March 2010 Newsletter of the Keweenaw
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship We support the goal of world community
with peace, liberty, and justice for all.
March 2010 Newsletter of the Keweenaw
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship We support the goal of world community
with peace, liberty, and justice for all.
March 7: "Joy"
Emily Dickinson says, "T'is so much joy! T'is so much joy!" while one
character in Turkish author Orhan Pamuk's novel “Snow” says to another, "You
got so drunk so you could resist the hidden happiness rising inside of
you." Let's gather together and resist resisting. Come ready to share what
brings you joy.
March 14: Forum:
topic to be announced.
March 21: "Fear and Equanimity" Will Cantrell and Rev. Sydney will help celebrate the Equinox while whistling in the half-dark. Potluck
March 28: "War and Peace" Our superb pianist Neil Paynter will grace us with evocative pieces in this service of readings and music.
Childcare is available
every Sunday.
Our minister is The Reverend Sydney A. Morris, ph. 370-3927, samorris@uuma.org. ____________________________________
The Youth Group
will meet at 4PM March 7th at Dave Watkins' house (22229 Royalwood
in Houghton 369-0734), to wander with KUUFers through the thorny thickets of
ethics, money and internet explorations. Anyone with internet connections
should bring along their device(s) -- laptop, phone, antenna ears, whatever.
ADULT EDUCATION. Value Based Financial Practices. The last class in ethical economics will be held at Dave Watkins' house at 4PM on March 7th. All are welcome -- but do let Rev. Sydney know you are coming. Bring your laptop and expect to enjoy the evening with teens, pizza and a large dog named Bear.
Sacred Scripture. Sunday mornings at 9AM, Rev. Sydney will lead her course in
"Sacred Scripture" -- teachings which illuminate the religions of:
Buddhism, Hinduism, the people of
the Book (Judiasm, Islam and
Christianity) and Sikhism. Every Sunday in March (except the Forum Sunday 14)
and the first Sunday of April.
KUUF members donated $558 to the Guest at Your
Table collection; $200 to the KFRC Children's Indoor Playspace and $1,050 to
the UUSC Haitian Relief Fund. – Barry Fink
March birthdays: 3rd, Ken Kraft; 8th,
Tracie Clanaugh, Emily Young; 9th, Tony Zoars; 11th, Arthur Mayer; 12th, Anna
Shoos; 17th, Maureen Anderson, Jane Hiltunen; 19th, Jeni Jobst; 21st, Pete
Ekstrom, Bill Fink, John Wheeler; 24th, Jeanine Sewell, Dave Watkins; 28th, Dan
Wisti; 30th, Sharon Emley. If anyone is missing from
this
list (or any of the birthday lists), please let Dorothy Love know. #
An Automated
External Defibrilator (AED) for use in case of a
heart stopping attack, is available upstairs in the BHK building. It is on the
wall inside the door of the adult gym at the top of the second floor staircase
- the next floor above us - and the door is unlocked. It
is recommended that one get Adult CPR with AED training. You can contact the
American Red Cross and American Heart Association regarding
lessons. Speak to Bill Fink if you would want to be part of a class for
KUUF, if one were offered. There is a fee involved. There are
very simple instructions for using the AED printed on the case, and a computer
voice guides you through the set up and use, so you should not hesitate to
grab it and use it if needed. – Bill Fink
Our newest member, Christine Heppermann, writes: “My family and I moved to the Keweenaw from
Bayside Unitarian Universalist Family Camp happens only once a year. Imagine the joy of the fisher kids in the early
mornings and the intergenerational fun each evening, the calm feeling knowing
the kids are involved in great supervised activities while parents attend adult
morning workshops, the excitement of seeing old friends from last year and
meeting new friends this year, the beach, the campfire, the art projects, and
all that family time. Bayside is a
Unitarian village. A safe, warm, and nurturing place for "raising"
the child in all of us. We wish it could happen all year long, but since it
can’t, we anticipate this one full week in July each year. We welcome
families of all configurations to join us July 11th through July 17th,
2010. For information, please contact Stephanie Lent at 608-831-1784 or sjlent@wisc.edu,
or visit http://www.yahoodrummers.com/bayside/.
From Merle Kindred.: I'm sitting here with the palm trees waving and the crows
caw-cawing, and having thoughts of you folks bundled up in the midst of March
snows. My 2-1/2 months in
Orchids and anthuriums are more viable and affordable
for us here at the house at the moment than cows and I have connections with
people who’ve offered cuttings and tips, so the cowshed is going to be the
plant nursery for now. If we shuffle some soil around on the plot, we can reposition
our chicken coup and get some good birds – not the ones with the featherless
necks (a feature of the breed) that look ravaged. Maybe some guinea hens with
great eggs and a propensity for attacking snakes.
Again, I think fondly of all of you and so appreciate
your support of my globe-trotting these past 4-5 years. Please convey my
greetings to all at KUUF who remember me. – Merle.
Backers of public financing for congressional elections are making a new push,
triggered by a Supreme Court decision that lets corporations spend unlimited
money on politics. Two top Democrats in Congress back the idea. So why hasn't
it gone anywhere? One big reason: Members of Congress prefer the current system
because it favors incumbents.
Public-financing proposals
have been kicking around
So when the Supreme Court
ruled Jan. 21 that corporations and unions can spend unlimited amounts of their
treasury money on election ads, public financing advocates saw an opportunity.
