But the fall of communism is something of a mixed blessing. Without question, a world without communism will be a more prosperous and happy place for human beings to live. Unfortunately, however, a world without communism again creates the darkness that allows Marxism to flourish under various disguises. People, especially the young, can be seduced into believing that individual mistakes can and should be corrected by the state. People can be made to believe that only through government curtailment of individual liberty will there be safe streets, clean air and clean water. Without the practical examples of the USSR to demonstrate what happens when people try to exchange freedom for forced equality, we are tempted to try the old politically correct but practically wrong solutions.

GA Report: This year at GA was a most unusual time. Due to a family illness, I was unable to do anything for GA, so I canceled the planned events and "sold" our table to UU’s for Freedom of Conscience. You can imagine my surprise when CFUUer Jim Rice called me to relate the following tale. Out of curiosity, Jim went to the room where the CFUU event was to be held, expecting to find at best one or two lost souls who hadn’t gotten word of the cancellation. Much to Jim’s surprise, over 50 kindred souls had decided that, even if the CFUU event was canceled, they would get together anyway! Looking around, Jim realized that he was the ranking CFUU officer at the scene, so he proceeded to run the meeting. It appears that there is a great deal of discontent out there among UU conservatives (who, in any other context other than our peculiar denomination, would likely be considered moderates) with current trends in the UUA.

Jim has volunteered to organize next year’s GA activity, and is planning something to really draw them in. This, in conjunction with a planned UU World advertising campaign, should provide a real boost to our membership!

In catechism, I worked my way through the New Testament, and was taught that the Bible contained the words of God. Most importantly, our catechism class focused on the words and acts of Jesus.

Even at twelve, the Christian story lacked a certain amount of credibility. The virgin birth, stories of miracles, and the resurrection left a great deal to question. But open dialogue on these topics was not tolerated in my catechism class (besides, as I recall, our instructor was so old that I thought she might have seen Jesus first-hand).

After graduating from catechism and joining the Methodist Church, I drifted away from religion. When Janet and I were dating, we discovered Unitarianism, and settled on it primarily because it seemed broadminded enough to tolerate my growing Agnosticism and Janet’s liberal Christianity. And Unitarian Universalism worked for us both, largely, I think, because we never really needed religion in those early years. It was only recently, when many of the foundations on which we built our lives began to collapse, did we find we needed not just a religion, but a faith.

In this period of personal trial, Janet found comfort and meaning in the Christian church. This was a fairly easy transition for her, since she had been a liberal Christian from the start. But, for me, finding some comfort is more difficult. I cannot follow the same path Janet did, because I am, to the core of my being, a Unitarian Universalist -- for better or worse, you’re stuck with me. But in contrasting the peace that Janet was finding in the Christian world with my own unsettledness, I have begun to wonder whether there isn’t something there that is missing from our own religion. As a result, I have begun to pay more attention to the teachings of Jesus and the effect they have had on people. I wonder whether there isn’t a place for Jesus within the framework of Unitarian Universalism, and where that place might be.

 The Ancient Jewish Carpenter

The Jewish carpenter named Jesus was born into the world of the Roman Empire 2000 years ago. Politically, the mighty Roman empire had eliminated all opposition and was the dominant force in the civilized world. Technology had reached new heights, and Roman law, art and religion prevailed. But on a human level, the Roman world was crumbling. Social morals, never a strong point in the ancient world, was declining at a rapid pace. New diseases (particularly sexually transmitted ones) were taking their toll. The old sense of public duty that permitted the republic to exist was being replaced with public corruption. Human life itself was cheap, with hundreds being brutally murdered every day for sport.

Into a far-off part of this empire, Jesus was born and raised. While much is known about the world of Jesus, little is known about the man’s life, or whether he lived at all. What is known of Jesus is derived from the gospels of the New Testament. But these are hardly historical texts -- the first of these (Mark) was not written until 25 years after the death of Jesus. But from what is known, it is generally agreed that Jesus was born about 7 B.C., and was trained in and practiced his father’s trade of carpentry for most of his life. Contrary to the mythology of Jesus, the historical Jesus was probably married (perhaps to Mary Magdeline), had brothers and sisters, and otherwise lived a normal life for a Jewish carpenter in first century Palestine. But, around the age of thirty, his life abruptly changed. He became a preacher and left home. For one to three years, (the Gospels do not agree on this) he gathered followers, told stories to the people he encountered, and was eventually executed by Roman authorities for his heresies. But in this time for wandering prophets, nothing this carpenter turned preacher did was particularly unusual or special.

