, legends, and myths to support a pre-determined conclusion. Whether or not the “Passover Plot” has credibility, there is a basic insight to be gained from considering it. Precisely the same observation can be made about the trinitarian, evangelical scheme of Christian salvation....

Those who might want to read more widely for contrasting points of view will find Morton Enslin’s THE PROPHET FROM NAZARETH illuminating from a liberal stance and Gunther Bornkam’s JESUS OF NAZARETH will provide a conservative alternative.

Quite apart from which plot one prefers in interpreting the life of Jesus, most helpful are the author’s chapters describing the Messianic movements of that time and the formation of the gospel records. The gospels did not assume anything like the present written form until sometime after 70 A.D. It is not only that the simple passage of time can create all sorts of legends about historical events, but the basic facts become more confused and controversial. A case in point is the eruption of books and speculation which question the findings of the Warren Commission only three years after the Kennedy assassination.

More than that, the period after Jesus died was disturbed by wars with Rome; most of the original records were destroyed. Just as important, the early execution in revolutionary struggles of most, if not all of those who would have had first-hand knowledge deprived all history of their record of what Jesus said and what he did; how he lived and how he died. Unless some discovery more startling than the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls is made, we may never have more solid grounds on which to construct the life of Jesus.

But one can be sure that the search for the historical Jesus will continue because he is a magnet for the dreaming of great drama and the hoping of great hopes.

One ting more: In our age, so distant from that troubled land of ancient Israel and Judah there may be help and insight to be gained in trying to understand a Messiah. There is an ageless truth which the Messianic stories represent. If good is to be hammered out of wrong, then forthright actions, courage, and strategic planning are necessary. Someone, some group must turn face toward Jerusalem and walk to it, even though it be the place where foreign tyrants rule and prophets are killed.

In nature there is a pattern of productive waiting – the leaves fall, the frost chills, the snow falls, the snow melts, the ground warms, the seed germinates, the bud unfolds, the fruit ripens. But in the affairs of man, while there may be a time in the affairs of men when one must take advantage of the tide, inactive waiting for wrong to become right, for evil to vanish or ignorance to become knowledge, will not do.

Many of the Messianic hopes depended on supernatural intervention to crush the occupying tyrants and restore Israel, but the world we confront in 1966 demands the uncommon effort of the will and the strength of persons. Our woes and problems seethe in the bubbling kettles of human conflict, pride, greed, ignorance and inequality. The effort to set things right must come from human cooperation, humility, generosity, knowledge and opportunities for equality.

The goals can be understood in the structure of ancient Messianic expectations. Dr. Ezra Spicehandler of Hebrew Union Seminary analyzed some of the differing hopes in the numerous Messianic dreams.

First, some Messianic hopes were dreams of political independence from Syria and Rome. Political independence, particularly of developing nations and nations in conflict, is one of the massive, substantial, and thorny issues of our times. yet I would suggest to you a principle of political independence, which if carried out more fully would be the fulfillment of a grand hope. Millions now living not in oppressed nations, but free ones, can acquire political independence by studying and talking to become better informed. With the elections only a few days gone, surely we ought to be conscious of the trivial and demeaning level at which much political persuasion is pitched. A person in a free country who does not search for convictions found on available facts about the great political issues is hardly more emancipated than the person who, in a totalitarian situation, is prevented from the search for truth. Like reports that Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem (20 41/42), “would that even today you knew the things which make for peace.” Few of us would either admit our inertia in the search for what is true and what is not true in public affairs, or admit our tendency to accept those points of view which support our unexamined pre-judgments. But failure to face our political ignorance ensures our dependency. To strive for political independence through knowledge is to meet a real need and advance an authentic hope for peace and freedom.

Second, some Messianic hopes were dreams of a day when material prosperity would be the consequence of the coming of the Messiah or the arrival of the Kingdom. Perhaps this reflects one strain of ancient belief that the acquisition of material abundance was evidence that God had rewarded a virtuous life. If you will, this notion can be dismissed as materialistic and crass, not representative of high religious motives. But this goal was not like unto the greed of Midas or the acquisitive passions of those with great possessions who continuously grabbed for more. This was the dream of poor people who had not much more than subsistence, many times not that, who suffered when there was a drought, famine, or a grain tax. Nor should this be overlooked today. We know, or should know, that when a person does not have enough to live on, the chances are he will not be easily persuaded that there are great, democratic principles to live by. As observers of the scene have pointed out again and again, in Latin America, in the Islands of the Caribbean, in Southeast Asia or anywhere else that hunger walks, the seeds of communism or any other ideology do not grow because peasants have the leisure and energy to study and discuss Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao Tse Tung. The troubles breed because the hungry man with hungry wife and hungry children looks for food before he has any time or interest to study the Gettysburg Address.