Without public financing,
they say, members of Congress will look to lobbyists and special interests for
money to counter corporate attack ads. They might also be inclined to cave in
to corporations' legislative wishes rather than risk a barrage of negative
election ads.
Sen. Dick Durbin, the party
whip and the sponsor of Senate public financing legislation, said he hadn't
thought his proposal would go anywhere without a major scandal, but he now
thinks it has a chance.
Susan Jocoby writes about Atheists
in the Washington Post’s On Faith: I was somewhat taken aback
recently when I found myself on a list of "kinder, gentler
atheists"--most of them women--compiled by a religious historian
attempting to distinguish between socially acceptable atheism and the
presumably mean, hard-line atheism expounded by such demonic figures as Richard
Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. This nasty versus
nice dichotomy is wholly an invention of believers who are under the mistaken
impression that atheism is a religion in need of a good schism.
The list of "kinder" atheists was compiled for USA Today by Stephen Prothero, an On Faith panelist and professor of religion at
Boston University and author of "Religious Literacy" (2007), a lively
and incisive account of Americans' ignorance about religion in general and
their own religious history. Pleased as I was to find myself on a list in the
company of such other spirited atheists as Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author
of the witty, recently published "36 Arguments for The Existence of God: A Work of Fiction,"
and Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of "Doubt: A History" (2003), it
is nevertheless slightly insulting to find your name used not only to place
female atheists in a special category but as a foil for a mythical enemy known
as the New Atheists. The latter consist, in Prothero's view, mainly of Angry
White Men who believe that all religious people are stupid and that "the
only way forward is to educate the idiots and flush away the poison."
I don't mean to pick on Prothero, whom I greatly respect as a scholar of
religion (this must be the sort of observation that he considers kinder and
gentler), but his piece is a perfect example of all of the distortions of
atheism cherished by anti-atheists.
Myth No. 1: The "new atheism" is a phenomenon that
differs radically not only from atheism as it has existed since antiquity but
from the views held by forerunners of modern atheism, including deists and
Enlightenment rationalists, like Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and James
Madison, who played such a critical role in the founding of this nation. Try as
I might, I find little in the works of Dawkins, Harris et. al.--apart from
their knowledge of modern science--that differs significantly from the views of
secular thinkers of earlier eras. What is different is that today's atheists
are not hiding behind other labels, such as agnosticism, in order to placate
religious sensibilities. It is this lack of deference, more than anything else
that has outraged religious believers--particularly those on the right--in
Myth No. 2: Atheists think all
religious believers are stupid. It is true that Dennett coined the unfortunate
term "Brights" to describe atheists--which does imply that he
considers believers dimwitted. But I disagree with Dennett on this point, and
so do a good many atheists I know (some of whom didn't even make the
"kinder, gentler" list). I am quite prepared to concede that there
are a fair number of intellectually challenged atheists, and I have no interest
in arguing about whether the proportion of dunces is higher among the
religious. As for the intelligence of religious believers, I doubt that many
educated atheists would consider Aquinas, Abelard, or, for that matter,
Prothero stupid. What we do think is that their ideas are wrong and
irreconcilable with the laws of nature.
One point, however, is indisputable: there is a strong correlation between
simplistic fundamentalist beliefs, relying on a literal interpretation of
sacred texts, and lack of education. As the level of education rises, the
number of people who believe in materially impossible tales such as the
creation of the universe in six days; the literal resurrection of the dead; and
the Virgin Birth diminishes. That is why fundamentalists have been tireless in
their efforts to inject religious teaching into public schools. So it is
generally true (although there are of course many exceptions) that the less
people have learned about science, history, and different belief systems, the
more likely they are to cling to a rigid form of faith.
Nevertheless,
education and intelligence are hardly identical. Holders of doctoral degrees,
whether in philosophy or biology, are less likely than high school dropouts to
believe in the supernatural, but plenty of people with more than 16 years of
formal education are quite susceptible to a wide variety of non-supernatural
but equally muttonish notions dressed as lamb. One need only consider the
number of grownup atheists who are still as entranced as 15-year-olds with the
sophomoric Ayn Rand, whose basic philosophy, as expressed in her turgid novels,
is that the only proper relation of one human being toward another is
"hands off." History is filled with atheists who have embraced every
crackpot notion from eugenics to the desirability of eternal life facilitated
not by God but by science. Of course, there have also been a great many
religious believers who find that their godly philosophy include racial
superiority and the inferiority of the poor. (Let's not forget the most recent
example of a stupid Christian politician, South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer,
who thinks that free school lunches encourage the poor and stupid to
reproduce.) What ultimately distinguishes atheists from religious believers,
however, is that no intelligent atheist can ever claim that his or her ideas
constitute absolute truth.
: Keweenaw Unitarian Universalist
Fellowship
Myth No. 3: This brings us to the most common false stereotype
about atheism--that it is a religion and, furthermore, that "atheist
fundamentalism" is as intolerant as conventional religious fundamentalism.
Prothero uses the revealing word "genuflection" to describe the
supposed attitude of atheists toward the writings of Dawkins, Harris and
Hitchens. Other critics of atheism have described these writings as
"sacred texts" for atheists. I hate to break it to the anti-atheists,
but another crucial distinction between us and them is that we have no sacred,
authoritative texts.
As
someone who, as far back as I can remember--certainly from around age 12--never
accepted what I was taught in Catholic school and suffered no pangs of
conscience when I realized that I did not believe in God or in any religion, I
probably qualify as a "hard" rather than a "soft" atheist.