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Jim Checkley

July 8, 2012

According to polls, “trust” is at an all time low within our country. Government, lawyers, the media, politicians, and others are setting all time low marks for trust. They say that when trust is broken in a relationship, it is very difficult to repair and it is usually time to move on. But how do you move on from yourself? Moreover, trust is not just an external phenomenon; it is in fact important to our own inner well being, and somewhat like forgiveness, often says more about us than about them. Checkley first attended the Church in 1977 and has been conducting services since 1987. He looks forward to taking the pulpit for the 28th time.

Sermon: The Courage to Trust

Author’s note: I have revised this from the talk given at the Church. The big change is to the discussion of meetings by avatar, which were prompted by a post-service discussion with an IBM employee. The vast majority of the rest are the usual changes to go from an oral presentation to a written document, including details and back-up not included in the sermon as delivered.

There is an old joke that goes: What’s the opposite of progress? The answer? Congress.

Congress has been the butt of jokes for years, but last October, trust in Congress to do the right thing fell to an all-time low. Only 9 percent of respondents to a New York Times poll said they “approved” of how Congress was conducting its business. And, American’s trust in their government overall reached a new low – even below Watergate levels – with just 10 percent of those polled believing government will do what is right “all” or “most of the time.”

This isn’t much of a surprise is it? What may be somewhat more surprising is the fact that Congress and the government have plenty of company. According to the polls, the trust Americans have in just about everything is at an all-time low.

In late June of this year, a Gallup poll showed that trust in the public education system had fallen again, with only 29 percent of respondents having “a great deal of confidence” in education. This is down from 58 percent in 1958, when Gallup first began conducting the poll. Banks have been hit hard, down 24 percentage points since 2002 to where only 22 percent of respondents in a 2011 Gallup poll said they had confidence in the banking system. And of some interest to us today, trust in organized religious institutions, despite the United States being one of the most religious countries on the planet, is also at an all-time low. Even trust in the future is at an all-time low, with a majority of Americans believing for the first time in recorded history that the next generation will not be as well off as they are.

To give you some more flavor of how pervasive lack of trust is in America, let me provide you just a few more numbers. These percentages represent the people who in a 2010 Harris Poll said they had a high level of confidence in the institution in question: TV news at 17 percent, major corporations at 15 percent, the press at 13 percent, law firms at 13 percent, and Wall Street dead last at 8 percent.

And by all-time low, I really mean it. Here’s some interesting context for these numbers: according to the Associated Press, 34 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, which is higher than any of the numbers I quoted above. This means that more Americans think that their homes could be haunted than believe that they will get a fair shake at their banks, that major corporations will do the right thing, or that the press tells the truth.

So are there any institutions that are doing well? A couple. In the referenced 2010 Harris Poll, people gave only two institutions ratings at or over 50 percent in terms of having great confidence that they would do the right thing. What were they? The military at 59 percent and small business at exactly 50 percent. The next highest was colleges and universities at only 35 percent. And among the professions, we still trust health workers like doctors and nurses, although the numbers have fallen, while firefighters, teachers, and pharmacists round out the top four.

There’s one point of special interest to me given my background in science. And that is the fact that trust in science is also at an all-time low. That is, the number of conservatives who say they have a “great deal” of trust in science has fallen to 35 percent, down 28 points from the mid-1970s, according to a recent academic paper by Gordon Gauchet published in the American Sociological Review. According to the paper, the trust that “moderates” and “liberals” have in science has remained steady since the 70s, while that of conservatives has plummeted.

Bear with me, because I want to talk about this just a little bit. What’s disturbing about this is that we are not talking about uneducated conservatives. Nope. We are talking about educated conservatives, those with college degrees and graduate degrees. According to Gauchet, conservatives with college degrees decreased in trust faster over the time period studied than those with only a high school diploma. He finds this result profound because, “it implies that conservative discontent with science was not attributed to the uneducated, but to rising distrust among educated conservatives.”

But this fact is itself quite disturbing to me because it implies that this lack of trust is political and ideological and has little to do with science itself having been shown to be untrustworthy, even considering the politicization of global climate change. Gauchet says: “It kind of began with the loss of Barry Goldwater and the construction of Fox News and all these [conservative] think tanks. The perception among conservatives is that they’re at a disadvantage, a minority. It’s not surprising that the conservative subculture would challenge what’s viewed as the dominant knowledge production groups in society-science and the media.”

I would suggest to you that this polarization between the right and the left has in fact impacted every single aspect of America and the people’s trust in government, institutions, communities, and even themselves. Take, for example, the recent Supreme Court decision on health care. You would think that of all the institutions of government, the Supreme Court would be viewed as providing an objective decision based on law. But as the prognostication over health care and other important cases has shown, that is not the case. We see the Court as ideologically split and when Chief Justice Roberts upheld the health care law under the tax and spend authority, conservatives felt betrayed and liberals were stunned. The way Fox News reported it, you’d think that Roberts had just sold the country down the river-and I suppose that’s how conservatives felt. But that’s not how it’s supposed to be. We are so used to an ideological, if not cynical, view of the Court that we can’t remember well the days when there was at least an outwardly expressed belief that the Court would do what was right under the Constitution.

Now, I’m sure that a lot of this isn’t news to you. You live it every day just as I do. So you may be thinking, “Yes, Jim, things are bad. We know that. People can’t be trusted, institutions can’t be trusted, government can’t be trusted, seems like nothing can be trusted. What’s a person supposed to do?” My answer to you today is as simple as it is difficult: Trust anyway. That’s the lesson I want to bring to you today. Yes, it’s bad out there and we have been betrayed at every level, but it is important, imperative even, that we regain our sense of trust.

I know. Sometimes it is silly to trust. That’s one of the lessons of the Scorpion and the Frog. Sometimes it is silly, dangerous, and foolish to trust. And I get that and I’m not suggesting that we act foolishly. There is, however, a big difference in having an attitude of trust and being a dimwit and trusting when trust is a silly thing to do.

You know, the thing about the Scorpion and the Frog is that the lesson is that scorpions, and by extension, people, cannot help themselves, even if it means their death. Scorpions sting. And people, well, people betray our trust. We have plenty of examples of that right? Think of all the politicians who ruined their careers having affairs. I’m not going to name them, you know who they are. In fact, history is riddled with men and women who just couldn’t help themselves and in the process hurt others and ultimately ruined themselves and their careers.

But from a religious point of view, the story of the Scorpion and the Frog goes even further. Catholics and Fundamentalists believe in the doctrine of Original Sin. Original Sin says that all humans are born sinners, corrupted, as it were, by the sin of Adam and Eve, and from the moment of birth until death are nothing but sin machines. I found a wonderful expression of this belief online, where a fundamentalist minister claimed: “Have you ever heard about busy people who ‘hit the ground running’? In the delivery room we hit the obstetrician’s catcher’s mitt sinning. We’re born as sinners.”

But we don’t believe this, do we, we Unitarian Universalists? Do we believe that people are born sinners, corrupted by Original Sin? I don’t think so. We may be a creedless church, but we do have the Seven Principles, and I don’t think that believing that all people hit the obstetrician’s catcher’s mitt sinning is consistent with them. In fact, such a belief is wholly inconsistent with the very first principle: that we avow the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This seems to put us on the opposite end from the Catholics and the Fundamentalists, who believe that all babies are born corrupted. Not much inherent worth and dignity there.

Even so, we UUs are not naive and recognize that people will betray trust, behave badly, and even commit atrocious acts. But our first principle, our opening position, is to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Said another way, we begin with an attitude of trust, and go from there. This reminds me that I want to say a few words about the saying that I put on the cover of the order of service: “In God we trust, all others pay cash.” You’ve heard it before, right? In Islam there is a similar saying: “Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.” I kind of like that one. Even had it made into a t-shirt back in the 70s. And the sentiment expressed by these sayings reminds me of Ronald Regan famously saying about a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union: “Trust, but verify.”

These sayings all make sense to us on a gut level. But, are they really talking about trusting? Where is the trust if you are going to verify anyway? Might as well just say: “We’ll agree, but only if we can verify because we don’t trust you.” And I don’t know about you, but I don’t think God is going to be ordering coffee and donuts any time soon, so the expression really reduces to: “Pay up now, because we actually don’t trust you to pay later.” And finally, I can’t claim to know much about camels, but I suspect that they, like horses, don’t stay put unless they are hitched to a rail. So the expression should be, “Tie up your camel, because if it runs away, it’s your fault, not Allah’s, who doesn’t seem to care what happens to anybody’s camel.”

Now, I’m making light of this, but there is a very profound question here. That question is: can we trust, I mean truly trust, in a world where we know the only things we can trust 100 percent of the time are death, taxes, and, at least since 1908, the Chicago Cubs not winning the World Series? I’ve made a little joke here, but this is actually a very profound question because in an uncertain world, it turns out that trust is essential for all human relationships to work well and for us to be happy. And I’d say that makes trust pretty important. I want to be very clear what I am talking about. There are two kinds of trust that I am talking about. First, there is the common, ordinary trust, which I will call transactional or relational trust. This is where you say, “I’ll be back at seven tonight to pick you up” and lo and behold, there you are at seven that evening. This kind of trust is founded on reciprocity, fairness, and mutual respect and affection. John Gottman, perhaps the most famous marriage counselor in this country, says that we trust in this sense when we believe that the person we trust has our best interest at heart, or, said another way, has our backs and will act accordingly. This then, is the ordinary trust in human relations, and it extends to trusting that institutions, from this church to the government to the banks to the media, all have our backs and will do right by us.

This kind of transactional or relational trust is precious and hard to come by. It’s what we Americans lack in relation to our institutions and leaders, but it also seems to be increasingly lacking in personal relationships. I may be out there on this, but here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: people don’t seem to be getting together to do things like they used to. Everybody wants to do his or her own thing and has a personal music player, personal smart phone, and even when they hang out together, they are alone with their music and their social media. Am I the only one bothered by the proliferation of screens and people’s obsession with them? Is it really the case that having 500 friends on Facebook means you have 500 friends? I believe you can’t know if somebody is truly your friend until he or she has inconvenienced himself or herself for you. Are all those Facebook friends ready to inconvenience themselves for you? And how would you know?

