It s Complicated Beyond the Oversimplification of Religion By Rev. Dr. Todd F. Eklof April 3, 2016

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1 Beyond the Oversimplification of Religion By Rev. Dr. Todd F. Eklof April 3, 2016 Ten years ago, while I was still living there, the Muhammad Ali Center opened in Louisville, Kentucky, where the boxing legend was born in I visited the center shortly thereafter, expecting it be a museum with artifacts and exhibits honoring the Heavyweight Champion s life and accomplishments. So I was surprised with the Center s bizarre emphasis on what it calls Ali s Six Core Principles, confidence, conviction, dedication, giving, respect, and spirituality. It s own online description states, The Center museum captures the inspiration derived from the story of Muhammad Ali s incredible life and the six core principles that have fueled his journey. While I appreciate these principles, it felt to me like the Center was portraying Ali as some kind of spiritual guru or religious figure who has left us with a simple path for achieving our own greatness. Admittedly, I didn t know a lot about him, but I d never heard anything about these Six Core Principles before. I have not doubt the Center did its research in advance of opening and presume it got help boiling down his values from Ali himself, but I ve not been able to find any source for these six principles beyond the Center itself. Today, if you go online, there s a lot about his six core values, all written within the past couple of years, all citing the Center as their source. There is, without argument, much to admire about Muhammad Ali, but, like all of us, he is a complex and fascinating figure whose life doesn t need to be justified by and can t be boiled down to a simple list of six bullet points. I bring this up now as an example of the desire many of us have to KISS keep it simple stupid especially when it comes to religion. Just this week, it so happens, an old Stud Terkel interview with Carl Sagan was discovered, during which the famed astronomer said the idea the world is only 6000 years old is based on the science of the Babylonians in the 6 th century BC and we ve learned some things since then. 1 We have, indeed, learned a lot since the Babylonians. We ve learned the Earth isn t the center of the Universe, that the Universe is infinitely vast and nearly 14 billion years old, and that planet Earth is itself 4.5 billion years old. Yet today, thousands of years beyond ancient Babylon, according to consistent Gallup polling, more than 40 percent of Americans still claim they believe the world is only 6000 years old. I suspect this tendency to oversimplify is especially prevalent in religion because it is comforting to think the world can be easily controlled so long as we do the right stuff. We can keep the violent, powerful, unpredictable forces of nature at bay so 1 Studs Terkel s 1985 interview with Sagan,

2 long as we make the gods happy by obeying their rules and performing the proper sacrifices and rituals. So, rather than turning to reason and science, which complicates things by sticking a vast, infinite, complex world in our faces based on empirical evidence and sound arguments, many of us still prefer turning to ancient beliefs that boil everything down to just a few simple truths. Judaism and Christianity have Ten Commandments. Islam has Five Pillars. Buddhism has Four Noble Truths and an Eightfold Path. Even our own complicated faith, Unitarian Universalism, is often boiled down to just Seven Principles. For many, knowing these lists is all they believe is necessary to understand what a particular religion is all about. In fact, listing these basic commands, pillars, truths, principles, and so on, is precisely what the cheat sheets do in the book, Religion for Dummies. It must be a pretty popular cheat sheet because it seems like there are a lot of religious dummies around. I don t mean to poke too much fun, but to point out that too many are satisfied with only the most superficial understanding of religion, the religions of others as well as their own. I ve often heard conservative Christians, for example, quote some verse from the Quran, like, Unbelievers are enemies of Allah and they will roast in hell, 2 or, Make war on them until idolatry is no more and Allah's religion reigns supreme, 3 then feel they have proven Islam is a violent religion seeking to overtake the world. The assumption being that all Muslims have memorized everything in the entire Quran, live by all that is written in it, take individual verses out of context, and that the book has replaced their brains and overrides every other influence in their lives, including human kindness, reason, compassion, culture, respect, peace, and so forth. Certainly there are a lot of extremists out there, be they Muslims or Christians, or something else, who fear and loathe those with different beliefs, some of whom even feel justified harming and killing them. But it is too easy to consider the actions of some extremists, no matter how horrific their actions, from ISIS to the destruction of the World Trade Center, then determine that s what Islam is all about and that all Muslims, therefore, must be terrorists. It s like blaming all Christians for the Crusades, or conversely, reading Jesus sermon on the mount and concluding that all Christians are peacemakers who love their enemies; or determining that all Buddhists must be content and never suffer because that s what Buddhism is all about. We want to narrow it all down. We want the Cliff notes and cheat sheets for dummies, because boiling everything down makes life seem so much more manageable and understandable. It goes back to the feeling of knowing you hear me frequently talk about. Knowing is an emotional, not a rational state. Knowing makes us feel good by rewarding us with dopamine. Knowing makes us feel safe in an uncertain and potentially dangerous world. The problem is the world is too big and too complicated to truly know enough to be safe and sure in all we think and do. 2 Sura 41:40 3 Sura 8:39 2

