The Red Desert

USA – dedicated to a unitarain, universalist, syncretist god

2007-10-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

The libertarians are debating political theology, and they like us.

Cato Unbound (a libertarian dram shop) is running the symposium. Jonathan Rowe writes

America’s founders ... were devout theists and gave God a prominent role in politics. See for instance, the Declaration of Independence. However, the God to whom America’s founders appealed — the individual rights granting Nature’s God — arguably was not the Biblical or Christian God. For one, the Biblical God does not grant men unalienable individual rights, certainly not a right to political liberty while the God of the American founding did. Further, on matters of religious toleration, the God of the American founding was not a “jealous” God but granted men an unalienable right to worship, in Jefferson’s words no God or twenty gods.

...America’s principle founders (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin) were not closet atheists but really did believe in this rational, benevolent, unitarian deity who fit their republican ideals much better than the Biblical God could. The inescapable conclusion is that America does have a political theology; it is just not Christianity.

...Nature’s God was theologically unitarian, universalist (did not eternally damn anyone) syncretist (most or all world religions worshipped Him), partially inspired the Christian Scriptures, and man’s reason was ultimate device for understanding Him. He was not quite the strict Deist God that some secular scholars have made Him out to be. But neither was He the Biblical God.

Sighted on the high seas

2007-10-16T04:57:00.000-07:00

I just discovered Pirates of the Unitarians. Love the logo.

Hat tip

Okie from Muskogee – Purity / Authority / Loyalty

2007-10-12T18:49:00.000-07:00

Liberals and conservatives have different morals, especially w.r.t Purity, Authority and Loyalty. Which shows me why Merle Haggard was a prophet.

Haggard wrote the song Oakie from Muskogee. You may not like it. It's an anti-liberal anthem. Every value it hold up is strong on the Purity, Authority or Loyalty scale. He says that the values in Muskogee are very different than those of San Francisco. Who can argue with him?

We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee; We don't take our trips on LSD We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street; We like livin' right, and bein' free.	Drugs as purity; draft cards as respect for authority.
I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee, A place where even squares can have a ball We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all	Patriotism as loyalty, pure drugs instead of impure ones.
We don't make a party out of lovin'; We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo; We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy, Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.	Sexual purity, cleanliness
Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear; Beads and Roman sandals won't be seen. Football's still the roughest thing on campus, And the kids here still respect the college dean.	Gender roles, respect for authority

From what I read, Haggard wrote the song as a portrait of people he'd known back in Oklahoma, not as a personal creed. But I've read quite a few essays recently on the differences between conservatives and liberals. This one does as well as any of them at capturing the different attitudes and values that form the great red/blue divide in this country.

Oh, and FWIW, Haggard just endorsed Hillary.

I'm glad he wasn't a Unitarian minister

2007-10-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

Any preventable death is sad, but I'm it's just as well that we don't have to deal with this.

"You can't legislate morals"

2007-10-11T17:20:00.000-07:00

"You can't legislate morals!" Well, of course you can, and we do, and most of our laws have some moral component to them. But the claim persists. Underneath its obvious error, there's some truth in there somewhere.

Continuing my meditations on Jonathan Haidt—purity/sacredness is a cardinal difference between our liberal religion and their conservative religion. Liberals and conservatives agree that justice, rights and autonomy are part of morality, and that care of the weak is part of morality. But we split with them over purity and sacredness.

Our culture-wars are mostly fought over issues of purity and sacredness. Flag burning. Obscenity. Sex toys. Drugs. Adultery. Homosexuality. Gay marriage. (Abortion is an outlier. It hits at least as strongly along the care of the weak and the rights/autonomy axis. But sexual purity is a big component of that argument.)

Underneath the (dubious) claim "You can't legislate morals" is a more narrow truth. In a free society, in order to legislate morals, you must have at least a rough consensus. For the morals of purity and sacredness, that consensus is elusive.

The UU Ad Campaign

2007-10-10T07:48:00.000-07:00

I finally watched some of the UUA's new video. I'm well impressed. I mean, I could pick at it and I probably will in later post. But overall, they've exceeded my expectations:

Watch the whole thing.

Cat herders and the Five Axis of moral development

2007-10-09T10:31:00.000-07:00

I was struck by this article by Jonathan Haidt. He writes about his research into moral reasoning:

I told people short stories in which a person does something disgusting or disrespectful that was perfectly harmless (for example, a family cooks and eats its dog, after the dog was killed by a car). I was trying to pit the emotion of disgust against reasoning about harm and individual rights.

I found that disgust won in nearly all groups I studied (in Brazil, India, and the United States), except for groups of politically liberal college students, particularly Americans, who overrode their disgust and said that people have a right to do whatever they want, as long as they don't hurt anyone else.
OK, [academic moral theory holds that] there are two psychological systems, one about fairness/justice, and one about care and protection of the vulnerable. [...] There were three best candidates for being additional psychological foundations of morality, beyond harm/care and fairness/justice. These three we label as ingroup/loyalty (which may have evolved from the long history of cross-group or sub-group competition, related to what Joe Henrich calls "coalitional psychology"); authority/respect (which may have evolved from the long history of primate hierarchy, modified by cultural limitations on power and bullying, as documented by Christopher Boehm), and purity/sanctity, which may be a much more recent system, growing out of the uniquely human emotion of disgust, which seems to give people feelings that some ways of living and acting are higher, more noble, and less carnal than others.

