Dear Dave - Cult of personality and authoritarianism or democracy?

Dear Dave:

I think the key to solving our problems is working together. I'm starting to think having two parties is the problem as we've polarized in opposing teams. It would be interesting if candidates ran without party affiliation. They should campaign to the entire population.

Sincerely,

Bert

Dear Bert:

In an ideal world I agree with you. But Anne Applebaum warns in her book The Twilight of Democracy that one party systems are the fundamental basis for totalitarianism. As Francis David, the Unitarian Founder said in the 16th century, "We need not think alike to love alike."

People can share common goals but have different strategies to achieve them.. The problem we are seeing in our contemporary age are not policy differences, different ways of achieving the shared goal, but different goals. There are fundamental differences in what kind of a country we want to build and live in together? Will it be a country based on the rule of law, or a country based on loyalty and the cult of personality? I think the two major political parties have chosen their paths and they are quite clear in that the Republicans have chosen the authoritarian route of loyalty and personality and the Democrats have chosen, at least superficially, on the rule of law.

The election in 2020 is not between two Presidential candidates but between  a personality cult and democracy.

Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote the right of conscience and the use of the democrate process within our congregations and in society at large. Four hundred years ago Unitarians rejected the cult of personality and monarchy and embraced the budding flower of democracy. In 2020 we will have a clearer choice than in previous Presidential elections whether to be true to our fundamental principles or not.

Sincerely, 

Dave

A Course In Miracles Lesson #42 - God is my strength. Vision is His gift.

Lesson #42

God is my strength. Vision is His gift.

My head is so full of nonsense that I finally get to the point where I have to admit that my life is unmanageable. I’ve tried and tried to change myself and made promise after promise to myself and others that I will change. I tell myself and others “I can change if only I try hard enough.” Like all the New Year’s resolutions I’ve ever made, I fail in the end. It’s a joke really to think that I can control my crazy thoughts and intentions so I finally come to realize that the best thing I can do is give up.

In giving up it dawns on me that there must be a better way and it sure as hell isn’t mine. So, I start searching and it takes me into the realm of a Higher Power, an awareness of the transcendent, and I begin to realize that it is the strength of the Transcendent which can illuminate my life and provide a new vision in a whole different realm which has been always there but which I had forgotten.

I learn to turn my will over to this Transcendent power and I experience more peace and bliss that I ever thought possible. As my Buddhist friend tells me, “It is what it is.” I have learned to answer, “Amen.”

I come to realize that the interdependent web of all existence has a mind of its own of which I am just a tiny part, a bit player, and so I relax and go along for the ride. Another friend, a student of A Course In Miracles, tells me, “Remember that God is our strength and vision is His gift.

And I say, based on my Unitarian Universalist faith, “May it be so.”

Good news for 09/15/20 - Robert DuBoise exonerated after 37 years in prison

From the Innocence Project, 09/14/20

Last month, Robert DuBoise was released after spending nearly 37 years in prison for a crime he did not commit — and today, Robert was exonerated from all charges.

Robert DuBoise following his exoneration after 37 years on Monday, Sept. 14, 2020, in Tampa, Florida. (Image: Casey Brooke Lawson/The Innocence Project)

He was arrested in October 1983 for the rape and murder of a 19-year-old woman in Tampa, Florida. He was convicted based solely on the pseudo-science of bite mark evidence and an unreliable jailhouse informant’s testimony, and he spent three years on death row.

Last month, Robert was released after new DNA testing of crime scene evidence that was thought to have been destroyed excluded him as the assailant and identified another individual. 

Editor's note:

The state of Florida still has an uses the death penalty which was applied to Mr. DuBoise who spent 3 years on death row. The people of the State of Florida could have executed an innocent man.

UU A Way Of Life ministries supports the Innocence project financially and encourages its readers to do likewise.

Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. Supporting the Innocence Project is a very tangible, concrete way of applying this principle in our personal, social, and political lives.

A Course In Miracles Workbook lesson #41 - God goes with me wherever I go.

Lesson #41

God goes with me wherever I go.