And here’s something for you in the hanging out and getting to know people department. Did you know that IBM at one time conducted meetings by avatar and that in 2009 that company rolled out a service called Virtual Collaboration for Lotus Sametime, where users set up and use virtual meeting spaces? It’s true. People who attend the meeting manipulate a two dimensional version of themselves on the screen and shake hands, sit around a table, and talk to each other through the cartoon image. I saw a report on PBS that said that IBM found that when people meet this way, their affinity for each other goes up and they are more cooperative and get more done. In fact, in commenting on the release of Virtual Collaboration, the Information Officer at Northcentral Technical College in Wisconsin was quoted as saying: “College students love to learn and meet in virtual worlds.” So I guess in the not too distant future many of us will be saying, “I may not trust John, since I never met him, but I really like his avatar.” Welcome to the brave new (virtual) world.

And transactional or relational trust, of course, is a two way street. This kind of trust is a reciprocal phenomenon that requires that we ourselves be trustworthy. And how do we become trustworthy? For starters, be honest. Keep your word. Researchers say that by doing the little things right and well, we create an aura of trust.

Keep confidences. Share personal information. If we divulge something of ourselves, we appear to be more trustworthy than when we hold things close to the vest. Of course, discretion is important here-don’t want to scare anybody off.

Do things that are in the best interest of the other person. That is the very definition of trust. Spend time together. In this era of texting and Facebook, nothing beats actually being together, except at IBM, I suppose. Finally, be real. Apologize when you make a mistake. We are all human and will all make mistakes. How we handle our mistakes is important. For example, studies show that doctors who apologize to their patients when they goof up are far less likely to be sued. And remember, most people want to trust. We just have to give them good reasons.

But there is a second kind of trust I want to talk about that is not reciprocal or transactional. This kind of trust is more of a spiritual or innate attitude about life and the world. It’s the trust that comes from an inner strength that provides us with confidence that however the world turns out this day, we will deal with it and be OK. You could call it faith, but I like to think of it more as a trust-a trust that the world is a knowable, understandable place, that I am an integral part of it, just like our UU principles declare, and that each one of us has the ability to create a quality environment for ourselves and others. It’s the ability to approach life with a trusting attitude, one that, like our first principle, allows us to view the world, our institutions, and each other with an opening position of trust that we can change the things we can control and have the wherewithal and ability to deal with those we cannot. I’m not saying it’s easy. But I am saying it is important.

But before I talk about that, I want to suggest that things are not as bad as we may imagine. With our 24/7 cable news outlets trying their best to outdo each other, every single bad thing that happens is burned into our consciousness with laser-like power. You’ve heard the expression, “no news is good news?” Well, I think the media act on the presumption that “good news is no news.” And why not? We seem to be drawn to tragedy, heartache, and loss like the proverbial moth to the flame. So in thinking about having and maintaining an attitude of trust, it is important to consider the media blitz of negative news and take it with a grain of salt.

Having an attitude of trust is important because trust is an essential element of life. Study after study tells us that without trust things break down, whether it’s at a cosmic level, a government level, an institutional level, or a personal level. Here’s your bumper sticker moment: Trust is the lubricant of human interactions. Trust helps us navigate the world in a way that minimizes stress, fear, and worry. When trust is absent, we are under stress, we become first vigilant and then hypervigilant about betrayal, real and imagined, we build walls both figurative and actual, we require confirmation of everything, verification of everything. It gets difficult to do business. It gets difficult to coordinate activities that require cooperation and planning and execution over an extended period of time. Sometimes it gets to be impossible to get anything done. Sounds like Congress, right?

And when we get to that point, when trust is truly ruined, psychologists will tell us that some relationships just can’t be saved. It’s sort of like trying to unburn a burnt pie. It can’t be done. Just have to throw it away and start over. I confess I feel like this with respect to our politics: that it’s broken beyond repair. And there are some studies that would support this conclusion. But then again, what choice do we have but to go forward and try to reconcile enough to at least get along?

Trust is also important because there is powerful evidence that having a trusting attitude leads to happiness. I quoted at the beginning of the service from the book The Geography of Bliss, in which the author explains the connection he found between trust and happiness. That connection is, in a nutshell, that the people who had the most trusting attitude about the world, institutions, and each other, were the happiest people. This makes sense to me given how negative life can be if we have little or no trust in it or ourselves. This also is consistent with studies about happiness in Europe. We Americans might think that the people who live along the Mediterranean would have the greatest overall level of happiness. But this isn’t the case. It turns out that the Danes, the Norwegians, the Swiss, and the Swedes, were the happiest, despite living mostly in the cold and the dark. And not coincidentally, these people also had the strongest attitude of trust.

One more example: a Canadian researcher who looked at the connection between trust at the office and happiness found that just moving up one point on a 10-point scale of trust in the management of the business has the life satisfaction equivalence of something like a one-third increase in income. A little bit of trust equaled a lot of money. Trust and happiness. They go together.

Finally, having a trusting attitude is good for our souls. By this I mean that having a trusting attitude inures to our spiritual benefit much more than it matters to those who we trust. In this respect, I see bringing a trusting attitude to life and its components, be they institutions or people, a little like I see forgiveness. When we forgive, we really need to do it for ourselves, not the other person. Forgiveness takes a load off of our hearts and souls, and lets us be free of the negativity and stress and anger and pain that go with carrying a grudge and being hateful and unforgiving. The act of trusting works in much the same manner. Trusting, even if the face of betrayal, allows us to heal, gets rid of the stress and negativity, and provides a positive psychological environment. Trusting allows us to view the world through lightly tinted rose colored glasses, as it were, and provides a faith in the unfolding of events and our lives that lets us approach life with a better attitude and a better opportunity for happiness.

Again I will emphasize that I am not saying we should act foolishly or naively-far from it. We need to be sensible and take precautions and enter into our transactional and relational trusts deliberately and with eyes wide open. But the courage to trust from a spiritual or innate point of view is more of a perspective, a way we choose to look at the world as we live our lives. For you see, courage is not about ignoring reality or denying anxiety. It is instead the will to act in spite of reality and anxiety.

The courage to trust is choosing to empower yourself and your choices rather than sinking into cynicism and negativity. And here is my last tidbit of the day for you: psychologists tell us that the marriages and friendships and relationships that last the longest and are the happiest are those where the participants view each other through lightly tinted rose colored glasses. As it is with love and friendship, so I suggest it is with life in all its myriad aspects.

Let me conclude by saying this: There are reasons why trust is at an all-time low in virtually every aspect of life we can think of. It would be easy to decide not to trust and instead protect oneself with emotional, psychological, and real walls. But if we want to make things better, both for ourselves and others, then don’t we have to take the first step and even in the face of betrayal, cultivate an attitude of trust? Somebody has to make the first move, and if we want others to trust us, shouldn’t we develop and project an attitude of trust ourselves? That will take courage and will mean being strong inside. It will also mean having the faith and confidence that come what may, be it betrayal or hardship or natural disaster, we can deal with it. And amazingly enough, all evidence says that if we can do this, the payoff for each of us will be a happier more satisfying life.

And trust me, I can live with that.

Presented July 8, 2012 First UU Church Austin, Texas Revised for Print

Copyright 2012 by Jim Checkley

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© Jim Checkley

 January 27, 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

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Imagine it is 2,500 years ago and you are a Greek with a question. This question has been bothering you for quite some time and you just can’t figure it out. So one day you decide to consult the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, one of the ancient world’s most intriguing and unusual establishments. For there at the ancient temple located beneath the shining rocks of Mount Parnassus, the God Apollo spoke through a Pythia, or human priestess, and offered inspiration and guidance to all who came.

Legends tell that Delphi and its environs had long been considered to have mystical powers. A few years ago I went to Australia for my 50th birthday and actually turned 50 while visiting Uluru, formerly know as Ayers Rock, the largest monolith in the world. I was nervous about going out into the middle of the desert to a giant sandstone monolith for such an auspicious occasion – ironically, I had always thought I’d go to Greece and turn 50 at the Parthenon but I’ve got to tell you, Uluru has a magic to it that has to be experienced and cannot be described. If Delphi was like Uluru, then I understand exactly why the ancient Greeks put an oracle there and why they thought the very land held special power.

When you arrive at Delphi, you approach the entrance to the temple and notice something carved into the wall, something that has come down to us as the best known of all the Delphic injunctions: in Greek it reads: GNOTHI SEAUTON, which we translate as “know thyself.” Some sources say that “know thyself” is the answer the Oracle gave to Chilon of Sparta who asked: “What is best for man?” It is, interestingly enough, the same advice that the Oracle in the 1999 movie The Matrix gave to Neo, only in the movie the phrase was written in Latin over the entrance to the Oracle’s kitchen. Times change, but the questions (and some of the answers), do not.

Now it seems self-evident that knowing yourself would be a good thing. But just what does it mean to “know thyself”? It is a question as old at the Delphic Oracle itself. Socrates said that it meant that “The unexamined life is not worth living,” that it was important on a daily basis to look inward to discover the true nature of our beings and to consciously make decisions about our lives and our dreams. In The Matrix, know thyself meant to know the essence of your inherent nature, which for Neo meant to know, the way we know we are in love, with every fiber of our beings, that he was the One, the savior of mankind. And when asked what he thought of the injunction “know thyself”, St. Augustine replied, “I suppose it is that the mind should reflect upon itself.”

Nowadays we call such self-reflection “metacognition,” the ability to think about your thoughts, to engage in self reflection, to introspect. This ability was for centuries thought the sole province of human beings, but animal research has challenged that old prejudice’some animals seem to have the ability to reflect upon their internal mental states, if only at a rudimentary level. That aside, while I think that knowing yourself certainly includes self-reflection, I think it is more than that. For modern science has shown us quite dramatically that we are more than just our conscious selves, and knowing oneself, truly knowing oneself, would include understanding all the layers of our beings, conscious, subconscious, and unconscious.

So let me suggest that simple – or even complex self reflection will not get you where you want to go. One thing that has become clear over the years is that we humans are not monolithic beings – we are not simply a conscious being that makes fully informed choices about life. We want to think we are, and we certainly behave as if we are, but modern research on the sometimes surprising science of us has revealed that often, our control is an illusion, and that there is something very powerful and very deep going on that we don’t even know about at a conscious level.

