I.

In addition to the Unitarian Universalist Seven Principles, the congregation that I serve as minister ascribes to a set of aspirational statements that  are specifically humanist. Our first Aspiration is, “To live joyfully and ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature.”

Why do we say such a thing?

Because we are countering a long tradition of life-denying dogma common in the Western world. Doctrines such as that of Original Sin are not an affirmation of life in this world, and, in our view, that’s the only life there is.

You don’t have to go farther than our bulletin board to see an implication of what we mean. Just now we have a poster advocating “sex-positive reproductive justice.” We are countering a culture in which sex-negative attitudes impact the fundamental rights of women.

In my blog post last week I discussed Dostoyevsky’s assertion of free will:

“One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy . . .”

Well, it’s certainly “joyful” to do “one’s own fancy,” but such actions may not meet the ethical or “reverent relationship” criterion. Dostoyevsky’s definition of free will, the freedom to really mess things up, is a negative assertion of freedom. There’s always a the poles: Sex-negative. Sex-positive. Freedom-negative; freedom-positive. Navigating those can be problematic. And traditional Western religions are the problem, not a solution.

How to be sex-positive and life-affirming. That’s why UU congregations take OWL, Our Whole Lives education courses, so seriously. We have this “one wild and precious life,” as poet Mary Oliver puts it, and we have to figure out how to live it here, now—as ethically, lovingly, and reverently as possible.

In Dostoyevsky’s time philosophers were grappling with the implications of the discovery of Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician, who realized that the numbers of births, deaths, house fires, crimes—even the types of crimes—proved to be fairly consistent from year to year. Predictable, in other words.

This led to both the insurance industry and the field of sociology, among other things. My inability to diet and the number of people who die of heart attack and stroke each year in the United States has some connection, now, doesn’t it?

The insurance industry certainly sees a connection.

Unlike in Dostoyevsky’s time, we don’t think much about it nowadays when we hear how many Americans will die of Type II Diabetes or high blood pressure this year. Nowadays we are saturated with statistics. So much so that, with the addition of computers, we live in the next iteration of statistical analysis: “big data” or “predictive analytics.”

Netflix can tell us what movies we will enjoy with a high degree of accuracy. Amazon can send us discounts for things that the crunched data indicate we will consume next. I love a sentence I read about predictive analytics: “Analytical Customer Relationship Management can be applied throughout the customer’s lifecycle.”

Think about that: “Analytical Customer Relationship Management can be applied throughout the customer’s lifecycle.”

So when you start getting coupons for caskets . . . watch out.

It makes me want to go Dostoyevsky’s route and buy something REALLY crazy.

II.

One of the oddest things I have to deal with in multi-faith work is answering the accusation that humanists don’t have a “theology of sin.” As in, “you don’t have a theology of sin, therefore . . .  you’re just not all that serious about religion.”

To which I’m tempted to say that humanism doesn’t have a theory of onomatopoeia either.

It’s not that humanists don’t understand what people are talking about when they discuss onomatopoeia, it’s just that it lies outside the purview of a humanist ethic.

It’s simply that I don’t put any credence in the idea that people are born into a “fallen state.” As far as I can see, a “theology of sin” has a lot of baggage that just has nothing to do with reality. It’s a complicated answer to a simple question: Why do people act like animals?” When St. Augustine came up with his theory of Original Sin, people didn’t know that human beings were animals. Call it self-denial. But now we do.

How could an animal that has evolved a consciousness such as we have be “fallen”?

I think that anthropologist Robert Ardrey put it best:

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. (African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man, 1961.

Claiming that “original sin” is not a true description of reality is in no way saying that human beings are “born good,” any more than saying “I have no vacuum cleaner” means that I can’t clean my floor.

Original sin is a theological concept that serves theological ends. And it is a complex answer to a simple question that does not survive Occam’s Razor.

There’s nothing original about sin. But there is something very original about acting up to human aspirations toward ethics and compassion. We are risen apes, not fallen angels, and we are “armed killers” besides. That is a considerably clearer place to start considering how to be ethical, loving, and reverent, it seems to me.

Allow me to take a crack at a humanist theology of sin, necessarily taking into account evolution. How about this: “Sin” is a lack of cooperation with others.

Looked at from this angle, Dostoyevsky wasn’t defining free will, he was defining actions that do not take others into account: “One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice . . . one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy . . .”

