“We think that honesty and living in truth are better ways to live than propaganda and denial and comforting stories.” –Tom Schade, “Religious Community is Not Enough: Unitarian Universalism’s purpose is much bigger than gathering with like-minded people for mutual support,” UU World Winter 2013.

Earlier this year the Board members of the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal voted unanimously to attend an Undoing Racism training offered by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. While most of the members of the Board consider themselves anti-racist, we are stretching into what it would take to intentionally shape the Center to be an anti-racist institution. A primarily interpersonal understanding of racism limits our collective ability to address institutional, internalized, and ideological racism. With support from the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, the entire Board registered for the November Regional Training in New Orleans.

Beloveds, it is not enough to send off one or two of a congregation’s more social justice-y members to a training and consider the work of anti-racism done. It isn’t even enough to go through a congregation-wide training – once. This system of inequity, so deeply in the bones of our country’s constitution that you can take white people out of leadership and have the system continue to provide a preferential option for whites, requires a diligent commitment to undo.

One white member of the Center’s Board was attending this training for the “umpteenth time” since beginning to attend in the 1980’s and was clear that she would keep coming back. What has been done to us as a nation is a powerful, hypnotic thing. It lets me think, as a white woman, “I worked hard for what I have” and not even begin to reflect on how hard my neighbors of color have worked to have not even half as much.

It is hard to express my gratitude to the members of the Center’s Board for showing up for the training, day after day, for an exercise in living in truth, unpacking and confronting propaganda and denial. And doing it together. While I have attended multiple-trainings as an individual, this is the first one I have attended as an intentional member of a collective – and I experienced this training profoundly differently than the ones before. Instead of getting stuck on my own abilities (and lack thereof), I was able to think about the resources and structures of the organization I was a part of – and this has sent me back into the world with energy and hope.

The strongly individualistic (white) values of this nation will not serve us in the task of undoing the structures of oppression. Dismantling systems of oppression is collective work, friends. Find your collective. It is not enough to be a lone crusader in the work of undoing racism. This position only enforces the structure of isolation, designed to prevent collective organizing. If this is your position, look around. You are not alone. All of our lives are diminished by the structures of racism.

Organize, beloveds. The work will not be done perfectly, but together, we can begin to heal that which is profoundly broken.

You’re wanting to know about the crucified squirrel. But first, here’s what happened to my Christmas lights.

I lived in Iowa City, in a second-floor walk-up over Iowa Ave. Without any warning, November was here. Late fall in the Midwest is like if the planet Venus ends up shoved to the back of the fridge with the celery and other things nobody wants until it gets soft and bruised, and then what do you do? You don’t want it. You can’t throw it away. The interminable winter had not yet arrived, but already people walked the streets with a look of surrender. The sun would sort of give up and sink around noon. Then, for hours, it would rain flecks of ice. I decided to take things into my own hands.

At a store in the mall, Christmas lights were on sale. I filled a basket. Brought home packing tape. Crawled through my window, out onto the roof of the porch. Did up the front of the house, at least the second and third floor. It took over an hour. By the end, everything was a-twinkle, you might say, if you happened to talk like a magical elf. Zig-zags. Curlicues. A milky radiance out into the gloom. At long last, the place seemed like somewhere a person could live.

What I had done was not only for me. It’s not like I should have received a peace prize. But when it came down to being a neighbor, there was the sense of having done what I could.

Then, one day, I come home. The Christmas lights are inside, ripped from the socket, tangled up on the floor. On the tangle, a note. Magic marker. Capital letters. Signed by a person I never had met. The husband of the woman I thought was my landlord. He seemed overcome by rhetorical questions. Hadn’t I realized the risk I had been taking? To go out on the roof? What about the liability? If Christmas lights were so important, why hadn’t I asked?

Look, I get all of this now. I pay on a mortgage. I’ve seen my children bleed. But, at the time, I was what? Twenty-four? All I knew was someone came into my home, and destroyed all I had in my life that would shine.

I checked out the roof. Then, came back, and turned over that same piece of paper. Scribbled out a rebuttal. While I’ve never been up on the law of the land, I was pretty sure a landlord should not just barge in. There should have been a phone call. Arrangements. He should have asked my permission. Who did he think he was, was the gist of my letter. I stuffed it in an envelope, and trudged over to the house, left it in their mailbox.