Research shows that our subconscious and unconscious selves play a big role in who we are, how we feel, and what we do. More fundamentally, new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful, and independent than previously thought. Generalized goals, like eating, mating, traveling, and the like, appear to be instigated by neural software programs that can be run by the subconscious whenever it, and not we, chooses.

Let me give you a couple of examples:

In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale were able to alter people’s judgments of a stranger by handing those people a cup of coffee. It’s true. What happened was this: the subject of the experiment was handed either a hot cup of coffee or an iced latte in a social setting. Afterwards, the people who held the iced latte rated a hypothetical person they read about as being much colder, less social, and more selfish than did the students who held the hot coffee. As improbable and strange as this seems, this result is consistent with others that have poured forth over the last few years. For example, new studies show that people are more tidy if there is a tang of cleaning liquid in the air, and they are more prone to be highly competitive in their negotiations with one another if there is a leather briefcase at the end of a long table rather than an old, worn backpack, in which case they are more laid back.

Psychologists say that what is going on is a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells, and sounds can selectively activate goals and motives that people already have in their brains. What is going on is that the subconscious is running preexisting programs that strongly influence our choices and our behavior – all without us actually having any conscious awareness that we are being manipulated by our own brains.

These findings help to explain how we can be happy one minute, then for no apparent reason, unhappy the next. I’m sure everybody in here has experienced this phenomenon – you show up to a party feeling great, then, without apparent reason, you get depressed, turn sour, and want to get away. No amount of self-reflection can explain the change, but it could be that one of the women is wearing the same dress that your ex-girlfriend was wearing the night she tossed all your possessions onto the street or perhaps the smell of the house triggered repressed resentments about your childhood. You didn’t consciously realize any of it, but your subconscious did, and initiated a hard-wired program that actually changed your basic equilibrium.

I’m going to go a little further and say that I don’t think that self-reflection is enough to know thyself for yet another reason. No matter how hard we try, I don’t think it’s possible to get a true picture of who we are simply by looking inward. While it’s true that only we can see our deepest thoughts, our deepest desires, and our deepest motivations, one thing we simply cannot see is how others see us. We need more data, data that reflects the who that we are in the eyes of others. In short, to fully know ourselves, we need feedback on the self that others know and experience.

And thanks to the Internet, all of us can do something that the visitors to the Oracle at Delphi could not: While they could ask a god for advice, we can Google ourselves. How many of you have Googled yourself? According to a Pew Research Study, by the end of 2007, about half of all Americans have come a little closer to knowing themselves, at least as others see them, by Googling themselves. But whether one Googles oneself or simply listens to what others who know and care about you have to say, I don’t think we can get close to truly knowing who we are without input from outside of ourselves. That perspective allows us, at the very least, to check on whether who we think we are matches with how we are perceived by others, and, if there is a discrepancy, as there often is, figure out what happened, and correct it.

Another thing about human beings is we are not static. We change as we grow older, more experienced, and, as Billy Joel might say, earn a few scars on our faces. I certainly don’t think I am the same person I was in my early twenties, before my experience with advanced Hodgkin’s disease and all that went with it. I have a sense of continuity, certainly, but deep inside I know that I have changed at a very fundamental level, a conclusion that has been confirmed by many of those closest to me over the years.

While these assertions may seem to run counter to the strong current in our culture that we each have an essence that is eternal and at some fundamental level, unchanging, recent findings in neuroscience and neuropsychology tend to support my experience. I do not dispute that we are born with certain aspects of ourselves hardwired. Nor do I dispute that this hard wiring is sometimes quite difficult to change. Nonetheless, research is showing that while older brains may be less efficient than younger brains, and may in fact, show signs of memory loss and the like, older brains may actually be wiser brains. It has to do with how information is accumulated and processed, but the point is that for this and other reasons, our brains – and with them, us – change over time. So unlike some people who think it’s better to be consistent than right, I think it’s OK to change your mind because, in fact, your mind changes. We change. We become different people with different desires, different wants, different goals, different values. And keeping up with ourselves, not living in the past, is a big part of knowing ourselves.

Which brings me to the point that knowing thyself doesn’t just mean knowing and understanding one’s essence. It also means knowing our dreams, our abilities, our real virtues and even our frailties. It means knowing ourselves in all our aspects, including how we change over time, at least as well as we know the world, our jobs, and those around us. But this often isn’t the case. Just as we are generally good at helping somebody else figure things out, whether it be their love life, money situation, problems on the job, or whatever, we are often not so good at taking care of ourselves, and the same applies here. As I’ve gotten older I have realized just how much I was unaware about my younger self and I think many people have had the same experience and that some, some go almost all the way though life as complete strangers to themselves.

So does all this mean it’s not possible to fully know yourself? I think that’s a fair question. There are those who say that it’s not possible to understand oneself, that an accurate definition of self is impossible from an objective point of view. Others think that the exploding field of neuroscience – the study of the brain at an anatomical, but in particular, at the cellular and even molecular level – is the most hopeful candidate for providing scientific answers to the questions that have perplexed human beings for thousands of years, including who we are and what is our true nature.

Neuroscience is expanding at a fantastic pace. My son, TJ, who is doing the lay leading today, has his masters degree in neuroscience and so I have some idea of how far we have come since the old days of stone knives and bearskins when I was studying biochemistry in graduate school.

But you know, while I think neuroscience is going to be able to teach us a lot about what we are and how our brains work, I think it’s going to be less good at telling us who we are and how we should live. So while it is clear that we are comprised of conscious, subconscious, and unconscious beings, and that our feeling of total conscious control is something of an illusion, no matter what science says, no matter what the limitations, it is vital that we get to know ourselves to the best of our ability, and be honest and accepting of what we learn. If you insist on being ignorant or if you insist on being somebody else, then who will ever be you?

All of which brings me to William Shakespeare. Thought by many to be the world’s greatest playwright, Shakespeare’s greatest play may have been Hamlet. In Hamlet, Polonius is preparing his son Laertes for his travel abroad. Polonius directs his son to commit a “few precepts to memory”, the most famous of which is, “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Much has been written about this quote, and I certainly am not going to do any literary exposition here. But I do think it’s interesting that Polonius assumes that Laertes knows himself, for how can one be true to oneself without first knowing oneself? Thus, before following Polonius? advice, we first must follow the advice of the Oracle at Delphi, something that is at best a daily exploration, and at worst, impossible. But leaving aside for the moment the very real issue of how do we know ourselves, what does it mean to be true to that self? What does it mean to be true to the self we know and understand today, who needs to get about with the task of living, and hopefully living well?

Well, the first thing we know is that Shakespeare was not trying to grant Laertes permission to behave however he wanted. If you are an axe murderer, it will not avail you to say you were simply being true to yourself. So that’s not what’s going on here. Unless we live in solitude, being true to oneself will always mean being true in the context of culture, society, and law. Thus, one of the most difficult aspects of being true to yourself is how to navigate in a complex society that presents us with scores of often complicated, difficult, and even ambiguous relationships.

And we do live in a complex society that demands much of us, and that, for almost all of us, requires some level of compromise. It is inevitable. So we tend to wear masks, masks that have the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, that are safe, that don’t rock the boat. Sometimes we wear them because we have to, one of those accommodations to reality that just has to be. But sometimes we wear them out of fear, and sometimes we wear them out of a lack of self-confidence. Those are the masks we need to work on, need to shed, if we are to live a truly authentic life of integrity.

Still, we are left with the difficult question of how to choose our path, when to fight and when to yield. There are many answers to this question, of course, but let me quote what Thomas Jefferson had to say: “In matters of style, swim with the current, in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” Looking back on the 1970s, I’m not sure I agree with Jefferson on matters of style, but I do certainly agree with him on matters of principle.

Which begs the question, of course, which principles? Well, if we are being true to ourselves, then the principles we are being true to are the principles we found within ourselves, while we were following the Delphic command to know thyself. You know, taken seriously, this position is a pretty radical one in our culture, one that sits at the core of what I understand it means to be a modern Unitarian Universalist and an adherent of liberal religion.

I’ve been coming to this church for 31 years, and have always believed that one of the important missions of this church is to help people get to know themselves, their real selves, and then assist them in being true to themselves as they live their lives and participate in our world. This is, I think, a very different mission from many other churches. In many other churches the mission is to convince you to distrust your humanity, to almost disavow it, in favor of revealed truth that comes from God, truth that is unchanging, that is to be accepted and obeyed. Our church, and all those like it, are very special places, are sanctuaries of humanity in the broadest sense of the word and I, for one, am grateful for them.

But did you know that some of the people in this church are among the most disliked people in America? It’s true. And I’m not talking this time about being gay or lesbian. According to a study conducted by sociologists at the University of Minnesota, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers are among the most disliked persons in America. They fell below Muslims, homosexuals, and recent immigrants in a poll that measured the respondents? view of whether and how much a number of different groups shared the respondents? vision of America and what it means to be an American. Unitarian Universalists, as free thinking adherents of liberal religion, and by that I mean us – you and me – we are not much liked or trusted by many in mainstream society, something it pays to know when you are out and about in the world.

Having noted that, we all know that no matter who you are, sometimes being true to oneself and one’s principles takes enormous courage and may even put you at risk of harm. It sometimes means having to stand against the majority, or your friends, or even your family. It means engaging in a regular pattern of behavior, and of making choices that are consistent with your espoused values and with the person you claim to be inside. It means having the courage of your convictions, and of being willing to put them out on the table, even when they are not popular. And I suggest to you that it all begins with knowing yourself, and then of accepting yourself, fully and completely, both the good and the bad, in order to be true to the good and change the bad.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that we are always alone in our lives and in our quest to be true to ourselves. Certainly, we have our friends, our family, we have this church, and we have a community of thought and feeling that goes back hundreds of years. All of that is enormously important.

And yet, we are a creedless religion that honors the individual conscious; which leads me to one of the scariest things about liberal religion and trying to know and be true to oneself.

There isn’t anyone else to blame.

When it’s up to you, when you are being true to yourself, then that’s all there is. This is another reason why living authentically, living the life of personal integrity, takes so much courage. Sometimes we’re all we’ve got.

And on this topic, it occurred to me that some Christians wear WWJD wristbands “What would Jesus do?” At first I thought we could wear WWED wristbands – you know, What would Emerson do?” Or even perhaps just get our own WWJD wristbands – only they would stand for What would Jefferson do? But ultimately I realized that none of these would be authentic, that if there was going to be a UU wristband it would have to read: WWID? What would I do?