Excessive drinking; smoking; eating too much—these aren’t “sins.” They’re merely really bad behaviors, given what we know about their outcomes. Those seven deadly sins—wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, gluttony—they’re bad for the self and they are bad for others.

“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides.” Too often our incredible reason and creativity has been allowed  to invent sharpened sticks . . . and a few other things to kill each other with. This is “sin”: it is a lack of cooperation and compassion for others.

Our challenge is to look reality in the face and do what we can with what we’ve got.

That tale of the Garden of Eden is a good story, but it has led to some bad behavior. Sin isn’t very original.

Allow me to take another shot at a humanist theory of of sin:

Some things, such as what have been called sins, are the default settings on the human body. The out-of-the-box model, so to speak. But every car enthusiast knows that if you want more performance, you’ve got to get yourself an after-market muffler. Human ethics are like that.

Our aspirations toward living “ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature” are mostly after-market add-ons.

OK. So I know that my metaphor doesn’t have the sizzle of two naked people and a talking snake. (That’s good writing!) Still, my metaphor is truer to the human condition.

We are risen apes, not fallen angels. We are prone to un-original appetites, irresponsibility, and killing.  Still, we can aspire “to live joyfully and ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature.”

Not bad for a bunch of primates.

Fred Phelps, of Westboro Church “God Hates Fags” fame, is reportedly near death. Which may or may not actually be true, but has led to some number of people publicly discussing how one is to respond to the death of a man so odious. This is a man, after all, who has picketed the funerals of soldiers as well as spewing endless hate for gay people, and indulged in massive, spit-flinging rants about the evils of everyone who doesn’t fall within his extremely narrow view of the righteous.

How then to respond to the news of the impending death of such a vile individual? Should his funeral (which, under the tenets of his church, he won’t actually have) be picketed? Should we flock into the streets singing, like the Munchkins, “Ding dong, the witch is dead”? Should we pretend to mourn, or note with pity the passing of a pathetic, miserable old man who had nothing better to do with his time than make a hideous spectacle of himself?

The answer, I suppose, depends on what God you choose. You can rejoice in Phelps’s suffering and sing in the streets when he dies, but if you do then you have sided with Phelp’s God, the one who belongs on a sign that begins: “God Hates….” If you are rooting for Phelps to receive the misery that he so richly deserves then you have opted in with the world view that people deserve to be punished for being despicable, which is exactly what Phelps himself had to say. If that’s what you believe, that God hates and punishes, well then, by all means rejoice, but know that you have chosen to play on Phelps’s team.

Or you could go with the team which says that love is without limits, that every one of us is a part of the sacred, that every one of us has worth and dignity, that each of us is tied to the other in an infinite web of love and connection. You might or might not call that web of connection God. Doesn’t matter. The question is simply whether you are playing on the Love Team. Because if you are then you don’t have to mourn Phelps like a brother, but you need to wish him gentle passage and hope that whatever awaits him is kinder than he himself has been.

You might even want to tell him thank you as he departs. After all, there are plenty of people who took no notice of the daily little assaults on the rights and dignity of GLBT folk, who didn’t much worry about the lack of legal protections for same-sex couples or the price of being the butt of jokes or sidelong glances on the street. But some of those people listened to Fred Phelps’s rants and thought: “No one deserves to be treated this way.” And then started to think about how people did deserve to be treated. Without Phelps and his gang, hundreds—maybe thousands—of people would have never felt moved to join a counter-protest, would never have experienced what it is like to meet violence with the power of love. Without Phelps to make obvious just how ugly religious prejudice can get, countless people might have felt comfortable leaving their own less virulent prejudices firmly in place.

So Godspeed, Fred Phelps, and God bless. I do not condone your hateful words or spiteful actions, but I will not mimic them. Thank you for reminding me that every life brings its own unique gifts, and that while our choices always bear consequences, they are not necessarily the consequences that we intended. Thank you for reminding me of which team I have chosen to play on, and that love, while infinite, is not always easy. May you, at long last, find peace, and may those of us who go on living never stop choosing peace.

When my sister was born, she made herself known. Screamed so loud, they moved her to a room far from all the other babies. But two years later, when I came along, it was different. I did not make a sound. In fact, I was so quiet, from what I understood, my mother was pretty sure I must be dead.