3 So we too often take the easy way out by thinking we can boil it all down to a few simple truths Ten Commandments, Five Pillars, Four Noble Truths, Seven Principles, Four Agreements, Twelve Steps, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and our lists go on and on. Such oversimplification often makes religious practice seem like no more than a matter of marking off a checklist of does and don ts. Avoid the seven deadly sins and practice the Seven Heavenly Virtues, that s all there is to it. Many years ago, for example, when I left my boyhood home in San Francisco, California to attend a Christian university in Brownwood, Texas, I imagined it was going to be like Heaven on Earth, nothing but kind and loving people living together in a Southern Baptist utopia. (Boy was I naïve!) I didn t realize that Christianity in the heart of the Bible Belt was but a routine and shallow part of the larger culture there. It had little to do with the higher, ill-defined, and difficult requirements to love and care for others, and almost everything to do with avoiding a few cultural taboos. In Texas, it seemed, being a good Christian simply meant going to church on Sundays, reading the Bible and saying prayers once in a while, and avoiding alcohol, swearing, and dancing. That s all it took. You could be mean, rotten, and selfish, so long as you went church and didn t drink, swear, or dance. Oh, and so long as you were married, you could have missionary style sex, but never standing up because it looked too much like dancing. The reason I bring up religion in the Bible Belt, where it has become a routine and rote part of Southern culture, is to point out this need to narrow things down to a few fundamentals not only let s us off the hook for better understanding other faiths, it also prevents us from fully grasping the deeper value, meaning, implications, and demands of our own. This is what William James meant more than a century ago when he complained about the second hand religious life, 4 in his classic work, Varieties of Religions Experience, by which he was referring to religion based on tradition, imitation, and habit, 5 rather than upon one s own personal and authentic experience. Jesus may have had an authentic religious experience, outside the orthodoxy of his day, but in turning his experience into a religion itself, by distilling it down to a few simple doctrines and rituals, it gets robbed of its authentic and original meaning. In trying to comprehend how Christianity so easily tolerated, even facilitated, the Holocaust, for example, German sociologist, Theodor Adorno said that religion often becomes neutralized, which he described as, an emasculation of the more profound claims of religion while preserving the doctrinal shell in a rather rigid and haphazard way. 6 4 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, forward by Jacques Barzun, A Mentor Book, New American Library, New York, NY, 1958, p James, ibid., p Batson, C. Daniel, and Ventis, Larry, The Religious Experience, Oxford University Press, 1982, p

4 Many of us recognize, having experienced it ourselves, the rigidity of hollowed out religion, but it is the haphazardness Adorno mentions, the sloppiness and laziness of gutting religion by narrowing it down to a few simple bullet points, turning it into a simple to do list, that we often fail to notice. For it is easy for us to recognize the rigidity and extremism of other faiths, but not so easy to always recognize the oversimplification of our own. This is why I never describe or introduce Unitarian Universalism to others by listing our seven principles, and why I always speak of them in context of a much larger, richer, and deeper religious tradition. Please don t get me wrong; please don t oversimplify what I m saying here. I greatly appreciate our seven principles and often narrow them down even further, from the familiar sentences written in our Association s bylaws, to just seven words respect, equality, openness, freedom, democracy, justice, and solidarity. But I also say these principles are not ours alone. They do not originate from or belong exclusively to Unitarian Universalists. These are the values and aspirations that have been widely expressed in many of the world s greatest religious traditions and moral philosophies. We articulate them in our own way, but they have been mined from the wisdom of many sources, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Paganism, Hinduism, Humanism, Activism, Philosophy, Science, and many other disciplines. Placing them in such a broad context helps us better understand these principles aren t simple and must be appreciated and understood and studied from many perspectives. I also like to say these aren t the only principles to be mined from all those sources we claim to gain inspiration from. Wisdom is too great and the mind too imaginative to narrow all truth down to just seven bullet points approved at a General Assembly 35 years ago. In fact, Unitarianism and Universalism have been around, in some form, since, at least, the 2 nd and 3 rd centuries of this era. As some of you have heard me say before, Christianity s first systematic theologian, Origen of Alexandria, born in the 2 nd century, was a Universalist because he didn t believe in eternal Hell, and Arius, of the 3 rd century, held a Unitarian theology, which created such a controversy that the Council of Nicaea had to convene in 325 CE to declare the Father and Son are of one substance, leading to the doctrine of the Trinity, and eventually making Unitarianism illegal. So boiling our faith down to seven principles adopted in the 1980s, when our religion has a history that is more than 1800 years old, epitomizes what I mean by the oversimplification of religion. Again, I greatly appreciate our seven principles, and don t mind promoting them in their larger context, yet I never define our great faith by presenting them as a list of what we believe. I also appreciate our collective desire to come up with that elusive elevator speech that does adequately help people understand what Unitarian Universalism is all about. Yet, I realize our religion is complicated and inherently difficult to understand, especially in a culture that usually defines religion as a particular theological belief. As Unitarian Universalists, we don t have a particular or defining belief about God, which has caused some to argue we re not a religion at all. 4