Finally, there’s more to life than principles. There’s dreams, there’s goals, there’s fun. Yes, even tortured soul UUs get to have fun. But strange as it sounds, being true to your dreams, your goals, and your potential can sometimes be just as scary and intimidating as standing up for unpopular principles. Once we take off our blinders, once we see for real, we begin to understand just how much is possible in our lives and we wonder if we’re up to it. We look out at the vista of possibility and it can be overwhelming.

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard put it this way: “There is nothing with which every person is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.” We talk about becoming the true beings that we are and then of being authentic and living lives of integrity, and it certainly sounds good, even exciting, but when it comes down to it, sometimes those prospects can be intimidating and scary. Sometimes it’s as if we are waiting for somebody to give us permission to be ourselves and pursue our dreams and our potential.

My message to you is don’t wait for anyone or anything to work on yourself and your dreams. You see, when we know ourselves, then we come into focus, our dreams become clearer, our path becomes straighter, and our sense of purpose and meaning grows until we feel such power and such of sense of belonging to and being right with the world, that as night follows day, we almost cannot help being true to ourselves.

So let me close today by suggesting this: I think there is a way to both know who you really are and at the same time, be true to who you are. And it’s not through ruminating, or self-reflecting, or taking classes, or any other inward looking activity. Ultimately, I think knowing yourself and being true to yourself is best accomplished simply by engaging fully in life and making choices and standing by them.

In the hit move Batman Begins, Rachel Dawes tells Bruce Wayne that it isn’t who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you. You are the choices you make and the actions you take. So if you want to know who you truly are, then put yourself out there, in situations that are challenging, that call for action, because then you’ll know. “There will be an inner voice that will tell you how you are doing.” You can sense it if you are honest with yourself and listen carefully.

So let me ask you to do something today, something we should do every day of our lives. Do something that is you. Do something that is true.

Copyright 2008 by Jim Checkley

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Asking the Next Question by Jim Checkley

I have always been a big science fiction fan. I even wrote and published some short stories way back in the dark ages of the 1970s when I lived up in New Jersey and was attending school at Montclair State College. I was, I think, in my last year at Montclair State when a friend of mine from school named Karl asked me if I wanted to go to a big science fiction and fantasy convention up in Great Gorge, New Jersey, a ski resort in the Pocono Mountains. I loved going to science fiction conventions and this one looked fantastic with lots of big name writers, a terrific program, and a fantastic dealers’ room. This science fiction convention had it all. And what was more, it was going to be held at the Playboy Club. What better place for a science fiction and fantasy convention?

Anyway, I told Karl that it would be great to go to the convention. So we made arrangements to drive up together and waited for the big day.

It was the middle of winter, back when we still had winter, and the night before the convention, it snowed something like three feet. I’m not kidding. The drifts were up over the parked cars on my street. But, I was a really big science fiction and fantasy fan, so I dug out my car and drove up to the college to meet Karl. I didn’t for one second doubt that Karl would be there, and so I was not surprised when he was—although his was the only car in sight. He, however, had been a little more practical than me and had called ahead to the Playboy Club to see if the convention was still going to be held. And, of course, it was or he would not have been there.

It was still snowing a little and standing there in the snow drifts, we had a momentary lapse of faith, but then decided, what the heck, what’s the worst thing that could happen—we fall off a mountain road in a blizzard. But we are all immortal when we are young, so away we went—driving, I might add, a Ford Pinto.

When we arrived at the convention, the place was deserted. I mean, there was nobody around. But we went into the club—it was very impressive—and found our way to the auditoriums where the main events of the convention were to take place. When we went inside we saw no more than a dozen fans and a handful of science fiction writers sitting around in conversation. Most of the people present had come in the night before and had stayed in the resort hotels. I think Karl and I were the only lunatics who had driven all the way up from the suburbs of New York City.

Anyway, the organizers saw no point to actually conducting the program—many of the guests of honor hadn’t arrived in any event. So, we spent the day hanging out in the mostly empty club, talking about science fiction, fantasy, and whatever else was of interest.

That was one of my favorite days ever. Yes, I was a geek, and on that day I was one very happy geek. Imagine being 21 years old and spending a day with a group of famous science fiction writers and some kindred spirits at a Playboy Club.

And this is how I met Theodore Sturgeon. How many of you know who Theodore Sturgeon was? Theodore Sturgeon was one of the great science fiction writers of the Golden Age of science fiction. His most famous novel is “More Than Human,” which won many awards, and he wrote two of my more favorite Star Trek episodes from the original series, “Amok Time” and “Shore Leave.”

But on this day, we spent hours talking, had lunch together—and yes, we had several bunnies as our waitresses (the first and only time that ever happened to me)—and we got to know each other pretty well. At some point in the afternoon, he signed the books I had brought up with me and in the process introduced me to his personal symbol that over the years I have taken on as my own. You see, Theodore Sturgeon signed all his books with his name and then he added a capital Q with an arrow going through it. Here’s what it looked like:

He asked me if I knew what that meant. I said I did not. He then said, “It means, ‘ask the next question.’ Ask the next question, and the one that follows that, and the one that follows that. And never stop asking questions.”

I immediately loved this symbol and what it stood for. After the convention, I asked a friend who was an art major to make me a stylized Q with an arrow going through it and I kept it framed on my desk for decades. I have tried to live my life in accordance with the attitude and vision engendered by always being ready and willing to ask the next question and being prepared to accept the answers wherever they may lead. That hasn’t always been easy, and there is more to it, actually, than meets the eye.

Asking the next question probably seems to you to be a natural state of affairs. After all, you—we—are Unitarian Universalists. But asking the next question is not a universally embraced attitude about life. There is a distinction between simply asking questions, which is a natural part of being human, and asking the next question. I don’t think that asking the next question, and the question after that, is actually an inherent part of being human. This is because, and this does make a difference, what most people want is answers. We hate uncertainty, ambiguity, and doubt. Human beings want answers so much that we will make them up if we need to—everything from the great myths that explain the world and our place in it, to the guy who says, “I don’t know,” but then gives you an answer anyway. And once people have those answers, and find them psychologically satisfying, they tend to stop looking.

You see, Unitarians always seem to be on the search for truth. And when you are searching, it makes sense to ask questions. But what happens when you have found the truth? The natural tendency is to accept what you’ve found, stop asking questions, and settle into a comfortable and satisfying place. Once you have found the truth, people who are still looking, who are still questioning, have a tendency to annoy you. So—on the bright side—we can all take some solace that we might annoy them as much as they annoy us. Be that as it may, however, once you’ve gotten to a place where you are satisfied, it’s entirely too easy to stop questioning.

And that attitude is understandable. I get it. We all get into our comfort zones with what we know and believe and we want to stay there. Having certainty, having answers, provides that comfort and lets us relax in a world that is terribly uncertain and is becoming more so all the time.

Many years ago, I had a secretary who would always interrupt me when we were talking about controversial issues such as evolution, global warming, or abortion. She’d tell me that she had her beliefs, that she was satisfied with them, and she was not interested in questioning them. She was saying, “Just leave me alone.”

The attitude displayed by my secretary can actually be kicked up a notch or two to the point where there is an active ban on asking questions. If you think about the way human beings lived for many centuries in Europe, free inquiry into the way the world worked, how to best live life, and so many other questions that confronted people was not just discouraged, it was punished. Thus, for a long time people were told that all they needed to know was Aristotle and the Bible and any deviation from that script was not just a sin, it was a crime.

This sort of attitude is still with us today, of course. The most obvious examples are the fundamentalists of Christianity, Islam, and other religions. But there’s more to it than that. At a mundane level, how often do we hear somebody say “TMI” meaning they are getting too much information about an uncomfortable or embarrassing subject and they want the speaker to stop? That’s a trivial thing, I admit, but TMI isn’t limited just to colonoscopies and locker room stories. TMI is symbolic of a strong current in our society that discourages inquiry into certain matters and areas of life. From the Frankenstein notion that there are things we simply were not meant to know, to the censorship and burning of books, a la Fahrenheit 451, to modern debates about recombinant DNA, stem cells, and cloning, there is a strong current of caution, indeed fear, about asking the next question and pushing the boundaries of knowledge, comfort, and our place in the world.

I, and I suspect many of you, reject these notions. You see, for me, asking the next question isn’t simply a matter of curiosity. For me, asking the next question is a way of life, it is an approach to the world and how we live in that world that for me is the only way to go.

Of course many—and I mean billions of people—have decided to live their lives and create their futures based on the authority of one of the mainstream religions, and in so doing accept as true and unchanging the values, laws, prescriptions, and choices found in sacred texts as interpreted by priests, rabbis, and mullahs. Those people have their framework of reality, their vision of life and how to live it, and they are done. They will each tell you sincerely and confidently that their accepted framework is the correct one, be it Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or some other. Reason and logic tell us that all of them cannot possibly be correct—but that doesn’t seem to matter. After all, they will say they have faith.

Faith is supposed to provide answers, and with them, certainty. It’s a kind of forced certainty—although that’s rarely acknowledged—because people of faith simply choose to accept something as true—that’s the very definition of having faith—accepting as true those things that otherwise cannot be proved to be true. Faith works, of course, because, it provides a safe, certain, framework of reality, morality, right, and wrong that people can and do rely upon. And it doesn’t seem to matter much what kind of faith we are talking about. Whether it’s faith in one of the many religions or faith in a Twelve Step Program, that faith will provide a level of certainty, which will itself provide for the comfort, safety, and sense of place and belonging that people seem to require to feel at peace with themselves and their place in the world.

This reminds me of a study I read about years ago concerning young children and how they respond to their environment. It turns out that if you provide a child with firm and certain boundaries, that child will actually venture out farther in exploring his or her environment than one that has been given total freedom to do as he or she wishes. This may seem counter-intuitive, but there is an explanation that makes sense to me.

The first child—the one with the boundaries and the framework—comes from a place of comfort and familiarity, a place of safety and certainty, which provides it with the confidence and ability to take some risks and venture out a little into the world knowing that if something happens, he or she can always come back to a known and safe place. The second child, the one with complete freedom, however, has no such certainty or safety and experiences what an adult might think of as unlimited free choice as a frightening chaos. That child must always decide for him or herself what is safe and unsafe, what is good or bad, and how far to go before going too far. This tends to make most children more cautious and anxious about things and as a result, they tend to hold back more. What applies to children also applies to adults.

