Here’s some humor, in the spirit of David Letterman, that’s been making the rounds. It’s called,

Well, you won’t get a long sermon this morning, you’ll get three —short ones….

We’re going on a breathtaking tour of two thousand years of history in three stages. We’ll look at some of the “heroes of faith in every age” as the hymn writer calls them. Not of every age but of ages most vital to our spiritual and humanist traditions. Heroes and heroines of faith, yes! But also, many times, of doubt, skepticism, questioning the prevailing “wisdom” and accepted (or required) “truth.”

The first leg of the journey, we’ll call, “My Mind Is My Church.” That’s a quotation from Thomas Paine, one of the great minds and pens of the American and French Revolutions. We’ll consider Paine and his quotation in a moment.

Those of you who were here last week will recall that we left off with two of the greatest teachers in the Western Tradition, Socrates and Jesus. Both were, in their instruction and practice spiritual but skeptical.

Last week, I raised the issue of Socrates’s daemon. That’s d-a-e-m-o-n, not d-e-m-o-n. Perhaps, to avoid confusion, I should use a variant spelling, d-a-i-m-o-n, daimon [DIE-mun]. The Greeks believed daimons were intermediaries between humans and the divine realm, in fact, the offspring of divine and human parents. Socrates is said to have claimed his daemon always told him what not to do. That is, it would warn him when he contemplated doing wrong but was silent when he did right.

Socrates was said to have heard the voice of his daimon from his youth. No doubt, if he had been born in our culture, the young Socrates would have found himself the recipient of a lot of psychiatry! Who knows whether he, or the world, would be better off “cured.” Many cultures have respected the shamans among them, those whose nature it is to live in a world slightly atilt from the world most of us live in, who help others in the tribe to find a new way through the chaos.

Socrates had both a radical way of looking at life, through endless questioning, and a radical way of looking at divinity. He held in a great God of complete justice and goodness, quite different from the official Greek pantheon of largely immoral deities who acted more or less like soap opera characters, constantly ravishing, seducing, lying, cheating, and killing on whim. It would rather seem that Socrates (just like Jesus) was a Unitarian, in the original meaning that word: His God was one. But, perhaps more importantly, Socrates experienced himself as part of a universal moral order. God, according to Socrates, was no local deity, wrapped up in narrow prejudices no “respecter of persons,” to use the parlance of the Bible.

Socrates was not alone among the philosophers of the Greco-Roman world in having an intimate connection with what we may call “spirituality.”

I don’t like any of the definitions of “spirituality” or “spiritual” in Webster’s Dictionary. They tried their best, using words and phrases like “incorporeal,” “eccliastical,” or “concerned with religious values.” I think that the reason I (and I’m sure many others) have difficulty with definitions for the spiritual is that it’s not something you can define, you can only experience it. I think its something like the judge’s famous definition of “pornography”: “I know it when I see it.” Your spirituality is in the eye of your (inner) beholder.

But, back to the philosophers. I can’t think of any besides Socrates who’s said to have had a congenital connection with God. But many of them did undergo a no less radical alteration of interior perspective. They did this through initiation into the Mysteries. In Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and throughout the ancient world, there were centers where ancient wisdom was passed down to each succeeding generation through ritual and instruction. Athens’ own place of initiation was Eleusis, a town a few miles west of the city. Every spring and fall, for perhaps millennia before even Socrates’ time, festivals were held at which crowds from Athens processed to the site of the mystic rites. Only the mystagogues, or initiators, and those to be initiated were allowed to witness the rites themselves. Strict secrecy prevented the initiated from revealing the secrets of the temple, so we may never know the exact methods they used to bring about psychological and spiritual change. But the transformation effected must have been profound, judging from how the Eleusinian Mysteries were praised above all the gifts of Athens to the world and how those from all nations and stations of life flocked to them. Unlike most mystery schools, Eleusis admitted, at least in the later stages of its history all types of people: men and women, slaves and free, natives and foreigners (provided they could understand Greek). Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Athens is regarded as the cradle of democracy.

Socrates himself was probably not an initiate at Eleusis. It’s been suggested this was because of a rule preventing those who had innate shamanic ability from initiation. I can only speculate that this rule existed from memories of negative experiences within the institution that came from meddling with the natural psychology of such persons. Socrates was not an initiate, but his disciple Plato was. So were the philosophers Cicero, Epictitus, and Marcus Aurelius.

The Early Christian Church was forming in this same era and borrowed copiously from the various mystery religions, especially those of Mithra, who had their own dying and rising God.

The Christians also had rituals designed to bring about positive change in those who partook of them. Read the Gospels sometime and count how many times Jesus says, “He who has an ear, let him hear!” His parables worked on different levels, for those inside and outside the Christian community. But, within only a few generations, most Christians could no longer understand their own Scriptures in the allegorical vein in which much of them were written and began to be trapped in pedantic literalism. They lost sight of the basic understanding all the greatest mystics have—that, underneath it all, there is a universal order common to everyone and accessible to everyone, if only we learn to open ourselves to it in the moment. By the year 325, the Emperor Constantine had merged the outlaw church with the state. He ordered a standardization of belief. Unitarianism then and Universalism later, would be forbidden ways of understanding God and humanity.

