The living tradition we Unitarian Universalists share draws on many sources. In 1961, the Unitarian Universalist Association was formed from the consolidation of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. The first UUA bylaws, adopted that year, 1961, identified sources of our living tradition and included mention of one of those sources as:
“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”In 1985, revisions of the principles and sources were adopted, but that language about humanist teachings was retained without change from the 1961 bylaws.
Today we celebrate our Humanist heritage. A key document of American Religious Humanism is the Humanist Manifesto of 1933. The entire manifesto is relatively brief -- just a couple pages. Here are some excerpts which will give you the flavor of the document (including the male-dominated language of the time). This is about one-third of the entirety (See the full "Humanist Manifesto I" HERE):
"The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world....SERMON
In every field of human activity, the vital movement is now in the direction of a candid and explicit humanism....
Today man's larger understanding of the universe, his scientific achievements, and deeper appreciation of brotherhood, have created a situation which requires a new statement of the means and purposes of religion....
We therefore affirm the following:
Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created. Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process....
Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values....
Religion must formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method....
We are convinced that the time has passed for theism, [or] deism,...
Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained....
In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being....
We assert that humanism will:
(a) affirm life rather than deny it;
(b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them; and
(c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few....
Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement.”
There is no God, and she is always with you. What do I mean saying this?
Our reality – the reality that we live our lives in, the only reality possible – is populated with concepts. Reality has houses, streets, cups, chairs, trees, stars, ourselves, and other people in it – which is to say, we have concepts of all those things. Reality also has abstract things, like the number 7, abstracted out from any particular collection of 7 objects and just there before our minds in its pure seven-ness. Reality has abstract things like freedom and love, like greed, anger, and ignorance, like music and the rule of law – also abstracted out from any particular example and present to mind as a concept of what all members of a set of examples have in common.
Reality has some things even more abstract, like the square root of negative one – which is not a real number. It’s an imaginary number, but it’s part of our reality. Other imaginary things, like unicorns and dragons and Harry Potter are also among the concepts that populate our reality. Most of us know who Huckleberry Finn and Anna Karenina are. We understand that our concepts of them are in the category of “fictional characters,” but they exist for us as concepts nonetheless.
But part of the concept of God is that God is way beyond the capacity of our limited, finite human minds to conceive. Whatever your concept of God is, it’s wrong, because it’s just one more limited, finite, human concept. The concept of God thus cancels itself out as a concept. If I ask you to think something that’s unthinkable, you can’t do it. Think something that, not only can you, now, today, not think, but that no human or collection of humans jointly will ever be able to think. You can’t do that, of course – because, if you could, it wouldn’t be unthinkable. So we can have no concept of such a thing.
Reality is populated with concepts – even concepts of fictional and imaginary things – but the concept that can’t be conceived is not among them. It can’t be part of our reality – can’t be invoked as an explanation, can’t be prayed to or cursed, can’t interact with us or our world. That’s how I would unpack, “there is no god.”
At the same time, there is always something with us that is just outside our capacity to think it. We might want to call it the mystery, but even the name “mystery” is a concept. For that matter, “always with you” is a concept, too – yet I think it is inescapable. If, as noted, our thought – our understanding, our awareness, our love – is limited, and finite – yet also growing, or, at least evolving, changing – then there is always that toward which our aspiration may be pointed, even if we can’t quite conceive of what it is.
It's a something, and it’s always there.
And it is fertile and fecund, it bears new life, so I call it “she.” So I wanted to put that out there at the outset. I’ll be circling back as we explore today our fifth source:
“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”First, then, I want to celebrate our humanist tradition which continues to inform who we are as Unitarian Universalists. The 1933 Humanist Manifesto, a portion of which is included in the above Reading, was very much a product of developing Unitarian thought. A key moment – perhaps we might say the beginning of American Religious Humanism – or, at least, the first coming together of the people who, working together, would systematically develop and spread American Religious Humanism – happened 15 years earlier, in 1918 – and it happened right here in Des Moines, Iowa.