Now everybody, whether they have traditional religious faith or not, everybody has a view of the world and their place in it. I have one, Hillary has one, we all have one. That view of the world is one that we trust, that we act upon, and gives to us the same thing that boundaries gave to the young children: a sense of comfort, place, and security in the world. And if we are asking the next question, then we are challenging that view on an almost daily basis, something I think is really difficult to do, but is also necessary.

In this respect, asking the next question symbolizes to me living the responsible, conscious, and intentional life. It is a life with as much responsibility as freedom and a life marked by having the courage and the will to confront, accept, and address the important questions that challenge us both as individuals and communities.

Asking the next question is not so much doubting as it is realizing that most knowledge and most truths are incomplete or inadequate to deal with every situation, especially in our incredibly complex and every changing modern world. Yes, it is important to believe in something, to be invested in each of our world views to the point where we trust and act upon them, but it is also important to know that they could be wrong and that we may need to change our minds, and, in the process, change ourselves. Said another way, not only should you not believe everything you hear, but you must be prepared on a moment’s notice to not believe everything you think.

This is the key to it then: If we create a framework of life that is full of certainty, full of absolute answers, whether from god or from science or some other place, then we will become stuck, we will not grow, will not evolve, will not expand. There may be some comfort there, perhaps even a lot of comfort, but to me it is a sterile, cold, and lifeless place to be. On the other hand, if we choose not to believe anything, if we choose not to invest ourselves emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually in a vision of what life should be, and constantly doubt ourselves and our understanding, then we end up in a shallow place, a place of impermanence, of total ambiguity, with little comfort, little to rely upon, little safety, and little fun. We must somehow be totally committed to our view of life today, but be willing to change tomorrow.

We are creating ourselves and our futures every day. This requires us to act consciously and with intentionality. That’s difficult to do for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that we have to actually pay attention and steer ourselves and our lives rather than simply letting ourselves follow the path of least resistance or some preordained path chosen by others or the path that our brains urge us to take as a result of evolution and our desire for comfort, certainty, and security.

In this regard, asking the next question is a symbol of our ability to rise above the animals that we are, that jumble of instincts, desires, fears, and other programs that evolution has provided to human beings for our survival. Those programs have worked remarkably well and we have not only survived, we have thrived. But now it’s time to change. Those survival techniques, including our incredible propensity for violence and war, as well as our ability to hate and denigrate based on irrational or meaningless distinctions, those tendencies simply are not serving us well any more and we need to do all in our power to lose them, both personally and as communities and nations.

Our ancient myths and mainstream religions contain the strong notion that humans were created by God at the top of the pyramid of life, that God has given people dominion over the Earth, and therefore, whatever we do is OK. This is a dangerous attitude, and one that needs to be lost, along with so much else from our old myths and religions. We need to instead accept that we are a natural part of the natural world, on a par with all life, and that for better or worse, we are the stewards of this planet and need to husband our resources and our home rather than believing that we have permission from God to do whatever we want.

There are two photographs that have been taken in the last 40 years that symbolize for me the new horizons and understandings that we all need to incorporate into our vision of the world and our place in it. The first was taken on Christmas Eve 1968 by the astronauts in the Apollo VIII spacecraft as it orbited around the moon. They turned their TV camera back on the Earth and for the first time in history, the people of Earth saw their home as a small cloud covered globe hanging in space—a jewel in an infinite ocean of black. That picture taught us in an instant that we are all one on this world, our only world, a tiny, fragile world, for which we, and we alone on this planet, are the caretakers.

There was no crystal dome over the Earth separating our world from heaven, as those who wrote the Bible believed; there was no heaven in the blackness of the total vacuum of space. On hundreds of millions of television screens around the globe all that the people saw was a fragile and altogether tiny world, a world put into perspective by the second photograph, I mentioned. Called the Hubble Deep Field, this photograph taken a few years ago by the Hubble Space Telescope and it provides the deepest, most awesome view of the sky ever recorded. The Hubble Deep Field revealed thousands of galaxies and trillions of stars existing in an area of the sky no bigger than a grain of sand held at arms length. The poet William Blake challenged us to imagine the world in a grain of sand: well here are trillions of them—an image so vast it is literally incomprehensible.

When the Apollo VIII astronauts read from the Book of Genesis on that Christmas Eve, it marked for me an important transition, a transition from the old myths, the old comforts, and the incredibly self-centered vision of humans and our planet, to the new vision with its very different place for us in the world, a natural place that was nonetheless fraught with responsibility and will require us to fearlessly, fairly, and honestly confront our future and the future of every living thing on this planet. But my youthful optimism has not been vindicated—at least not yet. I am a part of this church community and do these services in large part because I think that this transition—from the old myths to the new reality—is possibly the most important intellectual and spiritual transition a person can undergo and it is going to take lots of us to change the world.

And that, ultimately, is what asking the next question is about. It is about changing ourselves, our communities, and our world to make a better life for everyone. But before we can make changes, whether they are to ourselves as individuals or our communities, we need to be able to envision those changes and then make them so. To do this we must first and foremost change ourselves.

I therefore agree wholeheartedly with the notion of self-work and trying to make ourselves better than we are and to increase our understanding of ourselves, our relationships, and our place in the world. In that sense, I am a firm believer in what is called positive psychology. Most psychology you hear about is concerned with “fixing” something, be it a phobia, a neurosis, or some other metal ailment. But there is so much more possible in evolving and becoming a better, more understanding, more complete human being than just correcting problems. Positive psychology is about finding ways for us to grow, to become more than we are, and to simply be better people. And one need not be lying on a couch for positive psychology to be a force in one’s life: it can and does happen in the pews of this and other, kindred, churches and many other places as well.

I will conclude by noting that virtually all choices we make about how to live our lives, and what provides meaning and purpose, are uncertain in the sense that we cannot be sure that this path or that path will lead to the best result or have any meaning except to ourselves. There are no certain paths to specific outcomes like happiness, success, meaning and purpose. There is only our own path and the courage to go down it.

My path has been the path of asking the next question, and the question after that, and never stop asking questions. I am grateful to Theodore Sturgeon for introducing me to his Q with an arrow going through it on that snowy winter day so long ago. I chose that path, and it has made all the difference.

Presented June 24, 2007

First Unitarian Universalist Church

Austin, Texas

Revised for Print

Copyright © 2007 by Jim Checkley

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© Jim Checkley

April 15, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

I wish I could take credit for the title of the sermon. But I can’t. The title comes from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show I liked so much I did a service on it a few years ago. What’s going on is that Buffy is in love with somebody and is complaining that he is acting all jealous, but won’t admit it. Buffy is talking to her friend Willow and when Buffy complains to Willow that her boyfriend is being totally irrational Willow says, “Love makes you to the wacky.” To which Buffy responds: “That’s the truth.”

I agree with Buffy. Love does make you do the wacky. I’ll bet everybody in this sanctuary has at least one story of wacky behavior caused by being in love. Which begs the question, why? Why does love make us do the wacky? Why do we risk our jobs, our friends, our futures, our very lives in the name of love? What is it about romantic love that not only does it have its own holiday, but it provides both the greatest joys and the worst agonies imaginable, because truly, what can be better or worse than the total agony of being in love?

I was looking for a definition of love and found several I want to share with you. The first is from Ambrose Bierce and states that love is a type of insanity curable by marriage. You laugh now, but file this one away for later.

How about this one. It’s from a conference of sociologists back in 1977. Listen carefully:

Love is the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feeling by the object of the amorance.

I dare you to try to turn that into a poem. In fact, I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable with the person who came up with that one dating my daughter. There are, of course, long dictionary definitions, but I think part of the problem we have in defining love is that in our culture, love is required to be all things to all people all of the time.

We love our spouse or our partner, certainly. But we also love our cars, our kids, our favorite colors, our food, our jokes, our art, and on and on. The word “love” has as many meanings and covers as much ground as the word “God.” Eskimos have 20 words for snow and we have one word for love. At least the Greeks had four words for love: Eros, or romantic love; agape or spiritual love; philia or Platonic love; and storge or natural affection, like that of a parent to a child. But we English speaking people, with a language that has by far the biggest, most encompassing vocabulary, we only have one word for love. Why is that? I think part of it is that our culture is very schizophrenic about love and there are enormous sensitivities around it, especially romantic love,

For example, you may have heard of the late Leo Buscaglia who once taught a course on love at UCLA called Love 1-A and wrote many books on the subject. Dr. Buscaglia taught that love is something we need to learn about and that understanding and dealing with love isn’t something that just comes to us by osmosis. As a matter of culture and social behavior, I think we can all agree with that. As you might imagine, however, Professor Buscaglia’s course created some controversy as people complained that university is no place to teach about love – seriously – university should be reserved for important stuff like history, language, science, and engineering. Besides, love is, well, a delicate subject, one that should be kept in a brown paper wrapper and only spoken about in hushed whispers behind closed doors or on the streets or under the covers.

I don’t know about you, but I think all of that is just ridiculous. I agree with, of all people, Benjamin Disraeli, who said “We are all born to love. It is the principle of existence and its only end.” Disraeli was right on at least two counts: first, as I’ll explain in a minute, we are born to love. The mechanisms of romantic love are hard wired and we are bound to that drive, those desires, like nothing else in life except eating and drinking. And second, I believe that romantic love, sex, and reproduction are the very purpose of our natural existence, the focus of life, and the only inherently meaningful thing about life itself beyond simply being.

I have a book called Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice for All Creation by Olivia Judson. It is a very clever book written as if Dr. Tatiana were answering letters about sex, reproduction, and other related issues from a wide variety of members of the animal kingdom. Talk about wacky. I’m telling you, insect reproduction in particular is bizarre and often deadly. Males in several species literally die for the opportunity to mate and pass on their genes. If life on this planet is the design of some intelligent creator, then he or she was on serious drugs when they came up with the myriad methods of sexual reproduction extant in the animal kingdom. If you want to get educated and blown away at the same time, I highly recommend reading Dr. Tatiana.

