[Buddha-l] Will this be on the final exam?

[Richard Hayes]

On Fri, 2008-12-26 at 14:33 -0800, Mitchell Ginsberg wrote:

> I still don't know what Universalist Unitarian is supposed to be

Neither do any of the Unitarian-Universalists I know. Mort Sahl's joked
that the Ku Klux Klan liked to burn question marks into the lawns of
Unitarians. He also quipped that Unitarians teach that Moses came down
off the mountain carrying tablets on which were written the Ten
Suggestions.

Historically, of course, Unitarians were Christians who denied the
doctrine of the Trinity and so denied 1) that Jesus was divine and 2)
that the death of Jesus on the cross was a sacrificial atonement for
human sin. This helps explain why Unitarians are usually quite
comfortable forming alliances with synagogues and Buddhist
organizations. 

Historically speaking, Universalists advocated the doctrine that the
death of Jesus on the cross was a sacrificial atonement for the sins of
ALL beings, whether they accepted Jesus or not. Even Satan and all the
beings in hell are destined to be fully reconciled with God (whether
they want it or not). They tended to be biblical literalists who claimed
that there is no biblical support for the doctrine of eternal damnation.

In early America the centre of the Unitarian universe was Harvard. (Part
of what explains the intense rivalry between Harvard and Yale was that
Yale was an evangelical stronghold; Unitarians and evangelicals have
always viewed one another with mistrust and suspicion). Universalists in
early America were mostly poorly educated farmers and tradesmen. Egghead
Unitarians and uneducated Bible-thumping Universalists had little in
common, except that they were both despised by Catholics, Anglicans,
Presbyterians and Puritans and both managed to get themselves beaten up
in riots by religious bigots and by people who owned slaves. (Both the
Unitarians and the Universalists tended to have strong opposition to
slavery.)

In 1961 or so the Unitarians and Universalists in the United States
united as a single church and in so doing jettisoned most of the beliefs
that differentiated them from one another. The Universalist influence
survives in the tendency for UU's to believe that absolutely no one is
damned, no matter what they do or believe, because the universe is
basically good, and whatever it is that runs the universe has a goodness
that will eventually prevail over all evil. What got jettisoned from the
Universalist picture was any reference to salvation through the
crucifixion of Christ. Indeed, jettisoning what divided Unitarians from
Universalists resulted in jettisoning pretty much everything that
remained of traditional Christianity. 

The void left by the absence of Christianity was quickly filled with an
improbable combination of possible candidates for who or what is the
source of the goodness that informs the universe. Some UU followers like
the language of Daoism, others prefer the language of Buddhism, while
still others like Wicca or radical eco-feminism or secular humanism. In
a typical UU fellowship you'll find a Pagan contingent, quite a few
Wiccans, a good number of secular Jews, a few Twelve-Step people, a
circle who orient their lives by the Course in Miracles, a Zen group and
a Vipassana group, and a handful of people trying hard to be Navajos.
Oh, and lots of folk-dancing groups, and at least one Esperanto club.

If you either tentatively believe something or question everything,
you're bound to be 100% in agreement with Unitarian-Universalism,
provided you are not inclined to reject anyone on the grounds of race,
creed, preferred ritual practices, sexual orientation, economic status
or political views.

Subscribers to buddha-l may be amused to check out the
Unitarian-Universalist Buddhist Fellowship Discussion Group
(uubf-l at list.uua.org); go to
http://lists.uua.org/mailman/listinfo/uubf-l for more information. 

Mitchell, anyone who has read your book, The Inner Palace, would see
that you have Unitarian-Universalist stamped all over you. (I love the
book. I would. I grew up in a Unitarian family.) 

> I just retook the test and stayed 100% Univ. Unitarian

I don't think anyone on buddha-l has managed to get less than 96% on the
Unitarian-Universalist index. Maybe Benito Carral managed to get a low
UU score. I'd guess that anyone who managed to get a really high score
in Orthodox Judaism (or orthodox anything else) would most probably get
a pretty low score on the UU index. Unitarian-Universalists don't do
either orthodoxy or absolutism very well.

-- 
Richard