Sermon: The Evolution of Humanism
This sermon was written for the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas. It was first delivered there on Sunday June 4, 2023. Thank you to Rev. Jami Yandle for the pulpit invite and for suggesting a sermon on humanism.
If you’d rather watch (or listen) than read, you can see this Sermon on San Gabriel UU’s YouTube Page. (Call to worship at 11:20, sermon at 19:00.)
Call to Worship
This is an excerpt from a letter by Rev. David E. Bumbaugh in 2001 called “Toward a Humanist Vocabulary of Reverence, ”
As an observer of and participant in contemporary Unitarian Universalism, I have found myself wondering what has happened to the Humanist witness among us. How has it happened that we, who once seemed to set the agenda for religious discourse, now find ourselves increasingly on the defensive, if not engaged in a monologue? I would submit that to some degree at least we are talking to ourselves because we have allowed ourselves to be defined by the opposition. We have dismissed traditional religion as an atavistic aberration. We have given up the hope of a constructive dialogue. We have manned the ramparts of reason and are prepared to defend the citadel of the mind against a renewal of superstition until the very end. But in the process of defending, we have lost the vocabulary of reverence, the ability to speak of that which is sacred, holy, of ultimate importance to us, the language which would allow us to enter once more into critical dialogue with the rest of the religious community. If this be so, then the recovery of a vital vocabulary of reverence is a task of great urgency for those of us who cherish the Humanism tradition.
Sermon
Fun fact: the last time I was in the San Gabriel pulpit was February 6th 2011, y’all were holding services at the Sun City rec center and hadn’t called your first minister yet… how many of y’all were around that long ago? Alright.
Well, before we get started, I just want to give you a heads-up about how I preach — this sermon will have quite a few references — what I request of you is that you just roll with me… the text of the sermon is online and there are QR codes at the back so it is easy for you to find and so you can chase down references to your heart’s content afterward.
To put it another way: We’re gonna hike this trail together this morning, I’m gonna point out stuff and keep walking. The annotated field guide is available so you can walk it at your own pace again later, if you so desire. That make sense? Alright let’s dive in to Rev. Bumbaugh’s letter…
We have dismissed traditional religion as an atavistic aberration. We have given up the hope of a constructive dialogue. We have manned the ramparts of reason and are prepared to defend the citadel of the mind against a renewal of superstition until the very end.
Powerful words… We’re going to walk through these three assertions and see if we can’t use them to chart a way forward… a way for the evolution of humanism.
First: We have dismissed traditional religion as an atavistic aberration.
Ooohh.. Atavistic, that’s a good word. I’ll tell you this, when I was a self-righteous atheist in college — that word was one of my favorite insults, it was ‘bringing out the big guns’ — it was the rhetorical equivalent of a sniper rifle — ready to take aim at anyone who dared to bring out some of that ‘dead old white man’ stuff…
Now I’ve done a lot of work on my self-righteousness. Along the way, I dropped the label ‘atheist’ because I realized that it was just the antithesis of the same childish approach to God that I had rejected when I left the Christian church of my childhood. Are y’all familiar with Hegel’s dialectic: Thesis — the old belief, Antithesis — the counter belief, Synthesis — the new thing born of the resolution of tensions between the thesis and antithesis…
Well, in my life, traditional American-style evangelical Christianity was the thesis, atheism was the antithesis, and what we’re here to talk about this morning — the evolution of humanism — that’s as good a name as any for the synthesis that I’m working through — the synthesis that I’m inviting you to be part of.
First, let’s acknowledge one of the many elephants in the room — our dismissal of traditional religion is far from even-handed, am I right? Are we as dismissive of buddhism, or indigenous religions, or taoism? Heck, we’ve even got a soft spot for the bhagavad gita! Secular humanism as we experience it, grew directly and distinctly out of a rejection of western Christianity -and in true colonialist fashion it dismissively and disdainfully included all other religions in the ‘rejection of dogma’, but its target was always clear — a Christian church so unhealthy and splintered into denominations and corrupted by egocentric and ethnocentric and nationalistic biases that it had become unrecognizable.