Now, insects don’t have the capacity for rational thought. At least we don’t think they do. Their behavior is thus controlled by their genetic code and is hard wired into their very being. How else can you explain the sometimes suicidal and often dangerous behavior indulged in by a whole host of critters in the animal kingdom? For a long time people believed that humans were immune to that sort of hard wiring, that our big brains removed us from the ranks of creatures who were programmed for certain responses and behaviors in the world of romantic love sex, and reproduction.

It is becoming crystal clear that we were very wrong about that. Very wrong indeed. Study after study has shown that desire and what we call romantic love is the result of chemical processes in the brain that are not only hard wired, but result in brain activity that is virtually indistinguishable from being on hard drugs, and in particular, drugs like cocaine. Now think about that for a second. Being head over heels in love results in or from, take your pick, brain activity that is indistinguishable from being on hard drugs. Robert Palmer was right: we are addicted to love. Is it any wonder that people routinely behave insanely when they are in that stomach wrenching, sleep deprived, dramatic phase of love? The poets who wrote about love didn’t know the half of it.

It turns out that the brain is, in fact, the most important organ related to love, sex, and reproduction. At every turn, genetic programs, working through the brain, guide humans in their dances of love. And, I know it’s not exactly politically correct to say this, but the scientific truth is that men’s and women’s brains are significantly different in the programs they run, the systems they create, and the desires they generate when it comes to romantic love. This is true about almost every aspect of romantic love and reproduction, including sexual orientation, desire, and how the sexes view their role in the courtship dance. And the most recent studies show that socio-cultural influences are less important on these very fundamentally hard wired programs than anybody suspected. Thus, while it is true to there is a large variation in what signals and stimuli people respond to in actualizing romantic love impulses, those impulses and the genetic programming underlying them are resistant to socio-cultural influences.

Here are a few specific (and I think amusing) results to ponder:

In a study of the effect of pictures of beautiful women on the brains of men, researchers found that the pictures activated the same reward circuits in the brains of heterosexual men as did food and cocaine. Here is proof – as if we needed it – that men truly are visually stimulated. As co-author of the study, Dan Ariely of MIT, said, “This is hard-core circuitry. Beauty is working similar to a drug.”

Another study showed men a slide show of random women, each being projected for several seconds; but the men could extend the viewing time for each picture by pressing keys on a keypad. You can guess the result. The men worked frantically to keep the beautiful women on the screen, on average pressing the keyboard more than 4,700 times over a 40 minute span, prompting one researcher to observe that “these guys look like rodents bar-pressing for cocaine.” As far as women are concerned, studies have demonstrated, for instance, that a woman’s choice of which men she says she finds “sexy” changes depending on how close she is to ovulation.

When close to ovulation, women tend to prefer the almost stereotypical tall, dark, rough-hewn guys, while selecting more round faced “nice guys” at other times. Women are also thousands of times more sensitive to musk-like odors than are men, which makes perfect sense when you think about it.

When it comes to studying romantic love, there is one person who stands out beyond all the rest. She is Helen Fisher of Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Dr. Fisher is a leader among the army of scientists who are studying the biological bases for romantic love.

Dr. Fisher has written two popular books on the subject, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love and The Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. And in 2002, she published a landmark study on what is happening in the brains of people who claim they are head-over-heels in love. I cannot possibly do justice to her work here, but let me talk about Dr. Fisher’s theories on how human beings fall in love.

Dr. Fisher has proposed that human beings fall in love in three stages.

Stage one consists of simple and generic lust – that undifferentiated general sense of desire. Studies show that lust is mediated in the brain by the hormones testosterone and estrogen, with testosterone having been shown to play a large role in women. These hormones appear to function to get people out looking, so to speak.

The second stage is attraction to a specific person. This is that truly love-struck phase where each instant apart is a lifetime, where you call each other 20 times a day, and where you can’t eat, can’t sleep, and can think of nothing else. In the attraction phase, a group of neuro-transmitters called “monoamines” play an important role. These include dopamine; adrenalin’the chemical of fight or flight; and serotonin, which plays a role both in romantic love and depression – big surprise there, right?

Dopamine is the “reward” chemical and its production is what we are after when we desperately need to be with our beloved. It’s also the chemical that is made in bucket-loads when are brains are exposed to cocaine. Serotonin is the tricky one in that it can actually induce temporary insanity. Thus, many of the millions of people who do crazy things for love, who swim rivers naked, jump out of airplanes with friends to hold up gigantic signs of proposal while they parachute into a lover’s back yard, and all the other stuff you’ve ever heard about, many of those people may actually qualify as temporarily insane.

The third phase in Dr. Fisher’s scheme is called attachment and it involves becoming bonded with and attached to a specific person. It is marked by the sense of calm, peace, and stability one feels with a long-term partner and is driven by the brain chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin. Crazily enough, oxytocin and vasopressin seem to interfere with the production of dopamine and adrenalin, which is why the madness of the head-over-heels attraction phase fades as the attachment phase progresses – a finding that actually provides a basis for the otherwise cynical definition of love I quoted earlier as a type of insanity curable by marriage.

In fact, studies have shown that vasopressin is responsible for monogamy in a critter called the prairie vol. Once vasopressin is triggered in the brain of the prairie vol, that vol is faithful to its mate for life. Block the vasopressin and that very same vol becomes promiscuous. These are very powerful chemicals. Things are obviously much more complicated in humans – history teaches us that vasopressin does not work nearly as well in people as it does in prairie vols – but, Dr. Fisher nonetheless cautions that you should never mess around with somebody you do not want to fall in love with, because if you generate enough oxytocin and vasopressin, you very well might fall in love despite yourself.

As a result of her’s and others’ studies, Dr. Fisher has drawn the remarkable conclusion that romantic love is not actually an emotion like joy or sadness. Instead, she claims it is a motivation system, a drive, a need that compels people to go out and find a partner and is more akin to the need to eat than being happy or sad. Romantic love, the attraction phase, says Dr. Fisher, is an even stronger desire than simple lust. “People don’t kill themselves just because they don’t get sex,” she says. But they will and do kill themselves over failed romantic love adventures.

There is so much more going on in evolutionary biology, but I don’t have the time to go into even a fraction of it. What I will say is the discoveries of how deeply hard wired we are for lust, attraction, romantic love, and attachment are not a surprise to me. Put simply, reproduction is much too important to leave to the whims of consciousness and culture.

And it makes sense that humans would be subject to the same forces that other higher animals are since we share common ancestors and evolved together on this planet. Said another way, before there was consciousness, there was reproduction and all the drives and hard wiring that nature provided to insure the continuation of life. For the last handful of millennia perhaps, humans have been able to cogitate about love and sex and reproduction. But a million years ago, those things just had to happen for the species to continue and nature had to insure that they would by hard wiring in the proper mechanisms. And nature was obviously successful since we are all here today. Science has and continues to confirm that we have inherited those mechanisms and we call them romantic love.

My point in telling you all this is not to pretend to be able to fully explain

why or how we fall in love, or even the biological basis for romantic love. It’s much more complicated than this, of course. Rather, my point is to simply suggest that there is in fact a powerful biological basis for romantic love, that it matters, and we should openly and fearlessly take account of it in our lives.

But these revelations do not sit well with many people, who bristle at the

thought that humans might be subject to instincts, hard wired instructions, and that something as sacred in our culture as romantic love and all the trappings of courtship, marriage, and the like that go with it, might be the product of brain chemicals that mimic the actions of drugs. As unsettling as the scientific discoveries may be, I think the truth is that we humans are a natural part of the natural world and are certainly a product of evolutionary biology. But we are also conscious beings with the ability to make choices that either compliment or reject the signals, motivations, and desires that our DNA has made part of our experience of life.

This is why it is useful to think of ourselves as both a “what” and a “who”.

The what is the primate creature that Mother Nature created out of the raw materials of life and that is subject to the same laws, the same forces, and the same desires as the other higher level creatures on the planet.

The who is a relatively new entity, a conscious being who seemingly at least,

can make choices about how to proceed with existence and at present, seems to be a little bit confused about what life, the universe, and everything is supposed to mean. These two aspects of humanity coexist in one body. Both matter.

This is also the reason I think people are often confused when they ask the

question, “What is the meaning of life?” Life is a process that goes on all around us, has been going on for millions upon millions of years. Humans are included in the process of life, but so is a snail darter or an elephant or a wasp. So when we think of life in the broadest sense, it is clear that the purpose and meaning of life is survival, reproduction and all that goes with it.

But when they ask the question,”What is the meaning of life?”, many people use

the word “life” to substitute for consciousness and sentience. And that, as they say, is a very different question and not one I have any desire to tackle today. Well, actually, I will say this. Whatever purpose or meaning there is to human existence, as opposed to life generally, has to been created, invented as it were, which is the role of culture, religion, and other philosophical enterprises that seek to imbue our conscious existence with meaning. But the meaning of life itself, the purpose of life, that is clear: it is to survive, today, tomorrow, and always.

Up until thirty to fifty years ago, most educated people saw a human baby as a

tabula rasa, a clean slate upon which anything could be written without the pesky influences of instincts and other hard wired instructions, or drives. Virtually nobody who studies these things today thinks of a baby as a tabula rasa. That concept has been relegated to the same graveyard as phlogiston and the ether.

Having said that, I must emphasize that just how much has been pre-programmed

or hard wired and how powerfully is subject to debate, some of it fierce. Still, it is clear that we are born with hard wired drives, call them instincts, call them predispositions, call them an inborn style, but they are there. And probably the most powerful, the one that dominates so much of our lives, is the need for romantic love. Like every other creature on the planet, human beings modify their behaviors to accommodate those incredibly powerful desires – or as Willow says, “we all do the wacky.”

Can these drives and desires be overcome by the who that we are – our conscious

selves? Of course they can. People routinely choose to do behaviors that conflict with the urges and desires brought about by romantic love and its chemical addictions to a person. It happens all the time. It’s one of the things that distinguish us from insects and the rest of the animal world. A praying mantis will go ahead and get its head bitten off in exchange for the opportunity to mate. Even the most testosterone and dopamine driven man, however, is most likely to decline that offer.

But does the fact that we can control our behaviors mean we should not acknowledge the drives and desires that are making our lives both wonderful and miserable? Shall we pretend that we have conscious control of who -and what gender – we find attractive and that any feelings we experience that are not sanctioned by the dominant culture are to be labeled as sinful and wrong?