The Humanist Manifesto of 1933 had 33 original signatories, 15 of whom were Unitarian ministers, including Dietrich and Reese. One Universalist minister was a signatory, as were 17 other prominent public intellectuals who had been brought on board with the project.
When I re-read that manifesto, I am stirred and moved by the boldness of these Humanists 91 years ago – by their vision and their hope. The implicit critique of traditional religion – which, for them, pretty much meant Christianity – is valid. The West's religious tradition has often not harmonized well with the understandings emerging through the work of scientists. The West's religious tradition has sometimes obstructed rather than aided progress in addressing modern social problems. It has often separated people rather than bringing them together. So the Humanists said, “Let’s do religion. Religions have always been means for realizing the highest values of life, and we need that. But let’s have religion without God."
Today we still live in a world where people plant bombs – on themselves, in cars, in buildings – and fly jet airliners into buildings – and are led to do so in a way that is enmeshed with their understanding about something they call God.
Today we still live in a world where people want to take away women’s reproductive freedom, and punitively stigmatize gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, and their thinking makes heavy and frequent reference to something they call God.
Today we still live in a world where our children are liable to be told by their classmates that they are going to hell.
Today we still live in a world where a few people make it their life's mission to devise elaborate refutations of evolution, and where more than a few people work to change the public school science curricula to present as science their views about something they call God.
Today we still live in a world where our own experience of many religious institutions is that their devotion to something they call God goes hand in hand with authoritarianism: they don’t allow questioning; they don’t allow critical thinking; they demand uncritical acceptance of authority. They say that the authority is a book, but the perceptive quickly see the authority really is a community of human leaders who have settled on one interpretation of that book, when the book itself equally well – or better -- supports very different readings.
Today we still live in a world where we see that “faith” so often means “believe what the authority figure tells you to believe and pray what the authority figure tells you to pray.”
Today we still live in a world where countries that social scientists measure as “high on religiosity,” venerating something they call God, also measure higher on violence, drug and alcohol addictions, teen pregnancies, imprisonment rates, and high school drop-out rates.
No wonder it would seem important to Humanists 91 years ago as well as today to call for a religion that doesn’t have this thing called God in it.
In recent years we have seen a real renaissance in religious humanism – even though it’s often not labeled that. Try typing “Spiritual Atheism” into your favorite search engine. You'll find there's a LOT out there exploring and developing the idea of religion and spirituality without God. It’s a New New Atheism, much of which sprang up in the wake of the New Atheism.
“The New Atheism,” as it’s called, refers to a spate of books grouped together that came out about 20 years ago now. This included:
- Sam Harris, The End of Faith (2004)
- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006)
- Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (2006)
- Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great (2007)
- Andre Comte-Sponville, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2008)
- Chris Stedman, Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious (2013)
- Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believers Guide to the Uses of Religion (2013)
- Nick Seneca Jankel, Spiritual Atheist: A Quest To Unite Science And Wisdom Into A Radical New Life Philosophy to Thrive In The Digital Age (2018)
- Todd Macalaster, Looking to Nature: Exploring a Modern Way of Being Spiritual Without the Supernatural (2020) -- and just this year appeared:
- Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools, No Belief Required (2024)
The New New Atheists argue that atheists, instead of deriding religion should steal from it because, as de Botton says: “the world’s religions are packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies.”
“Faith,” as Karen Armstrong points out, in the New Testament, is the Greek word psistis, which means trust, loyalty, engagement, commitment. When Jesus calls for greater faith, he’s not calling for people to cling harder to a set of propositional beliefs. He’s calling for engagement and commitment. “Spirituality,” as growing numbers of spiritual atheists are saying, isn’t about spirit-stuff as opposed to material stuff. It’s about claiming the depths of awe and wonder, serenity and compassion, abundance and acceptance, indissoluble union with the great All, and of belonging to the universal.