The next afternoon, I came home to a new note, slid under my door. Same handwriting. But it came out all different. He said he could see my point. He hoped I’d forgive him. I had to, he said, of all things, understand. He had worried. He’d let the worry turn into anger. He wanted me to know that his wife made excellent pumpkin pie. Wouldn’t I come over to enjoy some with them? Pie! The nerve. It was beyond comprehension.

So, the crucified squirrel. In October, walking home, I noticed a squirrel on the side of the road. Killed, almost flattened. Then, in the next block, another. I would not own a car until many years later, so, in those days, doing anything at all always sent me out walking. Which was how I saw these little casualties, splayed out horrifically, in plain view. Carnage, all over town. But try to mention it, and people would shrug, unimpressed, as if I were reciting the order of months: October, November, dead squirrels on the road. I wanted to be heard. To be known. Admired as a prophet. But people seemed to think I was just someone talking.

That’s when I decided on the crucifixion. A squirrel on a cross would make an impression. I’d bring it downtown, or to some public place. As a statement. An indictment of modern society. Or something like that. I wish I could tell you this was somebody else.

Collecting a squirrel took a shopping bag and a shovel. Back in my apartment, the smell of rot sent my project quickly out to the roof. With rubber kitchen gloves, I completed the task. Nailing two sticks together, and then securing the tiny paws to the sticks. I’d intended it all as a message for others. I saw myself squarely on the side of the squirrel, and, for that matter, of all the small creatures who live near the road. Putting forth the perspective of God. But try to crucify something and keep yourself clean. You can’t. Drive a nail through flesh, and you get implicated. I left the squirrel there on the roof, where the rain kept on falling.

Remember the tangle of lights? And the note along with it? Seeing them, what came first was not anger. What came first was shame. The squirrel. The landlord had seen it! He must have. How to ever explain? But, scrambling out through the window and onto the roof, there was nothing. No squirrel. No cross. Only roof. Only rain. It meant the freedom to write the angry letter I wanted.

All that fall, it seemed like God had been folded, and stored until spring in a box up in somebody’s attic. To pray was to stand in another house, in the cellar, asking no one in particular where that box could have gone.

But what happened in that mess was a matter of grace. Not the squirrel being gone when the landlord arrived. A neighbor might have removed it. Or maybe some weather blew it down to the ground. The squirrel’s absence was only dumb luck.

Grace is more than dumb luck. It’s careless anger getting met by an invitation to sit down with pie. Despite what I’d done, and the words I had said, without even seeking it, I was forgiven. But a gift takes receiving. And this one I hadn’t yet learned to accept. It was asking too much. And so winter set in. The universe kept up its ponderous churn. And from wherever God had been hiding came a soft, tender sigh. The sound of one who’s been waiting.

We all make a decision every day, consciously or unconsciously: Am I going to cooperate today? Perhaps the question is cooperation with a partner. Or the kids. Or a neighbor. Or the people at school or work. Are we going to “go along to get along,” as the old saying goes? How much of ourselves are we going to give away? Because it feels like that sometimes, doesn’t it?  That cooperation is giving parts of yourself away?

Dr. Joshua D. Greene is a cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher and director of Harvard’s Moral Cognition Laboratory. Greene has been doing some fascinating work that he describes on the website The Edge.com and he has just published a book, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

I think that Greene succinctly sums up a central aspect of what morality means. Greene says,   “Morality is fundamentally about the problem of cooperation.”

I think Professor Greene is onto something here. This idea clarifies a lot of things that get muddied up when we start reading books on morality and ethics: “Morality is fundamentally about the problem of cooperation.” The thesis of his new book is that there are two types of human interactions that we do: “me versus us” and “us versus them.”

My examples about getting up in the morning and deciding to cooperate with others (or not) focuses on the individual cooperating with a group. But groups cooperate or not as well, and in those cases, too, I think the formula holds: morality is about cooperation.

We saw a failure to cooperate recently in the Washington budget brouhaha. We see it in Egypt. We see it in Syria. We see it in spying on foreign leaders. We see it in drone strikes. Figuring out what’s moral and what’s not moral is not difficult: “Morality is fundamentally about the problem of cooperation.”

Except . . .  Professor Greene does insert that little word “problem.” Greene puts it this way:

Each moral tribe has its own sense of what’s right or wrong—a sense of how people ought to get along with each other and treat each other—but the common senses of the different tribes are different. That’s the fundamental moral problem. http://wisdomresearch.org/Arete/Greene.aspx

It’s hard to cooperate with a group that sees things differently. For example, I don’t like a group that would cut funding for food stamps. I don’t like a group that would spy on foreign allies. I don’t like a group that sees “god” differently from the way I do. The list of groups I don’t like goes on and on! (And it may well be that THEY don’t like me either! Maybe they even want to hurt me!) And the perimeters of the groups expand and contract and shift constantly. I don’t think I want to cooperate at all!