Let me step sideways and put it to you like this: the teachings of Jesus were so profound, and hard, and so far ahead of their time — that we spent 2000 years turning him into a God, into an Idol, as an excuse to ignore the true implications of those teachings. And you can still see it today… but we’ll come back to that…
So secular humanism was an antithesis that grew up in opposition to a corrupt church that claimed sole ownership of the right to define and determine what the terms good and evil meant & who was eligible to be considered good. So — some natural philosophers and others put their heads and their hearts together and they said, “NO.” You do not have to subscribe to these metaphysical belief systems to be a good person, to have ethics or morality… What they were really saying is, “You, church, you have become immoral and we will no longer allow you to lie to our faces about what morality is or where it comes from… your moral bankruptcy makes you ineligible for such a task.” …and they were right. For the most part, they were spot on. I mean the prosperity gospel and just war theory and a bunch of similar garbage had been produced and marketed and sold and justified… So these humanist forebears doubled down hard on a purely materialist view of the universe and a view of humanity that looks a lot like what we think of today as homo-economicus — beings, primarily, of reason who also happen to have bodies and, occasionally, emotions.
Now, I’m going to leave this thread about the nature of humans and the concept of reason dangling here, for just a bit, and we’re going to circle back to it…
Our second touchstone line: We have given up the hope of a constructive dialogue.
Whew… I know that this letter was written 22 years ago, but could it possibly be more relevant?
We have given up the hope of a constructive dialogue.
Why? Because we are guilty of the same error that derailed our forebears, the same transgression that birthed colonialism and racism and all the other ‘ism’s we’ve been fighting over at the Lege this year: dehumanization. We, my religiously liberal friends and colleagues, have stopped believing that ‘THEY’ are really people… we can talk with people, we can negotiate with people, BUT NOT WITH THEM… have you seen them? Have you heard them? How could we possibly have a constructive dialogue with THEM?
Hurt people, hurt people.
But when we stop seeing those hurt people as people, when we vilify them, when we ‘other’ them, when we draw a line in the sandy desert bottom of our heart and put them on the other side of it — WE dehumanize THEM. Father Richard Rohr — by far my favorite contemporary Catholic theologian says this, “(O)ur real problem (is) our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others.” The first step on the path to scapegoating and sacrificing is dehumanization — and while our learned, liberal, educated version of it may seem more subtle — it is still the same disease masquerading as a cure.
In his recent book The Persuaders, Anand Giridharadas evaluates what solutions exist to this divided and divisive culture problem. His answer ought not surprise anyone in a UU congregation (but probably will)… Let’s start like this: anyone in here done small group ministry work: chalice circles, wellspring — if you have, just raise a hand. What would you say is at the heart of that small group work?…
Listening — wow, right! When we learn to quiet down and listen to another person with curiosity, attention, and compassion — that’s amazing right? And when we get to be listened to — not based on what we had to say or how well we said it, but just acknowledged as a being who is worth being listened to… that forms some powerful bonds, it invites us to open up some locked doors inside ourselves, to share a little deeper, to be a little bit more vulnerable…
That’s what Anand Giridharadas and his team found — the most transformative technique of modern political and social activism is deep canvassing. Some early experiments started in California after the LGBTQIA+ community there lost a ballot initiative. They just went to their neighbors who had voted against the initiative and asked ‘why?’… here’s the catch. They meant it! They actually wanted to understand why, they showed up ready and willing to listen and to learn what they didn’t know — they couldn’t understand how someone could vote against their right (to marry in this case), so they went to those people — earnestly, humbly and said ‘help me understand.’ You want to know the magic part. Those conversations changed people’s hearts and minds. People who had voted against the ballot initiative now had a single, positive, affirmative, usually one-time connection to a person directly affected by the legislation. They now saw those people — as PEOPLE. Not as an abstract concept or category, not as a threatening ‘other’ or existential cultural danger, but as people, like them, trying to live their best life and get by in this crazy world…
I’m going to pull one other thread into this pattern, one that bridges between our dismissal of tradition and our willingness to humanize those different from us. The example comes from a book called The Cosmic Serpent by Canadian anthropologist Jeremy Narby. Did you know that modern thoracic surgery, including open-heart and organ replacement, would be impossible without Amazonian shaman? Curare, an indigenous plant medicine unique to the Amazon was originally developed by shaman to coat arrow tips for hunting monkeys in the jungle — you see, if you shoot a monkey with an untreated arrow head its muscles and tail convulse upon impact, clinging to the nearby branches — leaving the monkey out of reach of the hunting party. So how did shaman discover how to make curare? According to the shaman, they learned the recipe from the plants themselves during their vision quests… Now, of course, the scientists who “discovered” the compound, isolated the active ingredients and figured out how to synthesize versions of the compound in the lab — they framed it like this, “We discovered this compound from the natural cornucopia of the Amazon.” when the reality is, “We learned of this compound from our siblings who live in the Amazon and whose relationships to that place, their medicinal knowledge, and the origins of that knowledge we simply do not understand.” Narby’s anti-colonial, anti-racist position is this: we should take indigenous people at their word, instead of assuming that their cultural and mythological belief systems discredit their ability to have a viable perspective… In the words of Dr. Martin Shaw, “What is superstition to some is cause and effect to others.” Put another way, in the words of Arthur C. Clarke (y’all have heard this one), “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But we’ve had a very one-way interpretation of what constitutes an advanced technology, haven’t we — technology is machines and microchips not meditation or entheogens… this is the colonial chauvinism of our culture, and it has infected even our humanism… That’s enough of a teaser in that direction, let’s move on to our third assertion:
We have manned the ramparts of reason and are prepared to defend the citadel of the mind against a renewal of superstition until the very end.