St. Paul writes in one of his letters to the Corinthians, “If God is with you who can be against you?” Deep down God is always with us because it is from God that we have emerged into this world in our bodies.

Are you a soul in a body or a body with a soul? You are a soul, an extension of the Divine Essence which temporarily is incarnated in a body. Do not mistake your true identity.

The third step of Alcoholic Anonymous states “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him.” God, of course, is always with us because God is the ground of our existence. We only think we have separated ourselves from Him in our arrogance and ignorance.

In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person which comes from God. We further affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning which takes us within to our essence past all appearances and illusions.

Today, we are asked to sit quietly for five minutes and go beneath the cloud cover that we call our lives and just become aware of Love which is our natural inheritance. There is a place there of peace and bliss and we realize that God goes with me wherever I go.

Good news for 09/14/20 - Instead of a farmer's market, it is a recycler's market

Sunday Sermon 09/13/20 - What's a miracle?

 What’s a miracle?

Some people believe in miracles, some don’t. Some people think of miracles as magic and some people see them as metaphors which facilitate a shift in apprehension.  The first chapter of A Course In Miracles gives 50 principles of miracles if you would like to learn more about them.

The third principle of miracles is very important. In A Course In Miracles it is stated “Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. The real miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense, everything that comes from love is a miracle.”

As the Beatles taught us, Love is all there is.

The miracle is the shift in perception from the world of the ego to the world of the soul. The world of the ego plays games like, “give to get,” and “one or the other.” It is what the economists call a “zero sum” game meaning that there has to be a winner and loser. There cannot be two winners. Whatever slice is taken from the pie leaves less for others. Life becomes a competition for resources.

The world of the soul is the opposite, everyone's a winner and there is plenty, enough for everybody. Unitarian Universalists have seven principles and the first one is that we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This is the basis of the Universalist faith that God loves everybody unconditionally. There is no hell other than  the hell we create in the world of the ego. The soul, being an extension of Divine Love, knows only peace and bliss.

Thomas Harris, the psychiatrist who was a disciple of Eric Berne, another psychiatrist who is the father of Transactional Analysis, said there are four life positions. I’m ok and you're ok. I’m ok and you’re not ok. You’re not ok, but I’m ok, and you’re not ok and I’m not ok. Elizabeth Kubler Ross, another psychiatrist who pioneered the models for the grieving process, supposedly said, “I’m not ok and you’re not ok, but that’s ok.”

Jesus tells His disciples when they ask Him how to get to the kingdom, “to love as I have loved.”

Jesus is known as a miracle worker not only for the magical activities He is described as having participated in but for His love. The magical activities are not important. They are just entertaining to grab the listener or the reader’s attention. The moral of the miracle stories, if properly understood, is love is to be shared and enacted in our care for one another.

The miracles reside in the blessing, the grace, that is extended from the miracle worker to another. UUs covenant together to affirm and promote not only the inherent worth and dignity of every person but also justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.

Whenever we affirm and promote these two principles we do miracles.

Blessed be and may it be so.

A Course In Miracles Workbook Lesson #40 - I am blessed as a son of God

 

Lesson #40

I am blessed as a son of God.

Some people are fixers. They are always looking for problems so they can fix them. People want to fix things for various motivations. It helps one feel useful, needed, and important. It helps one feel worthwhile and eligible for love and regard in return. It structures their anxiety and helps them minimize their fears and quells their rising experience of panic.

Fact is there is no need to fix anything. Trying to fix things is what in Boy Scouts we used to call a “snipe hunt” where we sent neophyte scouts in search of “red lantern oil,” and “left handed wrenches.”

Deep down we are the blessed sons and daughters of the non dualistic Oneness from which we separated ourselves thinking that we could do better than our Source in creating a self which could be made happy. And how has that worked out for us?

In Alcoholics Anonymous we learn that we are powerless and come to believe in a power greater than ourselves to which we can turn over our will and lives. We learn that we alone can’t fix anything. We come to learn that rather than dominate, overcome, control, we need to do just the opposite and surrender.

In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. In other words, we recognize that we and everyone else is the blessed extension of the divine which some of us call God and others call a Higher Power as we understand it.