5 We are a religion, I argue in turn, although ours is a nontheistic religion, like Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Deism, many indigenous and folk religions, and other traditions that aren t defined by theology, that is, by a particular belief about God. But explaining this takes time and is complicated. Others have claimed ours is not a religion because we don t ascribe to any specific beliefs at all. Again, I argue ours is a religion because it is a form of mysticism that seeks not to maintain beliefs, but to let them go. We strive to free ourselves from false beliefs by embracing the unknown, the mystery, the perennial and, therefore, unanswerable questions of life. Ours is an apophatic religion, meaning we chip away at our paradigms like woodcarvers and stonecutters to get at the unseen truth hiding beneath superficial appearances. I further explain that ours is a pragmatic, not a dogmatic faith, meaning we gather together not because of what we believe together, but because of what we can accomplish together. We are not defined by our ideas, but by our actions. But, again, explaining all of this takes time and is complicated. Others say we re not really a religion because we believe all religions and, therefore, have no religion of our own; or that we believe everything, therefore we don t believe anything. Again, I have to explain that we are open to finding the wisdom in many sources, but that s not the same thing as saying we believe all of them. Some of us draw more inspiration from one source than others, but we generally remain open to hearing the thoughts of others. We also support the right of every person to find their own path, and stand in solidarity with people of other faiths and their right to freely practice their religions in peace. We don t think we ve cornered the truth and everyone else is wrong, And even if we do think they are wrong, that doesn t make them bad, so we continue to support their right to pursue truth and meaning in their own way. At the same time, we don t think any belief should be used as an excuse to treat others unequally or unjustly. Ideas just aren t that important to us. They aren t central to our faith, and we certainly don t think our ideas are worth fighting about. But saying all this is complicated and takes a little time to explain and effort to understand. Still others say we re not a religion because we re an NRM, a new religious movement, the current academic, politically correct term for a cult. While it s true, I explain, that the Unitarian Universalist Association was formed as recently as 1961, when the American Unitarian Association and The Universalist Church of American decided to join forces, Unitarianism and Universalism has practically been around since Christ, and that we have a long, rich, and impressive history. As mentioned, the first Christian theologians were Universalists and Unitarians. Ours was the first religion ever to pass a law protecting religion freedom, the Edict of Torda, decreed by the Hungarian King, John Sigismund way back in 1568! And that in the US alone, our ranks have included the likes of Presidents, including, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and William Howard Taft, philosophers Like Emerson, Thoreau, and Bertrand Russell, and great social reformers, like Susan B. 5

6 Anthony, Clara Barton, Margaret Fuller, Albert Schweitzer, to name but a few. But, once more, all this takes time and is complicated and isn t information we can easily keep in our heads and recite at a moment s notice. Our religion, like all religions, is complicated. There is no elevator speech or list of simple bullet points that can adequately explain it. And, as intelligent, thinking people, we shouldn t want or need it to be otherwise. Religion is about finding meaning in our lives and pursing, but not necessarily finding, answers to life s most complicated questions. So, rather than using it to provide a false sense of security by reducing all truth to a few simply commands, or pillars, or truths, or principles, it should be a source strength and courage even in the wake of uncertainty. As behavioral psychologist, Gordon Allport once suggested. Religion ought to encourage, the individual to face complex problems like ethical responsibility and evil without reducing their complexity. 7 Religion, like so much else in life, is immensely complicated. When we can accept this, we become far less likely to think we can know and judge others based simply upon their religion, more capable of living without the false security of believing we have all the answers, and more open to our Universe of infinite possibilities. So save your checklists for the grocery store, your to-do lists for the day ahead, and your bullet points for business documents, but use your religion to open your heart to others, your mind to mystery, and your hands to the complicated task of transforming our world. 7 Batson, C. Daniel, and Ventis, Larry, The Religious Experience, Oxford University Press, 1982, p