As a child, death was never too far from my mind. Long and hard would I gaze upon roadkill, awaiting a twitch. In fifth grade, a guest speaker came to frighten us about drugs. He included a statistic on teen mortality. Said you could expect at least one of us would not live past eighteen. I concluded it would be Brenda, a girl who had dandruff. In the days after, I watched, amazed, as she continued to eat lunch, and perform other ordinary tasks, as if the long black shadow didn’t hover so close. You might call it a preoccupation, these thoughts. Or a hobby, but not the kind you enjoy. Through the years, teachers would ask what I spent class daydreaming about, but how to tell them, “We are all soon to die.”

So, the story of how I was born made me wonder. What if no one had noticed that I was alive? What if I’d ended up tossed in the garbage, or whatever happened to babies in cases like that? On the other hand, what if my mother had been right all along? What if all who loved me were only pretending that I was alive, so as not to hurt my feelings, when the unavoidable truth was that I was actually dead? It might account for how my fingers and toes in the winter sometimes wouldn’t warm up.

The thought of being born dead stayed there, hung in my firmament, a very long time, with facts like “my people are stout” and “I have a large head.” Things neither good nor bad, only true. Until some time, as an adult, when I mentioned the story of my birth in my mother’s hearing. “Dead?” she said. “No! C’mon! I said I thought you were deaf.”

What if it the story you live by got handed down wrong? Or at least incomplete? Take Jesus, for instance. Go into any church around Christmas. Their Nativity Pageant has the wise men on stage, hanging out with the shepherds. It’s fine pageant, true. But what they are doing is not in the gospels. Luke has the shepherds. The wise men? In Matthew. Mark skips any birth story to pick up with the baptism of the full-grown Jesus. And John tells it the way a man on the bus mutters about the government and somebody named Sharon. Some will point out that no one took notes at the birth of a no-name in backwater Nazareth, that any version at all was only tacked on much later, to fill in the blanks. What we’re left with is less like a story than a bag of bright Legos, dumped out on the rug.

So, go ahead, mash them all together. Shave down the edges. Make one seamless whole. Many put on a pageant. Who can blame them? We need something to go by when the night is so dark. But the truth, it still whistles around and through us, not to be bottled up. Not in one single story, nor in any one body. Christ comes in fragments, in disjointed gospels. Like broken glass on the pavement that only hints at the whole. And what is true about us might be somewhat the same. “I am large,” said Walt Whitman. “I contain multitudes.” And even that wasn’t the whole of it.

So, look, I don’t deny that each breath draws us closer to our last. We are bound for the grave. From dust we have come, and to dust we’ll return. But that’s only one story, only one way to tell it. Others alongside it tell of far greater glory. Of how the eternal turned out to be here, all along. How the flesh, squeezable, lovable though it may be, could not be all we are. Amazing stories. Ones, if you heard them, you just would not believe.

I have a terrible confession: almost all of the calories I consume in a day, I consume after 8pm.

No, I don’t cook extravagant dinners late at night. Far from it. I eat junk.

I’m not proud of it. I know that eating late at night is the worst sort of thing for my health. I have talked with my physician about it. I’ve talked with therapists. I’ve talked with nutritionists.

I have even stopped doing it for, oh, two or three days at a time.

As a matter of fact, the thought that I shouldn’t do it goes through my head each evening. Right before I head for the fridge.

And the knowledge that I shouldn’t do it . . . adds to the rush I get when I do do it.

This is a terrible confession. But you who have not sinned may hurl the first stone. Perhaps binge eating doesn’t appeal to you. OK. But something does . . .

Something you know you shouldn’t do. Bacon. Scotch. Pistachio ice cream. Gambling. Driving too fast. Drunk-dialing your ex. Sex. Drugs. Doritos.

Something.

Yes, you know you’re going to face-palm when you wake up the next morning. But you just can’t stop yourself.

Many Christians blame it on “original sin,” but a quick survey of the wreckage around us shows that sin isn’t all that original. You who have not sinned may hurl the first stone.

OK, so I know that’s not what St. Augustine meant by the “original” in “original sin.” But there is certainly a connection between those seven deadly sins—wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony—and the sort of thing I’m talking about. They are all things we do because they come naturally. Each is an easy answer in the immediate moment, though each is fairly clearly not good for us in the long run, if by “good” we mean . . . well, what? Our animal selves?

Why do we fall so easily into those patterns of behavior described as the “deadly sins”? St. Augustine thought that it’s because we’re born that way—we are born into a fallen world. I don’t think St. Augustine’s answer quite survives Occam’s Razor—it is not the simplest explanation by a long shot.

