Virtue development, Nonjudgmental attitude, the log in one's own eye.

Chapter three -nonjudgmental attitude

Part one - the log is one’s own eye

The virtue of nonjudgmentalism can go by various names such as tolerance, kindness, compassion, etc. but the other names don’t get to the kernel of authenticity as well as a nonjudgmental attitude does. Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, called this virtue “unconditional positive regard” which may be the best name for this virtue of all if it is accurately understood.

Jesus tells us we should not be concerned about the splinter in our brothers and sisters’ eyes when we have a whole log in our own.

How does one develop the virtue of a nonjudgmental attitude?

First, we must recognize and acknowledge that being judgmental is dishones tbecause we assume a position of omniscience which we do not have. We only see the tip of the iceberg. We are only seeing a snippet of a person’s behavior and life. Who are we to extrapolate from this perception to a comprehensive judgement of what a person is about? Sister Helen Prejean, the author of “Dead Man Walking” said that every person is worth more than their worst act.

The judgmental attitude is most likely a projection of our own unconscious shadow which so frightens us and disgusts us that we tend to see these signs and symptoms everywhere. Once we become aware of our own projections, can we call them back and examine their origin within us? In this examination, we seek to be honest about the origin of our attacks and take responsibility for them and leave the other person alone.

Jesus’ statement that we should pay attention to the log in our own eye rather than the splinter in our brothers and sisters eyes is encouragement to develop a nonjudgmental attitude and forgive ourselves and others meaning that we should not make them responsible for our own unhappiness...

Religious literacy - Should UU congregations aspire to enhanced religious literacy among its members?

Chapter five

Should UU congregations aspire to enhanced religious literacy among its members?

Religion has always been a major factor in US politics and international affairs. Neither the American Revolution nor the Civil War is comprehensible in a religion vacuum. The same goes for social reform movements such as abolitionism, temperance, women’s rights, civil rights, and environmentalism—and, of course, for contemporary debates about abortion, stem cell research, capital punishment, animal rights, global warming, intelligent design, state lotteries, birth control, euthanasia, gay marriage, welfare policy, military policy, and foreign policy.

Prothero, Stephen. Religious Literacy (pp. 4-5). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Religious literacy is an important factor in understanding politics and cultures around the world. Without understanding the religious component of a culture and society we are bound to make significant mistakes in building and maintaining good collaborative relationships with our planetary brothers and sisters.

It is very difficult even within our own country and culture to understand one another without an understanding of each others religious beliefs. Religious literacy is fundamental to cultural competence and valuing diversity.

The lack of religious literacy among Americans is significant and its absence in educational curricula is puzzling. History is usually taught as a timeline of military exploits and political dominations rather than organized around religious beliefs which bind cultures and societies together. What factors influence the development of history curricula are important to our viability is a society and our influence within our own country and the world.

Unitarian Universalism might be a more vibrant catalyst in societies if its members were more conversant with the world religions and were better able to support, encourage, and collaborate with people from other faith traditions. Such religious literacy, if cultivated among UUs, might contribute a vibrancy to the UU faith tradition which is lacking.

What would it take for members of UU congregations to become more religiously literate? Is enhanced religious literacy among UU congregational members anything that UU churches should aspire to and work toward?

Climate justice - Victimizers need to take responsibility for their victimization.

Chapter fifteen

Victimizers need to take responsibility for their victimization.

Until now, it seems to have been easier for us to empathize with the climate plight of other species than our own, perhaps because we have such a hard time acknowledging or understanding our own responsibility and complicity in the changes now unfolding, and such an easier time evaluating the morally simpler calculus of pure victimhood.

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. 35). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

It has been opined that people care more about their pets, their dogs and cats, than they do their fellow human beings. Dogs, in particular, love us humans unconditionally while other human beings are always problematic and demand more from us in many ways.

And so the “tree huggers” are subject to mocking and derision because of their hypocrisy. Their love of nature and desire to protect it seems childish in the midst of the human-caused devastation they are subject to. As they say in Alcoholic Anonymous, maybe we should be taking our own inventory and not the inventory of other species.

As Wallace-Wells points out it is much easier to sympathize with the victim than the victimizer. Focusing on the victim allows the victimizer to escape scrutiny and evaluation. Perhaps it is time for us to take responsibility for our own behavior and care for it rather than redirect our concern and distract ourselves with sympathy for other species which are being destroyed by our own behavior and policies.

Taking responsibility for ourselves is a huge challenge and facing up to what we have done and are doing takes courage and humility which seem to be in short supply for most of humanity as represented by their politicians.

Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. It is interesting how interspecies justice, equity, and compassion are left out of this principle. Is this unintentional or intentional? In Alcoholic Anonymous they say, “first things first.” The first thing we have to address if we are to deal effectively with the climate change on the planet is our own behavior and policies. Will we face up to what we have done, take responsibility, and fix it? The jury is still out deliberating this question and eco-systems conducive to human life and the life of other species depends on the decision.

Daily Reflections, Day Seventy Five, The restoration of my birthright.

Day Seventy five

The restoration of my birthright.

“Darkness is the lack of light as sin is the lack of love. It has no unique properties of its own. It is an example of the ‘scarcity’ belief, from which only error can proceed. Truth is always abundant. Those who perceive and acknowledge that they have everything have no needs of any kind. The purpose of the Atonement is to restore everything to you; or rather, to restore it to your awareness. You were given everything when you were created, just as everyone was.” ACIM.T-1.IV.3”1-7

Sometimes we feel and think that we are in the dark, or that other people or circumstances are keeping us in the dark. We intuit that there are things we should know that we don’t know, that the truth is not being told or made clear. We sense that there is a hidden agenda, that we are being manipulated, that there are covert schemes and strategies influencing our lives in ways that are nefarious. We worry whether we are being cheated on, betrayed, marginalized, silenced, exploited, taken for granted.