Not to recognize this modern hope for a good time coming, a Messianic hope if you will, when poverty will be lessened and misery lightened is to be insensitive to the facts and meanings of our time. Food is the dream of the hungry; warmth the dream of the cold; health the dream of the ill.

Furthermore, a principle of immense relevance to us was the ancient insistence that when the Kingdom was finally realized, there would be peace among men. When God’s reign arrived, there would be peace, the swords would be beaten into plowshares and no one should learn war any more. What a superb transformation of human existence would come about if no more than 51% of the people in our nation should come to terms with what a great and lasting peace demands.

There is a double-action hinge which swings into our time in the ancient Messianic dream of peace on earth. Second Isaiah is the most positive prophet in proclaiming that the minority people of Israel would lead all mankind to universal peace. Isaiah reasoned that if there was only one God of all, then the entirety of creation was within the bounds of his care. But the covenant people, tiny minority though they were, had the burden and the privilege of creating universal and lasting peace. Isaiah’s words are for the ages (51-12ff):
‘
“For ye shall go out with joy and be led
forth with peace: the mountains and hills
shall break forth before you into singing; instead
of the thorn shall come up the fir-tree and
instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree....”

No longer are our hopes for peace charted on a grand Messianic map. There will be no angelic police force or supernatural arbitration board. But there is that which is both realistic and idealistic in our world – peace must be universal or it is not peace. The way to peace may have to be lighted by minorities who can see its glory which will one day guide us past all the obstacles of ignorance, fear, hostility, and self-interest.

Those persons of all times who have been anointed with the oils of great goals and who bravely live by such dedication are sharers in human leadership, for they have led us a step or two, sometimes great distances, toward the day when within our midst there will be what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, what some of us dream as the Commonwealth of the Human Family.

The Expanding Consciousness

November 5, 1966
Plainfield

The Expanding Consciousness

Reading from the Playboy interview with Dr. Timothy Leary

For almost everyone, the LSD experience is a confrontation with new forms of wisdom and energy that dwarf and humiliate man's mind. This experience of awe and revelation is often described as religious. I consider my work basically religious, because it has as its goal the systematic expansion of consciousness and the discovery of energies within, which men call "divine." From the psychedelic point of view, almost all religions are attempts – sometimes limited temporarily or nationally – to discover the inner potential. Well, LSD is Western yoga. The aim of all Eastern religion, like the aim of LSD is basically to get high; that is, to expand your consciousness and find ecstasy and revelation within."

Reading from William James, Varieties of Religious Experience as found in THE PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES, p. 231

The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable' world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet, the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal....

What the more characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of energy in the faith-state and the prayer-state I know not. But the overbelief on which I am ready to make my personal venture is that they exist. The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.
-----------

There is an astonishing volume of discussion and speculation about the mind-expanding drugs – L.S.D., Psilocybin, peyote and other compounds. Furthermore, experimental services of a new religion founded by an L.S.D. pioneer, Dr. Timothy Leary, have piqued much curiosity and attracted followers.

In attempting to understand the value, reality, and morality of the drug-expanded mind, it is necessary to place LSD enthusiasm in the context of religious mysticism as well as the safety standards of the Food and Drug Administration. Therefore, consider religious mysticism before an attempt is made to evaluate the drug experience and Dr. Leary's religion. Then I would propose to you that the most healthy and productive mind-expanders may be consistently overlooked.

What is Mysticism?

By its nature, mysticism is not communicated by the usual method of conscious word and gesture. Mysticism is ineffable – that is, unspeakable in the sense it cannot be spoken. The prime conviction of the mystic is that there are many other levels of reality than our usual, conscious receptivity of experience through sight, sound, touch.

Mysticism is an immediate experience at a different level than the conscious, reasoning mind. The mystic believes he has experienced such superb and overwhelming real consciousness of God or Ultimate Reality, that no sense-bound explanation can possibly convey the beauty and power of that immediate experience.

