Reflections from the July IGR Meeting

by Jay Moore

"Which teaching(s) (conceptual or practical) of your religion would you prescribe as remedies for the illnesses, whether spiritual, social or political, that are afflicting humanity?"

In the Unitarian tradition, there are many points of view and no one revered source of truth is promoted. Consequently, there are many opinions among Unitarians about the remedies to the ills of humanity. However, there are guides for our individual searches and for the functions of our congregations and they are in the form of eight principles and six sources and many of them are directly useful to this issue. What follows cannot be described as the Unitarian statement about the ills of humanity but, rather, my own approach developed by me within my Unitarian environment.

When I look at the list of harmful human conditions given to us today and the behaviour of leaders and groups which are making matters worse, I think of all this as primitive survival behaviour that, once upon a time was seen as necessary to preserve and protect the clan, the tribe, from aggressors who might kill them and take their resources. Winning conflicts and competitions through violence, aggression, destruction – whatever it took – meant the chances of survival for one’s kin were greater.

But this primitive, tribal behaviour is no longer beneficial in the long run and is only harmful in regard to the chances of survival of the species. E. O. Wilson is quoted as saying:

"The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology."

We are a long way from recognizing that we are all kin. As we see on the poster we display at every Multicultural Festival, most well-established religions have a message that’s something like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” – the “Golden Rule.” There is also a strong theme that exists in many of these faiths about loving your neighbour. Jesus is reported to have gone further when he said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.” But, as a species, we are very far from that ideal.

Why? Fear. Millennia of fear. We have spent generations of remembering the threats, the attacks, the killing and every bone in our body says we must defend our families, our loved ones, from the evil strangers who cannot be trusted and will hurt us.

So how do we address the fear? How do we change messages of threats embedded in our cultures? How do we learn to see past our tribal ways, see that we are all kin and learn to love our neighbour and, perhaps, learn to love our enemies. In modern times, Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. pointed the way with messages that spanned various cultures and different religions. Our challenge is to take all the words and turn them into actions in our own context, in our own neighbourhoods. The actions of IGR are some small ways that we can do it here and now. I hope it doesn’t take another thousand years. I hope we don’t destroy ourselves before we recognize we are all siblings in the human family.

I’ll close with a quote that I recently heard August Adelman offer from the Jewish tradition:

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

-Pirkei Avot