In every sample we've looked at, in the United States and in other Western countries, we find that people who self-identify as liberals endorse moral values and statements related to the two individualizing foundations primarily, whereas self-described conservatives endorse values and statements related to all five foundations. It seems that the moral domain encompasses more for conservatives—it's not just about Gilligan's care and Kohlberg's justice. It's also about Durkheim's issues of loyalty to the group, respect for authority, and sacredness.

Our UU congregations are way about care and justice. We cast a wary eye, though, on ingroup/loyalty, on authority/respect and certainly on purity/sanctity. Or so I surmise, by the all the cars with Question Authority bumper stickers in our parking lots. We welcome transgressive behavior – especially transgressive behavior that doesn't directly harm anybody – much more than most churches. We don't just ignore the other axis. We dis them as superstitious. We deconstruct them as part of our Sunday morning worship.

There's a great market – a huge cultural appetite – for that stance. My own congregation is growing steadily with it.

If Haidt is right though – if these other three morality axis are about group solidarity – it explains something about the 'herding cats' experience of trying to lead in a UU church. I mean, any church is likely to draw some strong personalities and unbalanced people who make it hard to organize and get work done. I could name some other denominations that draw in an even larger percentage of truly odd visitors than we do. But most churches valorize group loyalty, respect for authority, purity standards. We valorize freedom, which is exhilarating. But it explains why all these UUs don't want to, like, pledge regularly or maintain a commitment to show up. It explains why all these Covenant Group leaders want to keep having their groups but not actually follow any rules.

The Chaliceblog: Action hero fantasies

2007-10-09T09:20:00.000-07:00

Chalice Chick write about Action hero fantasies a case where a school teacher is asking to take a gun to school. CC writes

I do think guns make people stupider.

Well, yeah, sort of. Robert Heinlein had a quote (which googling would not find for me) to the effect of "The most dangerous gun for you is the one you're carrying, because it will give you false courage and you'll stay in a situation where you should have left."

But do check out the rest of the story:

[Her ex-husband Gerry Katz] argues that her desire to take her gun to school is about reopening their divorce to get exclusive custody of their 6-year-old daughter.

"She's just scamming everybody," he said. "As soon as this thing started ... I called the principal at her high school and told her ... I am not coming to your school. I am not a threat to her. I have no desire to hurt her."

Divorce is a worse risk-factor for stupidity than guns are.

The Worst Evil in the World

2007-10-09T06:37:00.000-07:00

The worst tyranny in the world is still better than the evil of no order whatsoever.

Peacebang blogs about the evil chaos in the eastern Congo—the collapse of all legitimate authority, violence and sexual depredations beyond imagining. Arguably, the worst evil in the world right now is in the Congo.

Freedom House is an organization that rates governments on how free they allow their citizens to be. They do a better job than anybody else of bearing witness to the evils that governments do. Yet there is a paradox. The truly wretched of the earth often do not live under a repressive government. Instead, they live in failed states, where the 'government' controls only a portion of one city, and where the hinterlands live at the mercy of armed gangs.

2007-10-08T06:59:00.000-07:00

I don't know who I'm going to support for next US president. Indeed, I don't even know which primary I'll vote in.

But since Mike Gravel is a UU, I pay him a bit more attention than I would otherwise. And what I'm seeing is...sadly in keeping with some of the amateur Sunday morning services that I've seen when visiting our smaller UU Fellowships.

The Chaliceblog: Faith traditions we don't need to appropriate

2007-10-08T05:12:00.000-07:00

Porn as an addiction and a UU Concern

Porn as an addiction and a UU concern

2007-10-07T20:09:00.000-07:00

Chalicechick assures us that UU don't need to appropriate this faith tradition of seeing treating porn as an addiction. Mebbe not. I am not in sympathy of the sex-negative nannies of the left nor the right. I'm not looking to 'be in right relationship' with either Cornerstone Church
in its anti-porn crusades or with the sex-negative feminists like Susan Brownmiller. From both those corners we hear that for a man (or a boy) to pick up a copy of Playboy is a bestial, destructive act. Feh.

Still, I don't entirely discount the objection. Years ago I would have told you that the term 'addiction' only applied to a small class of drugs. Using terms like 'addicted to pornography' was just bad poetry and misguided metaphor. Then I got to know some guys that had really messed up with porn. One guy in particular – a UU, BTW – who'd been told by his boss, "We know you've been going to porn sites on company time and company equipment. This is a big no-no. We monitor your computer usage. You've been warned. Do this on your own time, but not on the job. Do it again and you'll be fired." And knowing that, and with plenty of net-access from his own home, he went back to the porn sites and lost the job.

I also once knew a guy who was on parole on drug charges. He was told by his parole officer "We will be testing your urine. If you do amphetamine again, we will see it and you will go to prison." He did up some speed, reported for his drug test, went back to prison.

I think it's fair to call them both addicts. And for addicts, the Cornerstone preacher's words about 'not being able to beat it on your own' – yeah, that's good ministry.

My UU church hosts an AA meeting. What if we were to appropriate some of Cornerstone's tradition by, say, hosting a support group for guys addicted to porn? I think it would fit within our tradition of compassion. That is to say, I think folks struggling with this should be able to get help without confessing a personal relationship with Jesus. And if we shun the kind of work that Cornerstone is doing, that will be the only help available.