Rufus Jones, the sensitive Quaker who died a few years ago, was considered the historian of mysticism. He concedes the difficulty of explaining mysticism to those who may have never known the experience:

"There always be in any audience, where one speaks of the mystic's way of life someone will rise ... and say appealingly, 'Will the speaker kindly tell us in two or three plain words what mysticism really is?' It is always possible to meet that demand by saying that religious mysticism is an immediate, intuitive knowledge of God or one may say it is consciousness of a Beyond or of transcendent Reality or of Divine Presence. One can pack that phrase into his mind and take it home to Aunt Jane or to Grandmother Ann but the phrase will mean much or little or nothing as it wakens or does not waken in consciousness memory of high tide moments when the Spirit flooded in and changed the old levels of life." (RUFUS JONES SPEAKS TO OUR TIME, p. 129)

Ralph Waldo Emerson's concept of the Oversoul was at core a mystical apprehension. The poet, Francis Thompson, seized both the immediate experience and the intellectual paradox of mysticism in the lines,

"O world invisible, I view Thee;
O world intangible, I touch Thee;
O world unknowable, I know Thee;
Inapprehensible, I clutch Thee."

Most mystics have practiced severe disciplines to achieve the immediate experience of marvelous realities beyond the usual conscious state. They have variously fasted, contemplated with an acute sense of concentration, tortured themselves, isolated themselves, gone without sleep and some have used drugs.

One additional insight has been a prime contribution of Dr. Abraham Maslow, expressed in his book, RELIGIOUS VALUES AND PEAK EXPERIENCES: The experience of mysticism is not limited to persons who hold a belief in a particular God or any god, necessarily. The immediate experience of glories and terrors at a level different than the conscious can be known by believer, agnostic, or atheist; furthermore neither time nor culture provide any exceptions to the availability of the experience to those who are attuned to it or are able to tune themselves to it.

LSD – What is it and Why is it News

It is in this context of the mystic experience, which is as ancient as man himself, that we should look at the phenomenon of the L.S.D. experience and Dr. Leary's new L.S.D. religion, the "League of Spiritual Discovery."

LSD is Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, accidentally discovered about twenty-three years ago by a Swiss chemist to have properties that produce alterations in consciousness. When a person takes LSD, expanding experiences of the mind occur beyond the usual state of consciousness. Sometimes the experience is joy, harmony, peace, and unity with the basic reality of all existence. Some persons experience terror, and an ultimate, isolated loneliness that can be shattering. The same limitations apply to the experience stimulated by psychedelic drugs as to an explanation of religious mysticism. Those, like I, who have never used LSD are incapable of any accurate reporting. As a physicist remarked, "Those who have taken a psychedelic drug realize it can't be talked about, and those who haven't naively assume that it can be talked about with the current vocabulary." (p. 15, Introduction, LSD, Solomon & Leary)

The LSD experience is news, nevertheless, under its various names. Hallucinogenic drugs, mind~expanding drugs, mind-manifesting drugs, psychedelic drugs are just a few of many labels being used. In just a few years, over 1000 articles have appeared about it. Dr. Leary asserts that not only have 20% of the young people of the nation used hallucinogenic drugs, but also he predicts that in less than five years from now, between 10 and 30 million persons will have used mind-expanding drugs.

Some artists, composers and creators in various other arts believe that use of LSD, marijuana, or other forms of mind-expanding drugs has increased their creativity, opening the way to new expressions of art, literature, and music. Furthermore, some observers report that among many young people, there is prevailing belief that not only are the drugs no more harmful than liquor or tobacco, but also that the use of "pot", LSD, etc., is the "thing to do." During a recent Senate hearing, "a young lady testified about smoking marijuana, 'Everybody I know uses it except my grandmother!"

What does LSD do? Research people report that awareness is altered by use of the mind-expanders, not only LSD, marijuana, peyote, but also varieties of certain common vegetable and flower seeds. Consciousness is changed. Our usual perspectives of sight in depth, hearting in certain audio ranges, the usual sense of touch are
altered into what is described as "an eerie novel landscape in which every thing seems possible and nothing remains fixed." (LSD)

Dr. Leary explains that every one of our 13 billion brain cells is hooked up to some 25,000 other cells and everything you know comes from a communication exchange at the nerve ending of your cells. At the conscious level, our ego selves and our cultural conditionings limit drastically the potential awarenesses of these uncountable cells and nerves combinations. With LSD, says Leary, "you become aware of processes you were never tuned in to before."

Dr. Leary's Religion

Dr. Leary takes his enthusiasm for the drug-expanded mind a step beyond other scientists who are engaged in research on LSD. Dr. Leary has founded a new religion, L.S.D., "League of Spiritual Discovery." (Some of his critics charge that he is proof that LSD will cause psychic deterioration rather than inaugurating human improvement.)

It should be noted that at the time of announcement, the founder was free on bail on two narcotics charges, one of which has since been dropped. But in the other case, Leary is appealing a Federal sentence of 30 years and $30,000 fine for possession of untaxed marijuana in Texas.

