I’ve been thinking lately about the New Atheists™—the Christopher Hitchenses and Richard Dawkinses, with their best selling books and talk show appearances. I’ve been asking myself: Why is this New Atheism™ so important to them?

The god they don’t believe in is a Tooth Fairy god, a Santa Claus god, a god of the gaps. It’s the god of fifteen-year-old fundamentalists and the earnest, recently born again.

You and I don’t believe in that god either. Yet somehow, for these few proud folks, this disbelief is profoundly important to them.

I’m trying to remember back to when I first found out Santa isn’t real. Click to continue reading “Santa Claus and the New Atheists™”

I picked up a copy of Sharon Welch’s After Empire: The Art and Ethos of Enduring Peace at GA, and I’m slowly working my way through it. From page five:

What I know in my soul I learned from the lives of my mother and father: that it is possible to work for justice without self-righteous condemnation of others, acting instead with good-humored resilience in the face of defeat and with a deep joy and zest for life. Where they saw injustice, they responded and invited others to act with them. They did not waste time denouncing others’ apathy or indifference. The range of activities they embraced was vast but united by a common theme: doing something now, with the resources at hand, to make a difference in people’s lives.

From page eighteen: Click to continue reading “Justice: Condemnation versus joy”

Carl Scovel laid out a nice typology at his farewell sermon at GA. I missed the sermon, but Ron Robinson does a good job laying it out.

Scoven says we’ve got two competing theologies in play in UUism.
Universalism focuses on god’s love for all and bends toward radical welcome. Inclusionism focuses on our ability (even, duty?) to be welcoming and bends toward fragmentation.

Not that Scovel had this in mind, but does this explain the recent Brown Bag Controversy?

“I am not a racist… and it is not OK to tell me that I am,” says Jamie Goodwin over at Trivium.

In fact it is an insult, an attack even, on everything I stand for. While I applaud our work on anti-racism as an organization i find it extremely unfair, and frankly a little frightening, for hard working, justice centered people, to self identify with smug looks on their faces, “Racist of course.. I am an American.”

Meanwhile, Joseph Santos-Lyons had this to say:

I believe AR/AO/MC is manifested in authentic relationship. In our authenticity, we are accountable and caring. In our accountability, we are reconciled and restored. In our caring, we nurture our greatest gift, the power of love. I believe true community to be intergenerational, multiracial, multicultural community, and it is these spaces and places I seek to be and minister.

Both are very strong statements about UU anti-racist work. And both come from places of pain.

Because it’s slower than god over here. Thinking about moving to a new host, so if you have an good recommendations of folks who can host five or ten domains for cheap, let me know.

Oh, the irony! Or as one digger put it, “I support this man’s right to not support his right to do what he is doing in order to support my right to not support what he is doing.” (Hat tip to digg.)