What makes the story of Jesus important is what happened after his execution. His followers, who even by their own description were not overly admirable people, returned to the lives they led before they had encountered Jesus.

One follower, Peter, was a fisherman. He returned to the sea of Galilee to fish with his brothers. Six months or so after Jesus had died, Peter began to comprehend the message that Jesus had been trying to tell him and the other followers. Peter became convinced that this message was not to be silenced by Jesus’ death, and showing an uncharacteristic strength of character, Peter resolved to carry on. He gathered other followers, including Jesus’ brother James, and began the process that was to take Jesus’ message first to the Jewish people, and later to the very heart of the Roman empire.

The way was not easy. Those who tried to live in accordance with Jesus’ ethical teachings were hunted down and publicly executed -- literally fed to the lions during Nero’s persecutions of 64 A.D. The persecution of the Christian martyrs had the unintended effect of both strengthening the resolve of the early Christians and starting the transition of Christianity into a formalized religion, beginning with the writing of the gospels. Until the persecution, the stories that Jesus told in his short ministry -- the very soul of first century Christianity -- were part of an oral tradition. But after the early Christian leaders -- and all those who had heard Jesus first hand -- were killed, Christian scholars began to set down the stories in writing. Each of the gospels was aimed at a particular audience.  

The author of Mark, who wrote the earliest gospel, addressed those who were already Christians, those who had heard the stories many times before. The author of Matthew aimed his scriptures at a Jewish audience, believing as he did that Christianity was the next logical evolution of Judaism. The author of Luke, who appears to have been both very literate and most likely a gentile, expanded Christianity to include all those who were not Jewish (and, in essence, became the first Universalist). The author of John (the last of the gospels to be written) was at his (her?) heart a mystic -- the concept of Jesus as "the son of God" becomes far more prominent here.

Along with this codification of the story of Jesus came the creation of Christianity the religion. Christianity filled the religious vacuum left as the gods of the Greeks and Romans fell into disrepute. It provided the ethical balance that the Empire needed for survival. But in the transition from Roman Empire to Holy Roman Empire, much of the Jewish carpenter’s message was lost.

 The Theft of the Message

In business school, I learned that nearly all organizations evolve the same way. First, a person with a vision creates a product or service. The visionary brings in other like-minded people to help turn the vision into reality. If the product or service is a success, the organization begins to grow, and transforms itself from a movement into an institution. During this process, the organizational types attempt to build the founder’s vision into the organizational structure (the beginnings of the corporate culture), rules of behavior are sanctified in policy manuals, and very often the founder and other visionaries are often forced out of the organization.

Christianity evolved much the same way. The original religion was a movement, made up of diverse groups whose uniting vision was one of love and service, based on the ethical teachings of Jesus. But once Christianity went from a movement of a few zealots to the official religion of the Roman Empire, it was forced to change, to become an institution. An organization was created, with a leader at the top and various levels of management until you reached the "production floor," the parish priest. A "mission statement" was created (the Bible) in which the words of Jesus were mixed with stories of magic and wonder enough to impress the masses. Management created sufficient policies and procedures to ensure that all Christians knew exactly what was required to live a "Christian life" as defined by the church. And as the Church grew in size and strength, the original message of Jesus, the Jewish carpenter, was less and less evident in Christianity, the religion.

Attempts were made to reform the Church, most notably the Protestant reformation. The key concept in the reformation was that the Bible, which was previously interpreted only by the Priests, could and should be read and interpreted by all Christians. (As a former engineer, I must point out that, while maverick Priests like Martin Luther provided the intellectual basis for the reformation, it was Gutenburg’s printing press that made Protestantism possible. After all, there had to be some way to mass-produce Bibles). And while Protestantism was a great advance by challenging the authority of the Church and advancing the religious rights of the individual, it also created the basis for the ultimate perversion and mis-use of the carpenter’s message -- Fundamentalist Christianity.