Although the announced program of the League for Spiritual Discovery does not presently provide for the use of LSD in group worship, "he would test in the courts the constitutional right of the members of the sect to use the drugs in their shrines at home." He is arguing for the right to use LSD sacramentally on the grounds that many religions nave used mind-expanding drugs to achieve mental states transcending normal consciousness. This is true, of course. Sects and cults have used such drugs in wide-spread and diverse places and times, as Winston LaBarre pointed out.

The League for Spiritual Discovery has a six-word motto, "turn on, tune in, and drop out." This creed has a sort-of theology which the founder explains, "Turn-on means to go beyond your secular, tribal mind to contact the many levels of divine energy which lie within your consciousness; tune-in means to express and to communicate your new revelations in visible acts of glorification, gratitude and beauty; drop-out means to detach yourself harmoniously, tenderly and gracefully from worldly commitments until your entire life is
dedicated to worship and strength."

Recently Dr. Leary has conducted several celebrations of his psychedelic religion wherein he attempts to recreate through sound, color, movement, something of what a person would experience under LSD. I tried to attend one of these celebrations a few days ago, but discovered that the services are not only sell-outs at $3.00 per person admission charge, but also that Dr. Leary had to move the scheduled service from a 1500 seat theatre to a 500 seat night club because of financial difficulties. This seems highly inconsistent financing to me, but that may just seem so to me because I apprehend only at the dull, conscious level of simple addition, subtraction and multiplication. However, I certainly hope to be able to attend one of the psychedelic celebrations, because if he is moving people to enthusiastic worship, we Unitarians and Universalists may have something to learn.

The Potential and Actual Dangers

The difficult question with which the courts and individuals must wrestle is whether or not the use of LSD, peyote and other chemical or vegetable mind-expanders is dangerous for human use. The question of unlimited freedom on the basis of religious liberty has long since been denied. The multiple marriage system of the Mormons in the last century was claimed by the followers to be a religious right, but the Courts forbade the practice as being against the public interest.

In a time when many may have the opportunity to "take a trip" with LSD, it is of major importance to point out that not only is the use of the mind-expanding drugs illegal except for research under rigidly controlled conditions, but also, all authorities in the field, including Dr. Leary, insist on the necessity of careful screening of all persons who might take the drug for experimental or therapeutic reasons.

There is some evidence to indicate that if a person has a latent psychosis, some terrible inner disturbance which is not manifested in conscious behavior, an LSD "trip" could place such a person in a psychotic state, perhaps for months. There is general agreement on the necessity of experimentation only under conditions which would tend to prevent such occurrence. Obviously then these drug-expanders are highly dangerous when taken for "kicks" in non-scientific situations.

Sociologist Daniel Bell (AMERICAN SCHOLAR, Autumn 66) makes an interesting historical analogy which may have some application: "The Greek idea of Ekstasis (in Latin, "Superstitio"), the leaving of one's body in the mystery rites or ecstasy, was regarded by the Romans as mental alienation and as socially reprehensible."

The Romans had a point. If the LSD trip takes one to the "not self," submerging individuality in an ocean of ultimate, but non-person reality, there is great danger, potentially, at least, of a failure of concern for other human beings. The question can be raised that the mind under the chemically-triggered influence may be escaping from reality rather than uniting with reality. Rufus Jones, the Quaker mystic to whom I referred, recognized this hazard and attempted to deal with it when he wrote, (Ibid, 139), "But the most striking effect of the sense of contact with God is the immensely heightened quality of personality that goes with the experience and the increased effectiveness of the person as an organ of spiritual service."

There is no present evidence that drug-induced mystic experience can uplift personality and sharpen effective service. In addition as the late Professor J.B. Pratt of Williams, one of the most informed scholars of the psychology of religious belief observed long before LSD was making news, "If we could induce some deeply religious mystic to drug himself... we would know if the drug-induced experience is the same as the religious experience induced by more natural disciplines." (ETERNAL VALUES IN RELIGION, p. 97).

Whether or not Leary's religion is a temporary aberration, as so many unusual and bizarre seats have been, or whether it may be a real approach to truth, beauty, and goodness of enduring significance remains to be demonstrated and tested. In the newest issue of the REGISTER LEADER (Nov. 66), Edwin A. Kartman, who intends to study for our ministry, describes his experience while under the influence of LSD. (The experiment was conducted under carefully controlled conditions as part of a legitimate research program.) One sentence in his description is certainly quotable, "To adopt a familiar trinity of Unitarian Universalism, I experienced great beauty, some love, little reliable truth."

