This I Believe

I want to start with two quotes, first from horticulturist Luther Burbank: “Nature's laws affirm instead of prohibit.” Next, from Thomas Jefferson: “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

I do believe that there is an underlying spirit of the universe. Whether we know it as nature, god or goddess, spirit, or some other name is not important to me.

If there are 3 UUs in a room, there will be 10 opinions on any given topic. If I’m in that group, I can hold several contradictory opinions on different days – sometimes even at the same time. I have a high tolerance for ambiguity. It is said that UUs can tolerate anything except intolerance. That applies to me.

The corollary is that religious certainty – the opposite of tolerance – has long been a problem for me.

I was a Physics major in college. The curriculum starts with the work of Newton – classical mechanics. But the deeper you look into physics, the stranger it gets.

This pulpit looks solid, but it is mostly nothing. At the level where we spend most of our time, “solid” is the best definition. However, on the level of atoms, it is mostly – empty space. To make matters worse, the closer you try to define where the particles in an atom are, the less you know about when they were there. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle says that the observer and the observed are not independent – there is an interaction between who we are and what we try to observe.

If you remember Firesign Theater from the 70s, the album title: “How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All?” could serve as a final exam for Quantum mechanics. At the quantum mechanical level, matter, energy and time are only related by probabilities. Objects actually can be in two places at once.

How many have seen “What the Bleep do we know?” That movie captures much of my religious philosophy. At least on some days. I reserve the right to change my mind. I do not believe that I will ever know all that I want to know.

I was raised Methodist, but I have a problem with hierarchical and historical religion. First, I don’t think that all truth was set out in a book which itself is a copy of a translation of a translation of a copy of a copy of several generations of aural histories. If I put my grocery list through the process that is supposed to tell us of the life of Jesus, for instance, I doubt that my dinner would bear much resemblance to my original idea. Chuck Brodsky has a better description of the problem – the absurdity – of considering the bible as an infallible work. He performed it at our Mountain Spirit Coffee House in March, and I considered just playing his performance for my talk this morning. In addition to the translation and copying problems, the books in the bible were written at specific historical periods for specific purposes, largely political. My grandfather, who read the bible in Greek, opened my eyes to the process of writing the bible when I was in junior high. I haven’t been the same since.

I think that through history there have been a number of wise people who have had more than the average insight into what I consider the underlying unifying principle or spirit of the universe. Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed are easy examples of avatars, but also the likes of Hildegard of Bingen, Emerson, Soren Kierkegaard, and Tich Nhat Hahn are on my list. I also believe, as Emerson said, that we each have the responsibility to judge ideas for ourselves. Note that I do look to the words of others to inform my opinions. I find this community – the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville – a useful place to hear the philosophies of others and consider how they fit with my view of life.

In the end, I think the search itself is mostly what I believe in. Each answer we find allows us to seek even better questions on all levels, from quantum mechanics - to the finish on the wood of this pulpit - to the political process in the world.