All the mysteries and ancient tribal rites the co-opted Church and its descendents came across they tried to crush, from the Eleusinian Mysteries to the Druid circles to the Wise Women of Europe to the inhabitants of Africa and the New World. Only one path was now to led to God. Only one definition of humanity would now be suffered. Christ, once the simple carpenter’s son teaching love, was now arrayed in regal attire, teaching obedience through those who spoke in his name. Obedience of women to men, of men to the priests, of priests to the hierarchy, of the hierarchy to the Pope, of the Pope to God.

As the centuries went by, those at the top of the ecclesia grew further and further from the people and their aspirations to think and worship without such an accretion of rules and control between them and God, or between them and their own minds.

It would make a long sermon indeed to trace the struggles of heretics and heathens scientists and artists to open up some sky, how they brought back the philosophers of Greece and Rome. How they preserved knowledge so long lost or squelched.

Perhaps it’s enough to close this part with a memory of Thomas Paine, who embodied so well the spirit of struggle and questioning. "My mind is my church," he said, "and churches are but human inventions, set up to enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit." As cynical as Paine was, though, of organized religion as he knew it, he, nevertheless, still saw a place for a rational spiritual life. While in Paris, Paine founded. “an ethical society which promulgated a "religion of humanity" forty years before Auguste Comte used the phrase. It was called the society of Theophilanthropists, meaning, as he explained in a letter, "God, Love, and Man." He rendered the word, Lovers of God and Man, or Adorers of God and Friends of Man. Paine argued for the existence of God as a "Superior Cause," affirming that the eternal motion of matter is not an inherent property of matter, but must be derived from a superior source. The Theophilanthropists regarded Nature as the only reliable "book" on Theology. At their meetings they sang humanitarian hymns and read from the ethical teachings of the Bible and from Chinese, Hindu, and Greek authors. For a time the movement prospered, the members gathering in parish churches assigned to them by the Directory, but this privilege was withdrawn by Napoleon as a concession to Pius VII, and the Society lost its strength.”[1]

More’s the pity, they sound like our kind of people….

II: Oracles of Concord

About the time that Thom Paine was starting his group in Paris, two new religious currents were beginning to flow in America. Inspired to some degree to by European heretics and humanists, Unitarians called into question New England’s prevailing Calvinist theology that depicted God as an angry judge and looked on humanity as inherently wicked. Universalists declared that God loved everyone and would never sentence one of God’s children to everlasting damnation.

In 1806, a Unitarian was awarded a chair at Harvard’s Divinity School, in the midst of enormous controversy. But some three decades later, in 1838, the Harvard Divinity School would experience a still more controversial event when an erstwhile Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson, delivered a devastating address to the graduating class. Espousing the views of Transcendentalism, Emerson declared that experiencing life at first hand was more important than timeworn creeds and doctrines. He and fellow Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau, and the Rev. Theodore Parker sought to incorporate the wisdom of East and West and the wonder that came from walking in nature, deep conversation, or poetic vision. They questioned many of the assumptions of their time, sacred and secular. Another Transcendentalist, for a time editor of the movement’s journal, was Margaret Fuller. She had a special passion for demonstrating to the world that women, if they have the opportunity may equal men in mental and spiritual pursuits. (The Universalist denomination was the first to accept a woman, Olympia Brown for ordination.)

The nineteenth century would prove a tumultuous one for Unitarians, as Transcendentalists, and then Free Religionists, spoke out for more and more personal latitude in religious belief, within a movement many of whom were still largely orthodox Christians. All this made for much controversy and would set the stage for the twentieth century, when Unitarians would again play a prominent role in redefining the very nature of religious community.

III: A Product of Many Minds

In 1933, sensing a need to declare what kind of a religion best suited the modern, scientific age, 34 people, many of them Unitarian ministers signed a document they called, “The Humanist Manifesto.” Some of the signers names are known to many of us: Anton J. Carlson, John Dewey, John H. Dietrich, R. Lester Mondale, Charles Francis Potter, Curtis W. Reese, and Edwin H. Wilson.

The Manifesto would be prefaced by a statement by Raymond B. Bragg which begins,

“The Manifesto is a product of many minds. It was designed to represent a developing point of view, not a new creed. The individuals whose signatures appear would, had they been writing individual statements, have stated the propositions in differing terms.”

I will read a few selections for your consideration and discussion. Before I do so, let me say that the original 1933 Humanist Manifesto was followed by a second version in 1973 and a third just recently. I hope you can attend two weeks from today, for the final installment of this series when we take up from the fallout over the Manifesto, the merger of Unitarians and Universalists, and the possible future of our faith. And now, selections from the Humanist Manifesto. Please note that, due to the date of the writing, there is some gender language we wouldn’t use today.

“Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.”

“Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process.”

“Holding an organic view of life, humanists find that the traditional dualism of mind and body must be rejected.”

“We are convinced that the time has passed for theism, deism, modernism, and the several varieties of "new thought".”

“Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious. It includes labor, art, science, philosophy, love, friendship, recreation — all that is in its degree expressive of intelligently satisfying human living. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained.”

“We assert that humanism will: (a) affirm life rather than deny it; (b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them; and (c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few. By this positive morale and intention humanism will be guided, and from this perspective and alignment the techniques and efforts of humanism will flow.”

Notes:

[1]	“GREAT THEOSOPHISTS: THOMAS PAINE,” THEOSOPHY, Vol. 27, No. 2, December, 1938 (Pages 51-57; (Number 29 of a 29-part series), (http://www.wisdomworld.org/setting/thomaspainetwo.html).