This idea of connecting with the religious impulse rather than denying it is just what the Humanist Manifesto called for 91 years ago. And speaking of good ideas that we can draw from the traditional faith traditions, one of those ideas, which is, in fact, a staple of Christian Theology going back centuries, is that there is no God. Yes, that’s right. John Scotus Eriugena, a 9th-century Christian theologian, made an argument somewhat similar to the one with which I started this sermon. Eriugena wrote:
“We do not know what God is. God himself doesn’t know what he is because he is not anything. Literally, God is not, because he transcends being.”Got that? This is a Christian theologian saying that God does not exist. Eriugena doesn't mean that God is nonexistent in the way that, say, my Ferrari is nonexistent. Rather God transcends the categories of existence and nonexistence, being and nonbeing.
To understand this, let’s look again at that fifth source of the living tradition we Unitarian Universalists share:
“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”It might seem a little strange that this reference to idolatry is in there. “Warning against idolatry” is probably not among the first things that come to mind when you think of humanism. Or when you do think of the repudiation of idolatry, your first thought probably wouldn't be humanism. Your first thought would more likely be the first of the Ten Commandment (or the first two Commandments, depending on which tradition is doing the counting):
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them:" (Exodus 20:3-5, KJV)What’s the big deal about graven images? you may wonder. Historically, it seems to have been a tribal thing: the neighboring tribes made statues that represented their deities, so the Hebrew people, to be distinctive, insisted on having no deity statuary. Nor, for that matter, any angel statuary, nor thing-in-the-earth statuary, nor thing-in-the-water-under-the-earth statuary. No figurines of elephants or parrots or fish: none of that. For the ancient Hebrew people, this was part of how one affirmed one’s loyalty to the tribe. They said: “We’re the people who don’t do that – so don’t do that.”
It may have started that way, but then a funny thing happened on the way to the Temple. The sanction against idolatry ended up pointing the Hebrew people toward something more important than statuary. Just as a statue is fixed and static and unchanging, a person might also have certain ideas, beliefs, concepts that become fixed and static. The commandment against idols evolved so that it was understood to be not just about statues, figurines, or graven images. It’s about any concept or thought-pattern that has become fixed and rigid. By abjuring graven images, the Hebrew people were subtly reoriented toward a conception of God as dynamic, unfolding, and always beyond whatever you can imagine, always other than anything you think.
The divine creative movement of the universe is dynamic, changing. Human understanding is ever unfolding. Idolatry means clinging to a fixed, static conception; closing ourselves to new learning. Thus we see that it actually is quite apt for this mention of idolatry to be included in our humanist source. The guidance of reason and the results of science continually overturn our idols, challenge what we think we know. Moreover, this is really the point that I think John Scotus Eriugena was on about.
Any time someone says God exists, she has some idea of what this God is that exists. This is problematic because any concept at all, if you’re stuck on it, is an idol. As soon as you have an idea of God – any idea – smash that idol and return to a stance of total openness to whatever the world might present to you without forcing it into one or another of your preconceived conceptual categories. This is humanist teaching warning us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.
Don’t even make an idol of your own past statements or beliefs. If you find yourself saying things that contradict other things you’ve said, that’s OK. Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” And Whitman said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
In a sermon I gave last March called, “The Ontological, The Semantic, and the Tribal,” I suggested that, the core uses of the word ‘God,’ were to point to any or all of the following:
- community-forming power;
- love;
- the greatest source of beauty, mystery, or creativity;
- the widest or deepest inspiration to gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe;
- origin;
- any ultimate context and basis for meaning, value, ethics, or commitment;
- the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed;
- the cosmos.
There is no God – that is, there is no possible concept that can encapsulate all of the wonder and the paradox that is this dear life – the wonder and the paradox that is directly staring us in the face every moment, saying, “hey you, knock over the idols of what you think you know and wake up.” Whatever you think you know, this moment has something new and fresh to teach you. Are you listening? Are you looking? Always. For there is no God, and she is always with you -- whispering: “Pay attention.”
Amen.
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