Fundamentalist Christianity is based on the premise that the words in the Bible are the absolute and indisputable words of God. By denying that the Bible was written by humans thousands of years ago, the Fundamentalists freeze their understanding of the world and human nature to that of the Roman Empire about 300 A.D. By insisting that God authored the Bible, Fundamentalists ignore the advances of two thousand years in the fields of science and theology. Much of the evil in the ancient world that Jesus preached against-- intolerance, arbitrary adherence to outmoded religious laws, hatred, violence -- are intrinsic to the Fundamentalist view of the world. This, in combination with the belief that Fundamentalist views must be imposed on the rest of us by force, if need be, makes religious fundamentalism one of the most dangerous and evil trends in the world today. And this is not only true of Fundamentalist Christianity, but all "fundamentalist" beliefs, including Fundamentalist Islam, Fundamentalist Marxism and even Fundamentalist Unitarianism (yes, it exists!).

With this perversion of Jesus’ original message comes much of the evils of Christianity that concern many of us. By freezing Christianity into the literal interpretation of the Old Testament as well as the gospels written in the first two centuries A.D., all of the evils of society at that time that influenced the writers in the Bible -- sexism, slavery, totalitarianism, homophobia and even anti-Semitism -- are frozen into the institution. Yet Fundamentalism represents the very negation of the words of Jesus, an insult to the memory of a prophet that very much needs to be listened to and understood today.

The Carpenter’s Message

What little we know of Jesus’ teaching is found in the gospels, all of which were written well after his death. And, of all the statements attributed to Jesus in the Bible, only 91 sayings and stories are believed by the scholars of the Jesus Seminar to actually have been uttered by Jesus. The rest were insertions of material from other religious traditions (and creations of early Christians themselves) as the religion of Christianity evolved.

Jesus had a purpose to his ministry, and a distinctive style. Jesus was a rebel; he was attacking the orthodox Judaism and social morals of his time. He was an orator, and illustrated his views through parables and sayings. His words, according to the authors of the book "The Five Gospels", "cut against the social and religious grain ... surprise and shock: they characteristically call for a reversal of roles and frustrate ordinary, everyday expectations."

His opposition to Jewish law appears to stem in part from its inflexibility, which made it unable to address human suffering and need. Jesus felt that religion should address the spiritual suffering of those most in distress; that is the reason he took his ministry to those lowest in society -- lepers, prostitutes and tax-collectors (but no politicians are mentioned). When asked why he ministered to people such as these, rather than the rich and powerful, he responded "Those who are healthy don’t need a doctor, but those who are sick do."

His kingdom of God is often interpreted literally, either as heaven or as a kingdom established after the apocalypse and his second coming. But another interpretation -- one more fitting with his other ministry -- can be made as well. Jesus made a great distinction between the secular and the religious in the world. "Give Caesar’s what is Caesar’s, and God what is God’s" is not only a statement on taxation, but an indication that, in Jesus’ mind, affairs of the world were separate and distinct from the religious.

As a popular writer recently explained it -- there is Manstuff and Godstuff. Jesus’ kingdom was the God-stuff that makes no practical sense in the real world -- things like love, compassion, forgiveness and altruism. Those who are primarily interested in Godstuff have little interest in Manstuff and visa versa -- hence "It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to get into God’s kingdom." Manstuff feeds and nurtures the body, but only Godstuff can nurture and heal the spirit.

Further, those whose suffering is spiritual in nature -- those whose bodies are failing them, those who grieve, those who are outcasts from society -- can only be ministered to with Godstuff. "Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened for you" addresses those with spiritual needs, not physical ones.

Finally, Jesus’ ministry rejected the harsh moral truths of his day, and focused instead on the saving grace of love, often very tough love. "You have heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I tell you, don’t oppose an evil man. If anyone slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other cheek to him. If anyone wants to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat too. If anyone asks you to go one mile, go two miles with him. ... If you love those who love you, how should anyone be especially pleased with you? Even sinners love those who love them. If you help those who help you, how should anyone be especially pleased with you? Sinners do that too. If you lend anything to those from whom you expect to get something, how should anyone be especially pleased with you? Sinners also lend to sinners to get back what they lend. No, love your enemies, help them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then you will have a great reward."

Jesus’ teachings were not aimed at the comfortable, the self-satisfied. They were aimed at those in torment. His message was simple: Live a moral life, a life of love and giving, and you will be at peace, regardless of what the world or fate does to you. There is a flip side to that message as well -- any person or society that does not live a moral life is doomed to torment of one form or another.