If you believe that you ARE reason, with the body and your feelings as incidentals, what else can you do? You must man the ramparts! But, luckily for us, the founders of humanism, despite doubling down on reason, left us a really important fulcrum for the next phase of our evolution: an imperative to follow science wherever it leads us. For our purposes today- there are three critical aspects of that imperative that we need to consider: First, our relationship with the unknown; second, the contemporary findings of external science; and, third, the contemporary findings of internal science.
Let’s begin with the unknown — not just the unknown, but perhaps the unknowable: I’d like to hear from you all some things, small things or big things, that are either unknown or unknowable? (repeat after audience)
So, even if we acknowledge that our practice of science can help us learn things, help us explore things that were unknown and make them known, explore things that were previously unknowable and make them knowable… there is still a lot of unknown out there — I would propose that there is far more unknown than known out there… this brings us right home to the crux, the fulcrum, of our scientific imperative.
Science says, very literally, we know nothing. Every Law is only as good as the first experiment that disproves it. Some of us like to use science as a tool for generating certainty and stability, I’m telling you that’s nonsense! Science is a tool for discovering and grappling with the unknown, using it for generating certainty is a misapprehension of the entire program. Yet, of course, we have built space ships and planes and cars and factories and generators and robots and computers — and we’ve made them more or less reliable and dependable… isn’t that a kind of certainty? For sure. Science, as a tool in combination with reason and motivation, can give us a certain kind of circumscribed practical mastery over our immediate environment. And that is SUPER cool. But the heart of science is not in that moment of applied engineering that reliably solves a practical problem, the heart of science, the soul of science, is in that next step out into the dark abyss of the unknown… it is the courage to explore that darkness with the tiny, focused pen-light that is the scientific method.
I want to plant a seed here, because this tendency to take a tool that was designed for discovery and to use it to try and produce certainty — that’s not just a science problem, that is also a religion problem, and a spirituality problem. I think that we need to re-master the art of not knowing. I think we need to rediscover what it feels like to say “I don’t know” — not as angry denial, or shameful admissions — but saying “I don’t know” as an act of wisdom, as the proper statement of a true elder.
Let’s grab our next thread and see if we can weave it in: science, in this case psychology and neuroscience, have also taught us some things about ourselves that are relevant to the evolution of humanism. First, we know from brain damage studies that people with impaired or absent emotional systems but functioning rational cognition will basically wither and die without daily intervention. On the flipside, people with severe damage to their rational systems but normally functioning emotional systems can live relatively normal lives, although their career options are significantly limited. These extreme cases combined with much other work in the fields make one thing abundantly clear. To paraphrase Brene Brown: We aren’t thinning beings that happen to feel, we are feeling beings who happen to think. This is not to devalue rationality, it is to accurately place rationality within the internal ecology of human beings. Here’s another provisional finding of the research — there is a surprising relationship between language and emotion. You have heard that old saw about the fifty different Inuit words for snow. In recent work, most surveyed Americans can only list three emotions that they experience: happiness, sadness, and anger. Researchers like Marc Brackett and others have discovered some amazing things: they developed a grid of one-hundred clearly named emotions — with a horizontal gradation from less pleasant to more pleasant and a vertical gradation from low energy to high energy. Their research found that increasing people’s emotional vocabulary — i.e. just teaching them these words and what they mean, enabled people to experience more nuanced versions of emotion in their lives… think about that for a minute…
If the only words you know are happy, sad, angry — then every time you have feelings, that complicated, nuanced, delicate feeling is forced to transmute itself into one of those three things… the simple act of building a vocabulary of feeling enables you to experience more nuanced feeling states, like feeling: apprehensive or sullen or cheerful or complacent. Language matters — it opens up our capacity to experience ourselves.