We Do Not Use Our Unaided Consciousness Enough

Without taking one ounce of importance from the mystic experience, the unity with reality however achieved, I would like to conclude with the suggestion that quite apart from the levels of experience beyond regular consciousness, we fail to use our unaided consciousness up to its capacity. I like what Dr. S. I. Hayakawa, the pioneer in semantics said about LSD: "perhaps my reason for distrusting dependence on 'mind-expanding' drugs is that most people haven't learned to use the senses they possess. Why disorient your beautiful senses with drugs and poisons before you have half discovered what they can do for you?" (Christian Century, 7/13/66)

As developed in the UNESCO World History, (Vol. 1 p. 1056), expansion of consciousness has been the main theme of history. Nothing has greater significance than the development and exercise of combined powers than intellect and imagination, the two springs of power of human greatness.

To dissociate intellect from imagination is to throw our humanness away and choose to sink in a wild sea of fantasy. To disassociate imagination from intellect to to lose ourselves in an intellectual wasteland – abstract but colorless and sterile.

How do we combine intellect and imagination to achieve fuller use of our powers? We can discover what the senses can do. Years ago I worked on the assembly line of a furniture factory, sanding chairs as they moved by me. Continuous handling of the sandpaper blocks made the skin of my fingers so thin and sensitive that whenever I grasped an object, a whole network of sensitivity registered in my brain.

We do well to sandpaper our emotions to the end that we can identify with the emotions of others. Rejoice with their rejoicing; grieve with their grieving; understand their anguish with uneasy wishes and forbidden notions. After all when one's network is sensitive enough he knows that the morbid fancies and guilt-filled desires of others are much like his own.

In another way we may make fuller use of our conscious senses by recognizing that this experience we call religion can be more than a passing fancy or a trivial way to spend a Sunday hour. Should not religion if it deserves the name have a more total effect on all our patterns of living? How do I conduct myself in the world? Do I continually seek a higher level of adequacy attempting to match the unrelenting demand that the differential be reduced between What I Am and What I Should Be? Between what I ought to do and what I do? To encounter these alternations and wrestle with them, without either unhealthy guilt or fatuous vanity, is to make fuller use of the resources that consciously we possess.

Lastly, let there be a reminder of that which most of you know and which everyone should realize. The hot spark of Unitarianism/Universalism for those who discover it is not [an] intellectual conclusion about the worth of a religion of reason but rather the excitement of the liberation experience. I was a long time coming to this awareness because I was born in the faith and thus never felt the explosion of intellect and emotion when the free faith is discovered and chosen. It is also true whether one has "come-out" of orthodoxy or "come-out" of a churchless secularism that when one permits the experience of liberation to become too routine, too static, the hot spark of the liberation experience cools.

Currently I am aware that philosophers and theologians of all faiths are seeking new shapes for theology, a fresh stance for ritual and a better reason for religious institutions. Although it seems paradoxical, these searching thinkers are looking for theology, ritual, and justification in the secularized movements for a better humanity, particularly civil rights and peace, but not confined to these overarching issues. I am beginning to feel strongly that this search is pursued not only because such movements uphold the human values we profess, but also because shot through these efforts are the emotional sparks – the excitement of liberation experiences.

The great performers in the arts usually create excitement as well as demonstrating accomplished techniques – Picasso, Calder, Olivier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pablo Casals, Koussevitsky. They create greatly by combining intellect (or skill) and imagination in a merger that represents high fulfillment of conscious living.

Perhaps for many, or all geniuses, mystic experience has been the deep pool for the springs of inspiration. There are unconquered worlds of the mind and its origins offering stirring adventures in a world that can become boring in spite of shiny technologies and abundant comforts. Perhaps one day we shall learn that the mind-expanding compounds are a great blessing for the human family; perhaps we shall discover the drugs to be abominable departures from what is true and good. These possibilities are open to painstaking research and the care-full treatment of human beings.

In the liberal churches, as well as others, conversations continue and procedures evolve which may have consequences of considerable change in organized religious life. In our day, much of the discussion rightfully concerns how our ethical imperatives shall be expressed and take reasonable, effective form. But we shall never do more than partially justify the religious nature of man and his religious society unless we also keep before us the kind of question the late Paul Tillich proposed several years ago:

"The question our century puts before us (is): Is it possible to regain the lost dimension, the encounter with the Holy, the dimension which cuts through the subjectivity and objectivity and goes down to that which is not world but is the mystery of the Ground of Being."

Those who resign from this quest will sustain a great loss.