Jesus’ message to the rich and powerful was typically blunt. He reported said "The way you judge others, you’ll be judged, and the measure you measure with will be used for you." This is a caution to the rich not to judge the poor; the majority to take care in judging those different from them; and those with few problems from criticizing how others deal with their problems.

Clearly, the Jesus of Palestine is not the Jesus of fundamentalist Christianity. Jesus today would be ministering to those who suffer the most in our world, the oppressed of our day. He would not be preaching hate, but love; not intolerance but inclusively; not a focus on the physical but renewed interest in the spiritual.

Unitarian Universalist Christianity

Both Unitarianism and Universalism began as Protestant Christian religions. Both attempted to restore to Christianity some of the essential message of the ancient Jewish carpenter.

Unitarianism emphasized there was but one God, one universal life force. Jesus is not God, but a human who was one of the first to grasp the true meaning of human existence, and one whose life could serve as a model for all people. Universalists understood that God’s love was universal; all human beings could benefit from association with a higher power. Both Unitarianism and Universalism continued the effort started in the Reformation of moving Christianity back toward the vision of Jesus.

Somewhere in the 20th century, Unitarian Universalism went from being a Christian religion to an essentially anti-Christian religion (there is more than a little truth to the old joke that the only time you hear "Jesus Christ" in a UU church is when the janitor falls down the steps). We abandoned our posts as the leading reformers of Christianity, and tried instead to make a meaningful religion of secular humanism, eastern mysticism, food cooperatives and coffee houses. This left Christian reform to mainstream Protestant Churches, that are limited by their traditional adherence to scripture and declining membership and influence. In the meantime, the Fundamentalists have appropriated the name of Jesus as well as the best of art and music through the ages, and perverted them into something the carpenter himself would find revolting.

All of this would not be such a tragedy except for one thing: what Jesus actually believed in 2000 years ago is what Unitarian Universalists believe in today. Our very purposes and principles resound with the ideas once articulated in Palestine. Would the Jesus who ministered to lepers find fault with respecting the worth and dignity of each human being? Is there any better model for challenging the structures of evil than Jesus himself? In Jesus’ call to the kingdom of God, is there not a hint of our respect for the interdependent web?

Whether we chose to associate ourselves with Christianity or not, the perversion and trashing of the true Christian message is an attack on our own Unitarian Universalist message. We cannot isolate ourselves and pretend that we have somehow evolved beyond Christianity, and what happens to Christianity is of no concern of ours. It is. John Donne said it best: "no man is an island, entire onto himself, but each is a part of the continent, a part of the main."

Also, by choosing to ignore the needs of each human individual’s spirit (Godstuff) and focusing our attention on the physical and rational, we are denying those among us with spiritual needs the sustenance they so very much want and need. No religion, including our own, can minister only to the mind and focus exclusively on the rational and material. To be a religion and not a philosophy society, we must also explore the world beyond the rational; the need within each of us to be as developed spiritually as we are intellectually. One starting point for doing this would be to travel back before the holy Christian church to the words of an ancient Jewish carpenter who tried to tell us what Godstuff was all about. And, while there are many others who have tried to teach this message, the Jewish carpenter may well have said it the best.

We Unitarian Univeralists have a choice. We can continue to ignore Christianity, and allow the true values that Jesus taught be destroyed in the world. Or those of us who are so inclined can again assume the burden of Christian reform that we Unitarian Universalists once bore. We can rediscover the true, radical religion of the Jewish carpenter. We can show the world by our actions, as the martyrs did 2000 years ago, the meaning and power of universal love. That is the challenge facing Unitarian Universalist Christians; that is the opportunity we have to remake the cold and evil world around us. Just like Jesus tried to do 2000 years ago.

Reconsecrating our relationship with the bovine is a gesture of great historical significance. By making a personal and collective choice to go beyond beef, we strike at the heart of the modern notion of economics with its near-exclusive emphasis on "industrial productivity," a concept that has come to replace the ancient idea of generativeness.

-Jeremy Rifkin

This is udder nonsense.

For millennia, we have known (at least we have struggled to grasp) what it may mean to reconsecrate a relationship to the divine. But to the bovine? And as for "the ancient idea of generativeness" I wonder -- could it be what I think it might be, what could it possibly have to do with cows, and does Rifkin think about it a lot?