My answer is an emphatic no. I think it is time we looked at these feelings,

these desires, without embarrassment, without shame, without feeling defensive that we are, after all, the product of evolution and are children of the Earth as much as children of our conscious souls.

While the idea that romantic love is a hard wired mechanism might spoil some of our notions of romance, it is also liberating. I suggest that if people would let go of the notion of the tabula rasa, would let go of the notion that falling down the rabbit hole of romantic love is a conscious choice, and realize that all those powerful feelings and urges are perfectly natural and are deeply imbedded into the essence of our natural being, perhaps we could all relax a little and not be so harsh with each other and ourselves.

Moreover, once that admission is made and the feelings themselves brought out into the open without embarrassment, they are much easier to deal with. Suppressed feelings and desires have a way of growing in the dark, just like mushrooms, but tend to lose their almost preternatural hold on us once we put them in the light of day.

Preachers routinely, and for thousands of years, have taken nature to be sinful. Western culture definitely assigns passion to the dark side, the night side, the female side of life, the side that is opposed by the light of reason, the cold hard facts of rationality that is ruled by the day and the male sky god. But when you pull all of nature over into the side of sin, you degrade the deepest and most fundamental parts of what we are as living creatures and deny the

importance of millions of years of evolutionary biology.

Our behavior matters, of course, and I am not advocating or justifying rampant

infidelity and wackiness just because we are hard wired for romantic love and all the feelings and desires that go with it. But I do think our ancestors and our Western religions got it totally wrong. I think that the world being split into male and female with romantic love and sexual reproduction, however those drives and desires may manifest in any individual, creates most of the pure joy

and happiness we experience in life.

In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that when we accuse a young man or woman of being “superficial” because they are attracted to somebody because that person is beautiful or sexy, we’ve got it backwards. There’s nothing superficial about it; rather such attraction is one of the most deeply rooted aspects of our natural existence. It is not only not sinful, it is part of the very essence of the inherent meaning of life.

Let me conclude by reaffirming that Willow was absolutely right when she told Buffy “Love makes you do the wacky.” We understand why that is so just a little better now than our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers did, but the feelings, the desires, the power of love remain undiluted and are eternally ours. No matter the cultural spin we put on them, love, sex and reproduction are simply fundamental to us and our beings. We truly are born to love. It is our birthright, our purpose, our meaning, and our glory.

Revised for print

Copyright – 2007 by Jim Checkley

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Jim Checkley

July 23, 2006

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Jim Checkley

July 17, 2005

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A Century of Relativity

by Jim Checkley

One of my intellectual heroes is the French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincare. This is because he is universally regarded as the last generalist—that is, the last person to do original work in all branches of mathematics. In 1902 Poincare wrote a book called Science and Hypothesis in which he posited three fundamental problems that befuddled physics: first, the motion of particles suspended in liquid, called Brownian motion, that defied explanation; second, the strange fact that when light hit a sensitive metal plate, electrons were knocked off the plate, a phenomenon called the photoelectric effect; and finally, the abject failure of physicists to detect the “ether”, the hypothesized medium in space through which light waves were said to propagate.

Three years later, in 1905, a 26 year old patent clerk living in Bern, Switzerland, named Albert Einstein, solved all three problems and then some. “A storm broke loose in my mind,” Einstein said about that heady year. Between March and September he published five remarkable papers (all without citation to other work), each of which either created or transformed a field of physics. Physicists call 1905 Einstein’s Miracle Year and his output is generally regarded as the single most productive burst of creativity in the history of science.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Miracle Year, 2005 has been declared the World Year of Physics by the United Nations General Assembly, the United States Congress, and a host of physics institutions around the world. Celebrations are happening in more than 30 nations and in the United States, scores of universities have conducted or plan to conduct programs in honor of Einstein’s accomplishments and to promote science generally.

And what accomplishments they were! I promise to talk physics for only a minute or two, in order to sum up what happened in 1905. Most famously, Einstein created Special Relativity, and with it, the only equation Steven Hawking’s publishers would allow him to put in his book A Short History of Time. You all know it, E = mc2, which was derived in its own three page paper that might as well have been attached to Einstein’s original paper on Special Relativity.

Ever pithy, Einstein described relativity this way: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.” Special Relativity was subsumed into General Relativity, published in 1915, which overturned Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. Einstein, and relativity, truly entered into our culture in 1919, when Sir Arthur Eddington conducted starlight bending around the sun experiments that showed the superiority of Einstein’s equations over those of Newton. Relativity revolutionized how we view space and time and lead to the development of atomic power and nuclear weapons.

In explaining the photoelectric effect, Einstein discovered that light is both a wave and a particle and set the foundations for quantum mechanics, one of the most important disciplines of the 20th century. It was for this discovery, and not relativity, that Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921. The irony here, of course, is that Einstein never accepted that quantum mechanics gave a sensible picture of the universe, asserting that “God does not play at dice.”

In the third of the big three papers, Einstein proved the correctness of the atomic theory of matter by explaining that Brownian motion was caused when particles suspended in a liquid collide with the atoms or molecules that make up the liquid. That may sound obvious now, but back then, Einstein’s paper was crucial in converting the last skeptics of atomic theory.

Oh, and Einstein also published his thesis dissertation in 1905; it remains one of the most cited scientific papers ever.

Through his radical and revolutionary discoveries, Einstein became the very symbol of genius in the 20th century. Many experts on such things believe that in the history of Western Civilization, only Aristotle, Galileo, and Newton were his equals. Einstein, however, frequently downplayed his brain power with statements such as: “I have no special gift. I am only passionately curious.”

But there was no denying that Einstein was eccentric. His famously chaotic hair actually represented a famously chaotic personality. Einstein never learned to drive, for example, and when he walked home from his office at Princeton University, sockless and deep in thought, he would rattle his umbrella against the bars of an iron fence. If for any reason the umbrella missed a bar, he would go back to the beginning. And his lack of fashion sense would appall any self-respecting metrosexual. But, as always, Einstein had a clever quip to disarm his critics. Comparing the difficulty of physics and fashion, Einstein remarked: “Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.”

And Einstein was famous. Oh, was he famous. He is the only scientist to achieve pop star status—something that has endured, if not increased, after his death 50 years ago. I think part of the magic of Einstein is that most people do not understand much about what he did, but they know it was important, they know it changed the world, and he seemed like a self-effacing, harmless eccentric who was accessible and not encased in some ivory tower. Americans like their geniuses to be nonthreatening—and Einstein fit the bill.

Whatever the reasons for it, Einstein used his celebrity to speak out against fascism, racial prejudice, and the McCarthy hearings. He was the only scientist with enough prestige and authority to sign the letter that convinced Franklin Roosevelt to authorize the creation of the atomic bomb. And in 1952, just three years before his death from a heart aneurysm, he was offered the presidency of Israel, which he politely declined.

It is difficult to overestimate how large an influence Einstein’s theories, especially relativity, have had on us and our culture. “We are a different race of people than we were a century ago,” says astrophysicist Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History, “utterly and completely different, because of Einstein.”

For all these reasons, and many more, Time Magazine declared Albert Einstein to be the Person of the Century and this year has been proclaimed his year. That is all I am going to say about Einstein directly, and if you are interested, there are a number of good biographies about him, including the one by Ronald W. Clark, which many people feel is the definitive work.

Instead, I want to talk about the impact that Einstein and science generally has had on us over the last century. Because I think it is ironic that the world is celebrating science this year, is trying to use this anniversary to rekindle interest in science across the globe. It is ironic because although the 20th century was the greatest 99 years of scientific and technical progress in the history of Western Civilization, much of it on the back of Einstein, it would be a mistake to claim we are a scientific society. I grant you that because we live in a highly technological society, it is only natural to believe that we also live in a highly scientific one. In fact, just the opposite is true.

Let me give you a few statistics I took off the Internet that I, at least, find disturbing. The belief in pseudo-science and fundamentalist religious assertions is staggering. Listen to this: 47 percent of people surveyed in the United States said they believed that the Book of Genesis was literally true and accurately set forth how the world was created; 65 percent believe in Noah’s Flood; 41 percent believe that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time. But it’s not just religious fundamentalism: according to a survey taken by the National Science Foundation, 70 percent of Americans do not understand the scientific process; 40 percent believe in Astrology, that is, that the alignment of the planets at one’s birth determines one’s personality and destiny; 60 percent agreed strongly that some people have psychic powers; 30 percent think UFOs are genuine alien spaceships; and millions call psychic hotlines to get advice about finances, romances, and the future.

Belief, not knowledge, is the preferred currency of the day. Magical, superstitions, and irrational thinking are everywhere and the dedication to observation, facts, and the truth those facts reveal, which is at the heart of the scientific approach, is sorely lacking in virtually every aspect of our culture. This phenomenon is, I think, directly correlated with the fantastic strides made by science in illuminating the nature of the world and human beings’ relation to it. It has been said that “The darkest shadows are cast by the brightest lights.” The bright light of science has cast terribly dark shadows for many people who desperately cling to superstition, mythology, and blind faith in order to feel comfortable and at home in a world science has revealed to be harsh, finite, deadly, and without much mystery or magic.

Thus, rather than enhance the scientific and fact based framework of reality, I think that the development of relativity–and quantum mechanics–as well as other scientific intellectual paradigms of the 20th century, including evolution, psychiatry, genetics, and many more, has resulted in the alienation of many people, who either do not understand or do not want to understand the implications of our scientific discoveries and therefore have chosen to base their perception of reality and the conduct of their lives on something other than the cold hard facts.

This is quite a turn of events from what our ancestors just a few hundred years ago believed would happened. The appeal to rationality, to science, to reason was seen during the Enlightenment as inevitably bringing about progress in how people lived, progress for the better, progress that would eventually lead to the perfecting of the world. Unitarians are fond of quoting Thomas Jefferson’s prediction that once all men became rational and reason held sway, then they would all be Unitarians. Well, Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant man of many wonderful accomplishments, but apparently being a seer was not one of them. We Unitarians remain a small minority religion and, in terms of influence, are arguably less influential as a movement than we were in the late 19th century when many of the patron saints of the denomination like Ralph Waldo Emerson held sway and divinity schools like Harvard were populated by many Unitarian thinkers.