Here’s a novel idea: let’s kill everybody we don’t agree with! Well . . . that’s a problem, isn’t it? That’s not such a novel idea, unfortunately.

Greene likens our moral thinking to a camera with two modes: a point-and-shoot, auto-focus mode and a manual mode, in which all the settings have to be consciously manipulated (you know, focus, f-stops).

“Bomb everybody different from us” is the auto-focus, point-and-shoot mode. It’s automatic. It’s gut. And, it’s immoral. It’s a failure to cooperate. The more remote the other group is from us, the more likely we are to react in the point-and-shoot mode.

A key finding in the research done at the Moral Cognition Laboratory is that we have no specific area of the brain that controls moral decision making. When people are asked moral questions, at least three areas of the brain light up. And they are the same three areas that light up when we are asked questions about buying things. Economic decisions.

Several systems work together, evaluating the probability of success and the diminishing returns we are likely to reap. So it appears that our moral reasoning has something to do with our acquisition of food back in our hunter and gather days.

Imagine you are hiding in a tree. Naked. No weapons. And there’s a dead rabbit right over there and you’re hungry—do you hop down out of the protective environment and take a chance?

One of the basic calculations concerning food for a hunter gatherer is, How dangerous is this to me? What’s the profit and what’s the loss?

(We have to be very careful when we get into explanations based on evolution. Neuroscientists can clearly see brain functions in these experiments, but the “why” is much more difficult to discover.)

We all know that watching someone die in our arms feels different than hearing about a death on the telephone. Or reading about it in the newspaper. Or seeing it on television.

Distant things—and distant groups—are much more difficult to care about. We always knew this; now we know it’s in our wiring. How to get around this flaw in a shrinking world is the challenge humanity will or will not solve. Religions and philosophies have been working on it for a while now . . . like, oh, seven thousand years, at least.

Still, it’s all about hopping down out of that tree and saying, “Hello.”

Everyone has to make a living somehow. Some weekends, my job has me blessing unions in the name of the Holy. All kinds of people end up finding each other. Once, it was somebody raised in the Black church tradition marrying someone whose family had been Hindu since before time began. So out I went to the Hindu Community Center, for an evening cram session with one of the priests.

To get there, you take the last exit west of Knoxville before the highway divides (south to Chattanooga or west on to Nashville). You can’t miss the exit, and not only because it’s across from Cupid’s Outlet, a log-cabin where they sell discount marital aids. You can’t miss the exit because, at night, it is lit to the horizon with the radiance the sun will one day give off when it finally dies. Like when the flashbulb on a camera explodes in that blinding split-second, only this one stays on. The source of it all is a two-story white building. On the front, it says, “Fireworks” in ten-foot-tall letters, with dazzling red stars shooting out over top. It sparkles like a helicopter arrived, pouring fat sacks of glitter. Klieg lights, bright as any maximum security prison, wash out the landscape. Outsized American flags ring the lot, the largest—a piece of cloth about the size of Knox County—on a pole at the center. A blinking sign in large letters reads, “Open to the Public!” Lest someone might think this was meant to be private. The road behind it winds its way past a place that sells guns, a few sagging barns, then the fenced desperation they call a “golfing community,” before you reach the yellow building where the Hindus all meet.

The priest I was seeking had not yet arrived, but another priest beckoned me into a chair. His English was paltry. My Hindi was zilch. But all kinds of people end up finding each other. So, with smiles and shrugs, we attained a sweet, flickering connection as he tried to tell me about one time he went to Atlanta. For a time, an ocean of difference between us dissolved.

Of the world’s great traditions, Hinduism seems most to pull off the American dream of “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, comes one. This and that, all together. The priest and I, unified. Like how Shakti, the divine feminine power, contains nurture alongside destruction, light along with the dark. The Gospel of John says, “The light shines in the dark, and the darkness has not put it out.” Hindus would not disagree, not exactly. The holiday of Diwali, with its clay jars and fireworks, comes around to say light will win in the end. But no matter how bright the light, the priest might have told me (had I had any Hindi), darkness won’t be extinguished. In this old world, at all times, dark abides. Wherever you can be found–ancient India, maybe, or else only off an American highway where untold travelers, rapt with fear and desire, purchase sex toys and guns and the dream of new life in a golfing community—wherever it is, the dark will be welling up into the light, and the brightest of lighting will not put it out. Instead, light and dark in a life will at long last forge union. Everyone, in the end, makes a living somehow. And it’s my job to bless it in the name of the Holy.