We may be led to believe that we are giving our consent to these schemes but the consent we give is not informed consent, but rather disingenuous. We have learned that the ego lies. The path of the ego is constructed of conniving, deceit, and exploitation.

We engage in games of cops and robbers, cat and mouse, where we attempt to ferret out the truth and play NIGYSOB, Now I’ve Got You, You Son Of A Bitch. Is this how we want to live our lives on the path of the ego playing games?

We come to the point where it dawns on us that there must be a better way. And what is that better way? We go in search and the search takes us to many places and on many journeys which if we are patient and persevere all wind up eventually in the same place. That place where the spiritual life takes us is to the Atonement, the rejection of the separation and the acknowledgment and acceptance of the Oneness from which we have all separated.

Today, I will give up living in the darkness of the ego and move toward the light. I will turn away from the sins of the ego which sow separation and divisiveness and move toward an alliance with the Oneness of God. I will willingly remember and restore an awareness of my birthright, which is Love.

Virtue Development, Part three, honesty: pretense or genuineness?

Part three - Pretense or genuineness?

:Putting one’s faith in the Spirit and not in the ego, and being consistent in one’s choice, there is no doubt about Truth and what it entails.

The Truth resides in the mysterious and glorious Oneness of all creation and the turning away from separation, locality, and individualistic egoism.

Honesty and truth no longer depends on appearances and form but rather on genuineness, authenticity, and substantive content.

When one is aware of the Ground of Being, one cannot help but to be honest, be the real deal, have their shit together.

Some people have their shit together, but, it seems, that most people don’t. They don’t know themselves very well, and have no idea what makes them tick. They are afraid to find out, scared of their imagined defectiveness and inadequacy. This fear, this sense of shame, clouds their awareness of their natural inheritance of love.

And so honesty, after faith, is a key virtue. It takes a lifetime of practice to forgive our mistaken illusions, our pretense, our deceit and lies, and rest in the authentic and genuine.

Religious literacy - Lack of facts distorts opinions.

Chapter four

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts

So when I finished graduate school and became a professor myself, I told students that I didn’t care about facts. I cared about having challenging conversations, and I offered my quiz-free classrooms as places to do just that. I soon found, however, that the challenging conversations I coveted were not possible without some common knowledge—common knowledge my students plainly lacked. And so, quite against my prior inclinations, I began testing them on simple terms. In my world religions classes I told my students that before we could discuss in any detail the great religious traditions of the world, we would need to have some shared vocabulary in each, some basic religious literacy.

Prothero, Stephen. Religious Literacy (p. 4). HarperOne. Kindle Edition. 

Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote the acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations but seem woefully ignorant about religious matters. How one is to carry out the third principle is a mystery without some basic knowledge of world religions.

Most of the Unitarian Univeralists I have met are from other faith traditions or none. Only a minority of current UUs were raised in the faith. The likelihood that a UU would be in a congregation of people who were raised in other faith traditions or none is very high. As Stephen Prothero mentions above about meaningful conversations with his students about religion is difficult, if not impossible, without a common vocabulary and some common knowledge. So to what extent are UUs hamstrung in carrying out their third principle without some degree of religious literacy? To what extent do UU congregations provide services and activities to enhance religious literacy in their congregations? To what extent are congregational members even interested? To what extent is enhancement of religious literacy ever stated as a congregational goal?

UUs seem to enjoy expounding and bloviating about religious and spiritual matters, especially the ministers, but without some basic religious literacy such speech is as, St. Paul said in 1 Corinthians, 13:1, a “resounding gong and a clanging cymbal.” St. Paul’s whole statement was, “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” The point is that to speak in spite of  naive or willful ignorance is not loving.

Climate justice - In what are we to invest our faith?

Chapter Fourteen

Zero sum game or a collaborative endeavor?

Especially those who have imbibed several centuries of Western triumphalism tend to see the story of human civilization as an inevitable conquest of the earth, rather than the saga of an insecure culture, like mold, growing haphazardly and unsurely upon it. That fragility, which pervades now everything humans might do on this planet, is the great existential insight of global warming, but it is only beginning to shake our triumphalism—though, if we had stopped to contemplate the possibilities a generation ago, it probably would not surprise us to see a new form of political nihilism emerging in the region of the world already baked hardest by global warming, the Middle East, and expressed there through suicidal spasms of theological violence.

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (pp. 34-35). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. 

What happens to human beings when triumphalism and exceptionalism doesn’t work for them any more? What happens when arrogance and pride start to have negative consequences on human well being? What happens when the arrogance of the human psyche is challenged by Mother Nature?

A mythic struggle ensues, like wrestling with angels, and the outcome can be a fight to extinction or an awakening to the proper place in the interdependent web of existence of which homo sapiens is just a part and perhaps a minor part at that which could just as easily be extinguished as nurtured and supported.

The eco-anxiety taking over humanity in this growing awareness of the meaning of climate warming can make us more arrogant and invest our faith in technological and political idols or we can become more spiritually aware, humble, and take responsibility for our own functioning.

Will we look for external solutions without or will we look for spiritual solutions within, and can we do both with a humble wisdom which sees the struggle not as a war, a zero sum game between the contestants of humans and nature, but as a collaborative endeavor where we can live in harmony with nature of which we are just a part? In what are we to put our faith?