What happened? We don’t have nearly enough time today to discuss that issue. Part of it, I believe, is as I suggested: science has revealed a world that is harsh, incomprehensible to the average person, and very unlike what we wish it would be. And, our world is full of uncertainty, ambiguity, and, a sense of insecurity and fear kicked up many notches by 9/11 and war. In this regard, I think Albert Einstein and relativity get a bad rap. That is, Einstein has been blamed or credited, take your pick, by many for the development of moral relativism during the 20th century. Today, moral relativism is used as a curse term by conservatives and the religious right. And while I utterly disagree with them regarding the value of thinking about morals in a relative rather than absolute way, it is also simply untrue that moral relativism derived from Einstein’s theory of relativity.

First of all, Einstein never said “everything is relative, there are no absolutes.” In fact, Einstein developed relativity theory (which he preferred to call a theory of invariances) so that all observers, in whatever reference frame, could get the same answers to their physics experiments. It is true that various measurements will be different in each reference frame, but there are right answers—the same ultimate answers that everybody would agree are correct. Einstein did not bring about the end of certainty in knowledge; by fixing the problems Poincare pointed out, he actually restored it.

This did not stop the pundits from associating new ideas in art, literature, philosophy, and music with Einstein’s theory of relativity. Einstein rejected all such associations. Nevertheless, despite what Einstein said or didn’t say, the phrase “everything is relative” entered into our culture and became synonymous with the notion that there is never an absolutely right answer to any question. The phrases “it’s all relative” and “everything is relative” combine for about 165,000 hits on Google. This concept has saturated our culture in a way that Einstein would both reject and never imagined and has led, I believe, to the transformation of the belief that everybody is entitled to place his or her own opinion into the free market place of ideas, into the belief that each and every opinion must be treated with respect because there are no actually right answers to anything.

This concept—and so much more—has also provided a basis for all those who long for the good old days of traditional values, solid cultural boundaries, and, above all, certainty, to come together and rebel against a culture that, to them, has lost its moorings and exists in a world of ambiguity and doubt, with no boundaries, no guidance, and no rules. This is decidedly not what Jefferson had in mind when he foresaw a world where Unitarianism was the dominant religion.

But despite my discomfort with all this, it might not matter so much if the people who believed in unscientific, irrational things kept their beliefs to themselves. But that is decidedly not the case with regard to religious fundamentalism. Fundamentalist religions of all denominations are the fastest growing religions in the world. According to reports on the Internet, fundamentalist Islam has been the fastest growing religion in the world over the last 30 years. And you don’t need me to tell you about the growth of fundamentalist Christianity in this country and the increasing amount of power and influence Christian fundamentalists wield. Right after the last election, Time Magazine’s cover story was on the 25 most influential fundamentalists in the country. They, and millions like them, have, to their credit, gotten off their backsides and entered into the fray, and now have influence and sometimes control at all levels of government and are seeking more. And the effects are being felt over much of the country. Here are just a few examples.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the board governing of the local zoo has authorized the construction of an exhibit that presents Biblical creation as the explanation for how animals got on this planet and their diversity. The justification used for this was, in part, that a small statue of an elephant in the style of Hinduism was present at the zoo.

At a park called Dinosaur Adventure Land, run by creationists near Pensacola, Florida, visitors are informed that man coexisted with dinosaurs. This fantasy accommodates the creationists’ view that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that Darwin’s theory of evolution is false.

At the Grand Canyon, the Department of the Interior is selling creationist literature that claims that the canyon was made during Noah’s Flood and not over many millions of years of erosion by the Colorado River. This situation got the attention of scientists from seven organizations who sent a joint letter to the Department of the Interior demanding that the literature be removed from the book store. But when the Grand Canyon National Park superintendent attempted to block the sale of the book, he was overruled by headquarters. I can report to you that the privately run Noah’s Flood tours of the Grand Canyon have been cancelled for economic reasons, but as far as I can ascertain, the Bush Administration still condones the sale of the book.

In Texas, and around the country, fundamentalist pharmacists are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills and other related devices based on personal moral standards. In 1965, the Supreme Court of the United States found that a Connecticut law making it illegal to sell contraceptives even to married couples was unconstitutional as a violation of the right of privacy. Today, however, legislation has been introduced in a number of states to specifically authorize pharmacists to refuse to fill a prescription based on their personal beliefs.

The Catholic Church has become more vocal and more radical on issues of science and religion. Two pieces in the Times last week (“Finding Design in Nature” by Christoph [Cardinal] Schonborn, July 7, 2005 and “Leading Cardinal Redefines Church’s View on Evolution: He Says Darwinism and Catholicism May Conflict” by Cornelia Dean and Laurie Goodstein, July 9, 2005) assert the view that evolution is in conflict with Catholic teaching.

And it’s impossible not to note that yesterday, J.K. Rowling sold millions of copies of the sixth volume in the Harry Potter series, a series that the Pope, who as a Cardinal was head of what used to be called the Inquisition, has condemned. According to signed letters scanned and published on LifeSiteNews.com, a family-oriented news portal on the Internet, Benedict wrote in 2003 to the author of a book critical of the Potter series: “It is good that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly.” My soul is probably too old and already too corrupted for the Potter books to do too much damage, but I picked up my copy of the sixth volume yesterday and have already read the first 130 pages.

Finally—and I could go on, you understand—in Cobb County, Georgia, the Board of Education required that stickers that asserted that evolution is only a theory be placed into science books. The stickers read: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” This was in keeping with the President’s own scientific understanding of evolution when he said: “On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth.”

Now it’s true that the sticker requirement was struck down by the courts, but that’s not the point. The point is that fundamentalists are everywhere trying to remake the world in their own image, trying to undo 400 years of scientific progress in our understanding of ourselves and the world, trying to make the world safe for their version of Christianity and its dogma so that they can luxuriate in their framework of life–a framework that at its heart is, I believe, unsupportable, but one that, for them at least, is also full of hope, promise, and self-satisfaction.

It is unreasonable and unrealistic to believe that fundamentalists are going to give up their religion, their beliefs, and the hope, promise, and satisfaction they provide, merely because somebody points out that scientific observation conflicts with those beliefs. You understand nothing about the human heart and soul if you do not understand the lengths to which they will go to keep an unwanted truth at bay. You understand nothing about the power of fundamentalist religion if you do not understand how deeply and powerfully it affects the people who surrender to it. The heart and soul do not care if something is true in the scientific, intellectual sense in order to become attached to it.

Human beings have the ability to invest themselves in beliefs that have no rational basis. You all know that. It happens all the time. But what quality of belief allows it to persist in the face of insurmountable evidence against it? This is a complicated question, one that I wish I knew the answer to, but I think we begin to understand it when we realize that whatever gives life purpose, meaning, and hope is the stuff that moves our hearts and souls and is believed. And for most people, there seems to be an imbalance between belief and knowledge in how they affect us and how they are valued. Knowledge tends to feed the intellect. Belief tends to feed the heart and soul. For so many people, satisfying the heart and soul, whatever is believed and however that is accomplished, is what is important in life; the rest, it doesn’t matter much, and can be left at the door.

In vivid and stark contrast, many Unitarians are the kind of people who, as Davidson is fond of saying, believe in salvation through bibliography. A central element of our religion is that it is one where knowledge and the intellect take precedence over, and in some sense control, what the heart and soul are able to believe. Unitarians insist on taking their brains with them into the pews.

The problem is that not only are they—we—in the minority, but the millions upon millions of people who believe in things that are irrational, delusional, unscientific, and downright wrong, they will never give up those beliefs on the basis of mere facts. We live in a post factual age—something I see increasingly expressed in outlets like the New York Times, the various news magazines, and even the cable news networks. I have concluded that Canon was right: Image is everything. And in a world where all things are relative, where everybody is entitled to his or her own opinion and have it respected out of PC etiquette, where there are no firm, absolute answers, then anything goes and belief–something that is at least an order of magnitude stronger than mere knowledge–will have its day.

I fear we are in danger of losing the gains made in the last 400 years against superstition, fear, and irrationality. Many before us have paid a high price to bring our culture to this point of understanding of the world and our place in it. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake because he asserted that the stars were suns and there were other planets and they were inhabited. Michael Servetus suffered the same fate for claiming there were errors in the concept of the Trinity and that it was nonbiblical. Galileo was condemned because he espoused the Copernican system, a system that yanked Earth, and with it humans, from the center of creation. Joseph Priestly, the discoverer of oxygen, was forced to flee from England after his laboratories were attacked because he was a Unitarian who asserted that Jesus was not the literal Son of God.

But we are not going to retain what has been so costly won by simply asserting that reason and logic should be honored over mere belief. We know too much about how human beings work to return to that. Even economists now admit that people do not behave rationally in the market based on evidence that demonstrates that where money is concerned, people do not behave rationally, but rather indulge their hearts and souls when buying cars, houses, clothes, and everything else. The wonder is that it has taken economists this long to figure that out.

I think the challenge to Unitarianism and to Unitarians everywhere is to develop and share a religion that provides something worth believing, worth cherishing, worth investing one’s life in, while not leaving our brains at the door, while not succumbing to illusion and delusion, and while being true to ourselves–and by that I mean our hearts and souls as well as our brains. The Unitarian religion has always provided an abundance of things worth knowing; we need to strive just as hard and just as passionately to provide something worth believing.

This won’t happen by itself. Like the fundamentalists, we have to leave the safety of our sanctuary, and venture out into the world and proclaim that it is possible to be both scientific and heartfelt, to demand understanding based on knowledge without throwing out the deeply held beliefs that nourish our souls. But that will require us to take a stand, to assert that this way—our way—is better than their way and thus leave behind the shackles of political correctness and an irrational tolerance of things that we don’t believe in and that we actually believe hurt us and our neighbors.

As you leave church today, consider that our building is invisible until you are on its very threshold. Consider that we are isolated from the world and think about whether that is what you want for your religion, the one you’ve chosen, the one you believe in. Consider if you are willing to stand up for what you know and believe against a world engulfed in fundamentalist and irrational beliefs, beliefs that clash with much that we in this church hold dear. Consider if you are willing to be a beacon on a hill before it’s too late.

Presented July 17, 2005

First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

Austin, Texas

Revised for Print

Copyright © 2005 by Jim Checkley

Permission is given for noncommercial, personal use.