In the certainty with which he displays conviction about things that are not so, Rifkin is a well-known exemplar of environmental excess. His anti-biotech crusade to stop an experiment with strawberries (a genetically engineered frost-retardant was to be applied) is an instance of life imitating art (in this case, the "art" is of a pretty low sort; those who’ve seen the movie ""Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" may know what I mean). And his campaign against BST, the bovine growth hormone, is without support from serious scientists. Yet he can successfully play to general scientific illiteracy and to the vague fear of technology many of us aging baby-boomers still carry, perhaps as a legacy from a youth spent watching so many low budget science fiction movies ("Them," for example, or "The Blob") in which scientists who are not mad do crazy things because science itself must be insane. If the First Amendment’s freedom of speech guarantee does not go so far as protecting the right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, one wonders -- does it protect Rifkin’s right to yell "Strawberry!" in a busy produce section?

But this is about more than Rifkin. It’s about excess -- silly excess -- which, among other things, obscures and undermines the ability of sound science and serious scientists to warn against serious threats -- and to be believed.

Item: Just a few years ago, a mother called the police in a panic insisting that they chase down her child’s school bus and intercept her child’s lunch. She had put an apple in it, only to learn later that same morning about the dread Alar. What she learned was that it "could cause cancer." What she didn’t learn was that the dosage that prompted (that forced?) the cancer finding in mice was the consumption equivalent in humans of 28,000 pounds of apples a day, 365 days a year for 70 years.

Item: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) warns that "crystalline silica" is a probable carcinogen. Crystalline silica is sand. If taken seriously, this finding might mean that a day at the beach is "no day at the beach." There is an even sillier aspect to this. The U.S. Navy has long used a sand-paint mixture to apply an abrasive, non-skid surface to shipboard ladders. Influenced by the OSHA warning, the Navy has banned its use -- apparently overlooking the fact that the "probable carcinogen" finding assumes that the sand is inhaled (the finding implicates lung disease) and overlooks the obvious, that should one "inhale" sand that has been mixed into paint, death by drowning would likely precede the onset of cancer.

Item: Last December, authorities closed the Oakland Bay bridge at the start of rush hour because some bags of construction debris containing asbestos fell off a truck crossing the bridge. Reed Irvine describes the resulting panic as follows: "Radio stations warned people to keep away from the bridge, and consumer activists warned citizens to pull down their windows and even take showers if they felt that any of the asbestos might have blown off the bridge and contaminated them." Irvine quotes a leading federal scientist and expert on asbestos as saying (in a taped but never broadcast San Francisco radio interview) that "This asbestos spill is about as dangerous as sunshine. It isn’t going to hurt anyone." His advise, that hoses could be used to wash the stuff off the bridge and into the bay (which he said contained much naturally-occurring asbestos anyway) elicited from the interviewer this protest: "But that would cause cancer!"

Maybe we should all reconsecrate our relationships -- to apples, or to sand, or to bridges, and maybe we should be praying to Juan Valdez or to Ra (the sun-god). In the alternative, we could rededicate ourselves to the idea that science is the search for truth, not an ideological ax to grind.

There are real issues and real questions to be raised and resolved about health and safety, about the effect on the environment of certain substances. There are real health and environmental threats, and illusory ones, and spending too much time on the latter (and regulating and legislating against them) wastes resources, stifles growth, and scares people -- needlessly.

Scientific questions should be decided scientifically. In this, they are distinct from policy questions, which should be decided politically. Put another way, scientific questions, unlike political ones, don’t get decided by argument and debate; they get decided by evidence and experiment. Once the evidence is in, say, about a threat to the environment, then the debate can begin about the implications for policy -- what should we actually do about the threat, how, how fast, and who pays?

Actually, Ted Koppel drew this same line well in a recent "Nightline" program. Commenting on Vice President Gore’s suggestion that "Nightline" explore the connections between scientists and others who disagree with Gore on climate change and various political and business groups of which the Vice President presumably disapproves, Koppel had this to say:

There is some irony in the fact that Vice President Gore, one of the most scientifically literate men to sit in the White House in this century, is resorting to political means to achieve what should ultimately be resolved on a purely scientific basis ... The measure of good science is neither the politics of the scientist nor the people with whom the scientist associates. It is the immersion of hypotheses into the acid of truth. That’s the hard way to do it, but it’s the only way that works.

The preceding article is reprinted with permission from the Spring, 1994 issue of Commonsense: A Republican Journal of Thought and Opinion. Michael Baroody is the editor of Commonsense.