Dimensions of Depth in Unitarian Faith

October 16, 1966
Plainfield

Dimensions of Depth in Unitarian Faith

Because Unitarians hold that answers should be tentative, not dogmatic to the perennial important religious questions, there sometimes prevails the notion that our Unitarian Universalist faith is shallow, not profound, broad, but not deep. In any religion, whether authoritarian or free, shallow beliefs are reflections of individual perception rather than being accurately mirrored in group professions of faith. Unitarian Universalist belief can be shallow or deep depending on the individual who holds it. Such range can be discovered across the entire spectrum of religious organizations anytime and everywhere.

In some faiths, theology is believed to be distinctly separated from philosophy, history, or social science. Some persons would still hold that theology is wisdom based on divine, supernatural revelation while all philosophies and sciences are wise words and methodical classifications limited to human knowledge, naturally achieved.

While we in the Unitarian Universalist societies are not limited by creedal statements, the belief would certainly prevail among us that wisdom and knowledge are human, acquired through the human interweaving of human knowledge, human reason, and human dialogue. Among us, this human emphasis would be just as true of theologies as with other scholarly fields. This attitude can be described as shallow only by those who assert pretentiously or piously that THEIR interpretation of religious experience is supernaturally revealed and divinely sanctioned. But shallow faith can be characteristic of any self-named believer.

In the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, Shakespeare's genial, gluttonous, conniving rogue John Falstaff says, "I myself sometimes, leaving the fear of God on the left hand and hiding my honor in my necessity am fain to shuffle (equivocate) hedge and lurch."

We live in times when there is equivocation and hedging doubt about the values and standards which should prevail both in our solitary moments of reflection and our outward expressions of belief and conduct in society. The modern poet, Theodore Lockhart has lines entitled, "for the preacher," expressing feelings many persons share:

"There is no ground beneath us.
There is nothing on which to stand.
All that is, is flux,
And in the middle flounders man,
Feverishly he beats the air –
The air, the air, the endless air;
Seeking inside him how to stand.
Cursing God; he does not exist!
Praying God: he must exist!
The moon stands watch over long
Deep night.
Out of charred black muck slips a lily’s shoot,
And the life winter hawked with savage gleam,
Foils the clutch and takes new root
And grass long dead comes a muted green."

Of course Unitarian Universalist belief can be shallow. If one wants to ally himself with our faith, he need not be an intense pursuer of deep meaning. If one wishes a religious alliance that can be treated lightly without hypocritical commitment to a creed, he can do so in a Unitarian Universalist society. The individual is on his own. His liberal faith can be simply a rejection of orthodox beliefs,with the religion of an inquiring mind going no deeper than the surface of what religion is and what religion does. One may regret that such triviality occurs sometimes, but it does happen nevertheless.

As the poet indicated, when we dive below the surface, we may not find solid bottom; we almost surely will do some floundering. It is no trivial process whereby the long, dead grass of shallow or rejected faith takes on fresh green and new growth because roots have become abundant with life-giving resources.

Did you see the cartoon in the S.R., (9/17/66), where two unshaven characters are on the park bench and one says to the other, "I’m a rat-race dropout."

Not the least of reasons why life seems a rat-race is that the meaning of human experience becomes elusive; the reasons fade why we should keep laboring for high goals. Many are dropouts from the adventurous search for meaning, and life then seems a rat-race.

But in spite of a considerable amount of expressed bravado and confidence among the ranks of those who profess a more traditional faith, much shallow belief prevails there, too. The recent flap over a theological appraisal by Mr. John Lennon, one of the Beatles, illustrates this neatly. A few weeks ago, John Lennon remarked casually that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. There were cries of outrage from those who responded with instant indignation. But beyond the frequency with which the name of Jesus is invoked by Christian institutions and the undeniable statistic that the hundreds of millions of nominal Christians outnumber even Beatles fans, Jesus' popularity is not great if one is measuring the influence of his life and teachings on the unsolved problems of war, prejudice, poverty and impersonality. [scrawled note: After 1st service: do you know what an English atheist is? Someone who doesn’t believe in John Lennon.]

An English journalist writing about a run-down Christian Church reports that scrawled on the cement-block wall was the sentence, "We love John, Paul, George and Ringo.” Romain Rolland's evaluation, as written into the character of the young Jean Christophe is neither unfair nor uncharacteristic, "Jesus hardly occupied his thoughts at all. It was not that he did not love him: he loved him when he thought of him: but he never thought
of him."

Voluminous writing has been devoted to the "Death of God" theology, but many of the indignant rebuttals by the God-believers have failed to deal with an obvious reality of contemporary experience. As far as handling the difficult problems of life today between and in nations, there seems to be no productive help in either the existence of God or the death or non-existence of God. One's profession about this seems to be a matter important only to individual taste and personal comfort.