Okay, one more — this one from an advanced meditation study — and I have to tell you, that only picking one meditation study was really a challenge for me — if this is a curiosity area for you I recommend the book Altered Traits by Goleman and Davidson. Okay, here’s the experiment — I put your hand inside a special glove that gets very cold very fast — enough to cause significant discomfort and pain, but not enough to do any tissue damage. You are only exposed to this pain for a few seconds, but I give you a warning several minutes in advance and monitor your mental and physiological responses through a PET scan. If you are just a normal westerner, your brain begins suffering from the moment I warn you up to the time when the pain happens and for several minutes thereafter. So, first you are experiencing anxiety, fear and phantom pains because you know the pain is coming, then you experience the pain, then you spend more minutes reliving and remembering both the pain and the pre-pain anxiety — this sounding familiar to anyone?? Yeah, every day right? Now, let me tell you what happens to an advanced meditator in this scenario — nothing. Okay, that’s not quite descriptive enough. When the pain stimulus is present, you can see the pain centers in the brain light up — but that’s it, just the pain centers — no storm of other spin-off activity. And no build up — no anxiety leading up to the pain and no re-experiencing the pain in memory afterward. I just want you to reflect for a minute on how radically your life would change if you only had to live every painful thing in your life one time? No anxious anticipation of what painful thing will or might or could happen… no reliving or re-experiencing that pain over and over again as a story or a grievance or a trauma. Holy cow… what would it be like to live like that? There are those among us who know, they seem pretty cool with it and willing to share what they’ve learned…
Alright, so that’s external science — what about internal science? Is such a thing even possible? If you’ve heard the Dalai Lama on this subject, I think he’s pretty compelling on the idea that the same ‘pen light in the darkness’ use of the scientific method can be applied to our internal perceptual states in the same way that we apply it externally. Of course, there are challenges. Just to give one example: if I want to replicate a physics experiment I can systematically validate the specifications and tolerances on my measurement devices, insure that I have my setup identical to the original, in functional terms. When we’re doing internal science, we’re each trapped in our own lab — forced to rely on intersubjective instead of objective definitions of tools and processes and outcomes… Now, for the hard core materialsists among us — the gap I just described feels like an unbridgeable chasm. I don’t think it is nearly as wide or deep as it is reliant upon something fundamental that was damaged by the same immature corruption that lead to the establishment of secular humanism in the first place: trust.
Trust — that’s a tough one, right? That Machiavelli dude really did us in on trust, didn’t he. Not to mention Plato and his Ring of Gyges? I mean, look at marketing budgets these days? Who has space left for trust. Here’s the truth — nobody who remains stuck in the cycle of anxious anticipation and resentful rumination has the space for trust. There is just too much possibility to worry about and too much trauma to relive… ain’t nobody got time for that. Trust is harder than science. Science let’s you bring your pen light, small and feeble as it is. Trust requires you to turn off the pen light, stick it in your pocket, and step forward anyway. Trust is like faith — so this begs the question, isn’t that what we started this whole secular humanism revolution to get away from? To get away from faith? To get away from trust?
I hope not and I don’t think so. We started it because our trust had been betrayed by those who were sworn to protect it. They failed to do their own internal work and failed to grow into the wise elders we deserved. Perhaps Jesus was such a wise elder, it’s too bad so many of his disciples and followers couldn’t hold up the side. They abused and hoarded their power and their prestige at our expense and then tried to sell it back to us for a profit. By breaking our trust, they disabled our most profound superpower — our ultrasocial capacity for collaboration and communication. If we reclaim that superpower we can not only do internal science together, a science we might call religion, a science we might call spirituality, we might even call it a mystical science to create a mystical humanism — but, no matter what we call it we can use it to mature into a generation of elders capable of remaking our world into a place that we’re actually proud to hand to the next generation.
