Is UU missing the "new" New Atheist boat?

One of the Sunday Assembly Boston committee members shared the October 2013 sermon above, with the advice that we keep in mind we are not just another group, but a new congregation that other leaders of other congregations are still trying to make sense of.

My thoughts.

Kendrick points to institutional insularity as a reason why UU is not connecting effectively with the population of religiously unaffiliated freethinkers coming out of the woodwork in groups like Sunday Assembly and Humanism; I wonder if there isn't another important factor: the language gap.

In his sermon, he uses terms like "transcendental", "faith", and "spiritual hunger". Now, I know what he means, but the register of this vocabulary seems to be a world removed from the science-infatuated, skeptically-inflected, irony-wrought idiolect of the new freethinkers. I can map his meaning onto my own ethical outlook, sure, but I fear I am not the typical case. For many more people among those he would be seeking to tell about UU, the ecclesiastical and vaguely supernaturalistic vocabulary of the UU tradition is likely to evoke a powerful response of suspicion and even disdain.

In my conversations with UU and HUU leaders and parishioners, I've encountered confusion, wariness, and even dismissal in regard to Sunday Assembly (and to the older project of re-orienting the Boston Atheists as a congregational group). These are folks who have good reason for wondering if we aren't a bunch of johhny-come-latelys, here to co-opt their place as *the* obvious destination for liberal-minded freethinkers in search of community as a connection to "something greater". I share this opinion because I think it is important that we keep in mind that our work in organizing SA isn't taking place in a vacuum; there are allies out there, that we can work with and learn from, and establish relationships of mutual aid, as long as we know that they are there, and are alert to the potential sensitivities. And I share it with full confidence that Kendrick is a certainly a potential ally.

Relatedly: After taking a few months off while occupied with wedding planning, I'll be restarting the Boston Interpath Workgroup with monthly meetings for discussion and position paper publication, in March 2014. If anyone here on the distro is interested in joining, please let me know.

Joking about atheist church

A joke from a friend that came up in an email exchange in which we were discussing the meaning of Sunday Assembly Boston. She writes that she across it during the Bosnian War; she thinks it was told by a Sarajevan

Q: What's the difference between a Sarajevan Muslim, a Sarajevan Jew, and a Sarajevan Christian?  

A: A Sarajevan Muslim is someone who skips mosque, a Sarajevan Jew is someone who skips temple, and a Sarajevan Christian is someone who skips church.

The extension to our context is, of course:

Q. So just what exactly is Sunday Assembly? 

A. A place for atheists not to go on Sundays.

*

Historical lagniappe: About a certain king of the Caucasus, 10th-century Persian explorer and geographer Ibn Rustah writes:

He prayed on Fridays with the Muslims, on Saturdays with the Jews, and on Sundays with the Christians. 'Since each religion claims that it is the only true one and that the others are invalid', the king explained, 'I have decided to hedge my bets.'

Ha.

What we can learn from Scientology

According to Patheos: "There is no personal deity in Scientology, so private rituals of worship and devotion are practically non-existent, replaced with diligence in spiritual practice and striving for moral uprightness."

In the spirit of learning from other traditions, I'd like to say: I'm totally stealing that emphasis on diligence and striving. (Albeit with the caveats that 1. "spiritual practice" can really only be meaningful when used to refer to introspective and cognitive methods of cultivating desirable knowledge and emotional states, and 2. "moral uprightness" is an ad hoc and utilitarian thing, to be invented and modified by the end user as needed, and doesn't exist 'out there' in some perfect Platonic form waiting to be uncovered by the truly diligent and spiritually pure.)

Quote: "Religion not the crying need of India"

"Christians must always be ready for good criticism, and I hardly think that you will mind if I make a little criticism. You Christians, who are so fond of sending out missionaries to save the soul of the heathen — why do you not try to save their bodies from starvation? In India, during the terrible famines, thousands died from hunger, yet you Christians did nothing. You erect churches all through India, but the crying evil in the East is not religion — they have religion enough — but it is bread that the suffering millions of burning India cry out for with parched throats. They ask us for bread, but we give them stones. It is an insult to a starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics. In India a priest that preached for money would lose caste and be spat upon by the people. I came here to seek aid for my impoverished people, and I fully realised how difficult it was to get help for heathens from Christians in a Christian land."

(from a lecture delivered by Indian Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda on 20 September 1893 at the Parliament of the World's Religions, Chicago, criticizing Christian missionaries for ignoring the needs of starving millions in India.)

from The Encyclopedia of Religion

"To say that man is homo religiosus is not to say something 'nice' about him."

(a throwaway line in Vol. 9; see also the entry for homo reliogsus in Vol. 6 )

Faithlessness in fiction

Few things rile my impatience as the assertion that atheists can't be people of deep thought and values.

Randy Boyagoda, chair of English at Ryerson University, has written an essay for First Things which more or less accurately identifies the waning of explicitly Christian voices in contemporary literature:

I always have ready some recommendations of current writers who take the life of faith seriously in their work—the novelist Marilynne Robinson, the poet Geoffrey Hill, assorted scholars and reviewers writing criticism—but I realize they have a point. While religion significantly matters in minor literary contexts today (as with the eccentric popularity of Amish romance novels) and in vulgar commercial contexts (as with Dan Brown’s books), serious literary fiction largely occupies its very own naked public square, shorn of any reference to religiously informed understandings of who and what and wherefrom we are, which represents a marked break from centuries of literary production informed by Christian beliefs, traditions, and culture.

(Emphasis mine.) There's an absolute ecology of unexamined, and I'd say indefensible, assumptions underlying the idea that identifies deep and thoughtful "informed understandings of who and what and wherefrom we are" exclusively with religiously informed understandings. The unexplored alternative to this idea is that certain author and artists may, by dint of the depth and richness of their understanding, have had to abandon "religious" (read: theistic) framings of the world. This is not a negligence on their part, but a feature of their engagement with reality as it comes. 

Boyagoda has a more sympathetic case, a less privilege-blind case, if he were using the word "religious" to encompass nontheistic worldviews, such as those aligned, e.g., with deep ecology or religious* humanism; but I see no evidence that he is doing so. Very well; we carry on with our own work in the larger pluralism outside the purview of sectarian commentary. You can be sure that the forthcoming companion site to Pen & Anvil's secular imprint, Secular Age, will do diligent work in focusing attention on new books from secular thinkers, and in promoting awareness of the many ways an atheistic worldview may nonetheless have consort with things infinite.

(I encourage anyone reading to recommend in the comments below any authors or books who are exemplary in this respect.)

_ _ _ _ 

* How good if it were more widely understood that the term "religious" can apply with equal usefulness to wholly nontheistic and materialistic traditions such as "religious humanism." Alas, most readers see "religion" and think a god-belief of some kind is involved (the case of some kinds of Buddhism not much changing these facts).

Brookes on Taylor's "Secular Age" thesis

"Advances in human understanding — not only in science but also in art, literature, manners, philosophy and, yes, theology and religious practice [Oh? Which? -ZWB] — give us a richer understanding of our natures. [...] These achievements did make it possible to construct a purely humanistic account of the meaningful life. It became possible for people to conceive of meaningful lives in God-free ways — as painters in the service of art, as scientists in the service of knowledge. ¶ But [...] these achievements also led to more morally demanding lives for everybody, believer and nonbeliever. Instead of just fitting docilely into a place in the cosmos, the good person in secular society is called upon to construct a life in the universe. She’s called on to exercise all her strength." (NYTimes)