But it is of lesser importance to us whether or not most persons of traditional faiths maintain profound levels in their religious beliefs. It is of more importance to each of us here to seek dimensions of depth in our own Unitarian Universalist interpretation of what religion is and what religions should motivate us to do.

In these times of international peril and national tension, there is a persisting strain as the ancient and abiding human failings of anger, greed and misunderstanding are supplied with intolerable weapons for their indulgence. Within our 1100 or more religious societies and in any given single society, the range of beliefs is considerable, not only about the ideas of religion but also the theories of applying religion to life. Amid that diversity are there ways that one can come to terms with himself in deeper dimensions of religion.

Although there is no authoritarian creed, holy book, or divine man to pronounce the word of faith for us, there are guidelines even in an unstructured faith whereby we can measure the vertical as well as the horizontal. We can seek understanding; we can appraise; we can transcend.

We can understand:
If we but realized it more fully than we do, we would discover more depth by rejoicing in and using more the wealth of knowledge and ideas available to us through our appreciation of universality. Because we have given no doctrinal mortgage to any unchangeable doctrine in Christianity or any other particular faith, we are free to understand the knowledge of many disciplines, free to appreciate the testimonies of many faiths.

If we except the ever-changing dynamisms of science, our understanding will be increased the more rapidly because we are not limited by a theology which has prescribed the nature of our universe. The whole range of discovery in the physical and social sciences provide clues to the origin of the universe and the nature and destiny of man.

One illustration out of hundreds possible: There is renewed theorizing and research about the nature of the cosmology of the Universe of which we are a part. The three-story Universe believed in by those who wrote the Bible and formed the doctrines of Christianity has been discarded for centuries. Even though our instruments measure galaxies and see back into time, as light reaches us which originated billions of light years ago, "cosmology, the science of the Universe is in the state electricity was in when Franklin was flying his kite," according to Robert Cowen, a science editor. To over-simplify some of the newer theories of the astronomer Fred Hoyle, there is some probability that the Universe was never created but always renews itself by the internal forces of its being; that the Universe had no Creator but is always creating. To come to terms with such an hypothesis, even if only in our feelings, is to deepen the dimensions not only of mystery but of religious insight. Dr. John Bahcall, a cosmologist at California Institute of Technology comments, "there's much more in the Universe than in anybody's cosmology. There'll be a lot more in everybody's cosmology when we have a lot more facts than we have today."

We can seek to understand people by attempting to learn more about the forces that create individual and group behavior; learn more about the kind of effort which will heal rather than aggravate the more destructive feelings and behavior. We are burdened by no denominational dogmas about man's depravity; we are handicapped by no theological decrees which assert the superiority of any variety of human being; we are not tied to the pronouncements of any State. We are free to understand what social scientists are learning about human behavior. We have the power to receive such findings carelessly and trivially; or we can take such knowledge seriously as an important tool to help dig deeper in our understanding of the nature of man and man' s options for his own destiny.

One thing more: because we reject the notion that anyone's religion has THE TRUTH, we are free to understand the religious search and discovery of others whose faith tradition had different origins and unlike development.

Several years ago I clipped a news story of a disastrous volcanic eruption on the island of Bali, killing more than 150 islanders and burying some villages in lava. The account went on to tell how the Balinese people believed that the gods were angry "because the people failed to ask permission to hold a special festival in the famed Temple of Besakih. Superstitious, you may conclude, but not entirely different from the theology of Job's friends or any other Western theology which implicitly or explicitly holds that natural disasters are punishments for what is named "sin."

Our individual faith can be deepened if each comes to terms with this widespread notion that individuals are punished by natural disasters. One can reject such a theology – certainly I reject it – but one can attempt to come to terms with an underlying supposition even though expressed in superstitious terms: That is a feeling for the oneness and the interrelatedness of all that is in our experience, the nonhuman natural as well as the human. The superstition might just be an overclouded pointer to some concept that is both intellectually valid and rewarding in meaning.

We need to understand that while the Christmas season is soon upon us, that hallowed and expensive though the celebration will be in Christian lands, in India "there are six hundred million people who believe Xmas to be a fantasy." [That was a line from ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER.] We should be singularly able to understand that one’s religious dogma may be some one else's fantasy. But such awareness does not diminish the opportunity to understand more about the great feelings of celebration when the seasons swing on their quarterly pivots.

In Bunyan's PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, when Christian runs to seek eternal life, two neighbors seek to bring him back – one is Obstinate; the other Pliable.

Truth is a running stream, not a locked-in pool. When we fail to reconstruct the truth on the occasion of new discoveries of the mind, or in creating new combinations of accruing human experience, then we are captured by old Obstinate. We can deepen our faith by renewal of allegiance to the authority of truth, known or to be known.