Let’s face it, progressives just don’t do fear well. Conservatives go to town with death panels and black helicopters, while progressives build arguments. It’s true in religion; it’s true in politics: progressives live in Reasonville while conservatives scare the hell into people.

Take, for example, Pascal’s Wager, one of the enduring arguments concerning the god concept. Blaise Pascal was a Seventeenth Century French mathematician whose work led directly to probability theory, game theory, and calculus.

Pascal understood that none of the proofs of god held up to logic, so he decided to go in a new direction, employing the nascent field of game theory. What he created is called Pascal’s Wager.

It goes like this:

Like it or not, we are playing a game that is like flipping a coin, heads or tails: either there is a God or there is not a God.

Reason can’t help us in this game–there is no evidence for or against the existence of God.

Each of us must bet: heads or tails. (That’s the logic part.)

Now, argued Pascal, if there is a God and you act as if there is—ding, ding!—you win. Eternal bliss.

Option two: If there is no God but you act as if there is—ding, ding!—you don’t lose anything. You, too, get bliss forevermore.

Option three: If there is a God and you act as if there is not—sad, scary music!—you lose: eternal damnation.

Therefore, the best bet is to act as if there is a God. That’s a great conservative argument.

Now, the biggest hole in Pascal’s logic is explained by the anthropic principle: how likely is it that Pascal, or you, were born in the place and the time that had the formula for “god” just right? Pascal’s unstated assumption is that there is only one type of god possible, the god of Seventeenth Century French Roman Catholicism. Pascal assumed, for example, that the earlier form of Christianity based on Arius is incorrect, and that the Mayan gods, or the Polynesian gods, aren’t capable of rewarding us with eternal bliss or eternal damnation. And so on.

Yet, despite its weakness, versions Pascal’s Wager crop up all the time. Because its real power lies in fear. Our gut tells us losing that particular coin flip would be very bad news indeed.

Pascal’s Wager shows the fault line between progressives and conservatives. Progressives see a problem; we educate ourselves about the problem; we see ways of fixing the problem; then, we think everybody should be convinced by our chain of reasoning. It baffles us that anyone would oppose such a logical position.

Our opponents think that our well-reasoned position will be bad for business. Or that it violates some old social norm or scriptural text. And so, they use the favorite tool in the conservative toolbox: fear.

Let’s face it: fear sells. Logic . . . not so much. We throw up our hands: “Why can’t people just be logical?” Well—we must remind ourselves—because we didn’t evolve that way.

Logic is not our first response to a stimulus. Fight or flight is our first response to a stimulus. Only later does logic become available to us.

Classic example: you’re walking in some tall weeds, you look down, and you see something that looks like a snake.

You get a rush of adrenaline; the hair on your arms stands up; you jump out of the way.

So, you didn’t get bitten by the snake. But, on second look, it turns out that the “snake” was a stick or a piece of rope.

Evolution has wired us to protect ourselves from snakes. We can logic our way out if it, but only with effort. With reason. If you don’t believe me, ask first or second graders living in a city what they’re afraid of. (This has been researched.) You’ll hear about snakes. And lions. And rhinoceroses. And dragons.  It’s unlikely the kids will mention cars; or guns; or viruses, things that are ACTUALLY dangerous. They certainly won’t mention high-fructose corn syrup, which will kill far more of them than even firearms, with the resultant Type II Diabetes.

Fact is, we are not wired to fear what is actually dangerous, because our lives are not as they were in our evolution. Fear has served us well as a species. Fear saves us from snakes. But snakes are not the most dangerous things in our environment any more. And so we sit on hold on the telephone, adrenaline rushing and hair bristling, ready for fight or flight, and all we accomplish is messing up our digestion.

Our brains did not evolve to cope with the world we now live in. Neither did our governments. Governments work best in short-term, fight-or-flight situations. Yet, thinking fast and scared doesn’t solve problems such as global climate change.

We have two very good systems for addressing the realities and the dangers of the world. The problem lies in knowing when to use which . . .

Did Pascal believe his own wager? Hard to say. He did know, however, that a concrete example and a real fear is convincing.