But the fact remains: why do we do what we know we shouldn’t do and that we know we will regret?

Despite the fact that he’s been dead for a hundred and thirty-three years, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky still has the best explanation, I think. His insights continue to challenge our most sacred of cows.

In his time, most Europeans believed that humanity had finally rounded a corner, and that the human future would be determined by rationality and reason—the greatest good for the greatest number.

Dostoyevsky was there to say this was not the case . . . and never will be the case.

Of all the reflections on why we human beings do what we do, from philosophers to neuroscientists, Fyodor Dostoyevsky still gets my vote for the deepest insight concerning why human beings make the choices we do:

“One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.”

Dostoyevsky knew that the “most advantageous advantage”—for me that’s losing twenty pounds—the “most advantageous advantage” is NOT what might be reasonable and “right.” Rather, the “most advantageous advantage” is our exercising what we see as free will—making a “capricious” and “unfettered choice.”

Dostoyevsky asked,

“And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice?

What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.”

Why? That’s the question we ask in those face-palm moments: Why? Why do we do that?

Philosopher Crispin Sartwell puts it this way: “When you consult your experience, the fact that you are a body is more obvious than that two plus two equals four.”

There: I think that’s it. And that’s what Dostoyevsky knew is the case: The physical trumps the reasonable. Virtue. Reason. Those don’t feel like independent choice, do they? They feel, well . . . wholesome. And wholesome, like two plus two equals four, doesn’t feel real, doesn’t feel embodied.

Isn’t the concept of original sin merely a complex way of saying that human beings are born with bodies?

And isn’t this the wellspring of so much of Western thought? Our dualism, our denial of the body?

The doctrine of original sin is all about how merely being born with a body, merely entering this world, makes us sinful. Fallen. Dirty. In need of redemption.

Well. Maybe you don’t buy that. But, when we turn the terms into “head” and “heart,” which do you think is more important? Which should predominate? Isn’t one about me staying in my chair and the other about my trip to the fridge?

Perhaps most people nowadays don’t think that the mere fact of embodiment— em-bodi-ment—the Latin prefix “em,” meaning “put into”—we perhaps don’t think that the mere fact of having a body has us on the highway to hell. But it certainly puts us in the way of some bad choices, doesn’t it?

Consider some other “em” prefixes: em-brace, em-bryo, em-barrassment. Fleshy stuff, isn’t this “em,” this being “put into”? Getting into a body appears to put us into quite a fix. I’m reminded of that Punk classic from Richard Hell and the Voidoids: “It’s a gamble when you get a face.”

I think that the most damaging idea in all of Western philosophy and religion is the body / mind distinction.

It led to the belief in a distinction between the body and the soul, which I think is a psychologically damaging and completely erroneous idea.

It led to the erroneous idea that consciousness itself is somehow distinct from the functioning of the brain.

These errors permeate Western thinking. Perhaps it’s easiest to see in the statement, “I have a body.” How could a human being possibly “have” a body? We can “have” a beer or a smoke or a snack or a new car. We can even have an opinion. But we don’t have a body: we ARE a body.

Rather than “I have a body,” the truer way to say this is, “I AM a body.”

Yes, Dostoyevsky said, people are capable of realizing the advantageous—what is good for us. But this knowledge, far from leading to rational decisions, shows us instead the way to REALLY mess things up.

I feel, as I head toward the fridge, liberated. I feel as if I were practicing free will. But am I? Or am I merely playing out my enslavement to one of the seven big sins, gluttony?

Dostoyevsky understood this dilemma. He was ruinously addicted to gambling. Still, in a world full of human beings whose actions can be predicted by statistics, what can we do? The irrational.

As Dostoyevsky had his Underground Man put it,

“The formula ‘two plus two equals five’ is not without its attractions.”

More next week . . .

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

This quote, often misattributed to Plato, perhaps originally spoken by Scottish minister, Rev. John Watson, and found in many forms out there on the internet, is one of my favorites in ministry – and in life. Whoever who said it, it is so true. Is it not?

We know not the burdens our neighbor or the stranger in the check-out line carry, just as they know not what we bear. It helps to remember that each and all of us are, at one time or another, and more often than not, fighting some sort of great battle. We would do well to be kind, as we pray that others will be kind to us.

Here in the Northeast, we are desperately awaiting Spring, and we could all use some extra kindness. This week, as our clocks spring forward, may our spirits do the same.

I wish you whispers of Spring and small kindnesses.

Blessings,

Megan