The comparable peril is that we shall confuse an open mind with a vacant one. Then, as in Bunyan's allegory, Pliable robs us of conviction.

Therefore we must not rest with understanding, we must appraise that which is offered for our yeas or nays.

Our faith is deepened when we estimate the worth of the important options before us. Disaster is created by gullible mentalities as well as obstinate ones. The irrationality of a mob, the shallow minds which change direction with each breeze of different influence, no matter how palpably false, destroy dimensions of depth in one's religious faith. Emerson said, best, "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

We will deepen faith by measuring events and claims with an appraising mind – free minds, but tough minds; not only wide-ranging in gathering facts but also focusing on evaluations of truth and falsehood. As John Erskine commented so many years ago, we have an "obligation to be intelligent" because the world of human experience needs the continuing surgery of the inquiring mind steadily cutting away the soft decay which can accumulate when the right questions are not asked; when authentic issues are not appraised.

In recent years there has been an astonishing increase in communication between divisions of the Christian Church, the ecumenical movement it is called, or "dialogue." Obviously we are called upon for only limited participation because we do not share even the somewhat uncertain assumptions of faith which have brought together for conversations the large branches of Christianity. We can be sympathetic to the movement, learn from it. The principles of appraisal suggested by church historian, E.L. Allen are stimulating:

“The convinced Protestant (we would substitute Unitarian Universalist) coming to a better knowledge of Roman Catholicism or Greek orthodoxy finds himself taking four attitudes toward it.

a) He discovers in it the truth he already holds, so that this extreme unity is already present.

b) He finds in it that which he must reject as error. To this extent conflict must continue, but it can be qualified by charity.

c) He finds in it that which appeals to him as new truth, some idea or practice hitherto strange to him which convinces him as something he must learn and make his own.

d) He finds in it that which he can neither accept as truth nor dismiss as error. He realizes its spiritual value for others but it does not speak to his condition. He must respect it, but he cannot make it his own.”

In an age where our religion carries with it an obligation to defend intelligence against vague, confused positions, we will deepen our faith by reasonable, courageous appraisal. In a time where it seems increasingly difficult to maintain one's personhood because we are fair game for "persuasion" and manipulation, the dimensions of personal religion will be less shallow when we measure as well as listen.

A third dimension is needed. Not simply understanding, not alone appraisal, but transcendence is necessary.

The capacity to transcend is not some occult gift of faith. The capacity to transcend is the ability to get beyond self. The capacity to transcend is keeping faithful to splendid loyalties. This is a difficult dimension to maintain because loyalty to a cause beyond self is perhaps the hardest test of our ease-seeking, anxiety-resistant egos. The need for a goal beyond self may have been why Voltaire commented that if “God didn't exist we would have to invent him.” But no particular theistic position is required and none is necessarily dismissed. One must have respect for self, otherwise even worthwhile efforts produce only self-misery. One must have goals beyond self for if these do not call us to fine duties, then the self becomes a perishing Narcissus.

In his poem, "Re-appraisal," Stanton A. Coblentz may have captured the point:

"If from some ultimate observation post
We could review our lives on earth, and see
The selves we were, and what we strove to be,
And all the goals and gods we used to toast,
What, from that pinnacle, would sparkle most?
Riches, I think would seem a broken key
To a door that faded; pride a wind-stripped tree
And fame a mist along a midnight coast.

Only those blocks, I hold, by which we build –
One with a brush or spade, one with a pen,
One with a deed of love, one with a song,
One with a steeple – show a life fulfilled,
And from a peak beyond the paths of men
May shine like stars above the murky throng,"

In his book, THE SEARCH FOR PURPOSE, which is encouraging for the human venture, Arthur E. Morgan likened a person's life to an ocean vessel: “The direction in which the ship will travel is determined by the navigator, using the steering wheel and rudder. The actual motion of the vessel is determined by the power plant and its fuel. Without a power plant the the vessel would only drift; with a power plant, but without a rudder, it would only go in circles, or would zigzag with changing winds and currents."

Arthur Morgan’s metaphor its suggestive – if the capacity to understand is the vessel, and the capacity to appraise, the power plant, the capacity to transcend, to get beyond self is the rudder which enables one to follow the best course.

The deep dimensions of religion – life’s finer experiences, if you will, come to us when we are convinced that religion can be both intelligent and useful; both intellectually honest and ethically inspiring; both reasonable and calling forth our reverence as we seek to know, courageously to appraise and determined fix our course on goals beyond self.