The Catholic Bishops of America recently issued a statement in which they said that the chaos and bewildered state of the modern world is due to [the human] loss of faith, [our] abandonment of God and religion. For my part, I believe in no religion at all. Yet I entirely agree with the bishops.

. . . There is a popular belief that some particular scientific discoveries or theories, such as the Darwinian theory of evolution . . . have done the damage. . . But this account does not go to the root of the matter. The root cause of the decay of faith has not been any particular discovery of science, but rather the general spirit of science.

The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when the scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs on which used to be called “final causes.” The final cause of a thing or event meant the purpose which it was supposed to serve in the universe, its cosmic purpose. . . .

The founders of modern science . . . took the revolutionary step of consciously and deliberately expelling the idea of purpose as controlling nature from their new science of nature. They did this on the ground that inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely the prediction and control of events. . . The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned on. This, though silent, was the greatest revolution in human history. . . .

The world, according to this picture is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. . . .

It is this which has killed religion. . . . The essence of the religious vision . . is the faith that there is a plan and purpose in the world, that the world is a moral order, that in the end all things are for the best. . . . But that spirit cannot survive the destruction of belief in a plan and purpose of the world for that is the very heart of it. . . .

Belief in the ultimate irrationality of everything is the quintessence of what is called the modern mind. . . .

We must not be misled by occasional appearances of a revival of the religious spirit. [People], we are told, in their disgust and disillusionment at the emptiness of their lives, are turning once more to religion, or are searching for a new message. It may be so. We must expect such wistful yearnings of the spirit. We must expect [people] to wish back again the light that is gone, and to try to bring it back. But however they may wish and try, the light will not shine again – not at least in the civilization to which we belong.

Four weeks ago, I undertook my annual “Question and Answer” sermon in which I respond extemporaneously to questions submitted by the congregation. One of those questions I received asked: “If nothing really matters and we die with nothing, why do we work so hard to be “good” and do “right?” While I responded to it that day, it is a subject to which I want to return in more depth this morning.

It was, apparently, a statement of a possible perspective and a question from that perspective. It is my central intention to address the question part, but I believe it is worthwhile to begin with the context.

The perspective described was the one called Nihilism. One Nihilist has described his position this way:

Springing from a cosmic accident ,life (apparently) has no purpose or value. Humans crawling upon a tiny world at the edge of one of countless galaxies in an uncaring, unconcerned universe.

That is the way in which some reasonable people, including some of the members of this congregation, understand the human situation. It is akin to the perspective articulated by the philosopher W.T. Stace in our reading. Nihilism is, by no means, a perspective shared by all of our members: there is no perspective shared by all of our members.

I want to begin with a framework that I addressed nine years ago, after attending a Unitarian Universalist conference, and have used several times in our Fireside series for prospective members – a framework that helps to clarify our diversity and our approach to religion.

This is a scheme developed by James Hopewell [Congregation: Stories and Structures, Fortress Press, 1987], an Episcopal Seminary professor, based on the work of the literary critic, Northrop Frye. Frye suggested that all literature can be viewed from a circle with four cardinal points, like a compass. Those points are comedy, romance, tragedy and irony.

Comic does not mean funny; it means having a happy ending. From Shakespeare to tv sitcoms, there is a chaotic situation which is resolved in the end by a new level of understanding.

Romantic stories are those in which there is a quest for something special that makes life whole – in gothic novels it is for a lover, in westerns it is for lawful community (the Lone Ranger or Marshall Dillon make it happen), in science fiction it is for distant planets to which we “bravely go.”

Tragedies are heroic stories in which the emphasis is on accepting the inevitable. There is no magic which is going to make everything ok. We need to accept the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.

Ironic literature is the kind that relates to Nihilism. It is about the anti-hero who is very human and fallible. Life is not fair; it is not justified by transcendent forces; there is no plan. All we can do is embrace our family and friends and accept life.

Hopewell added religious terms to Frye’s types. The comic becomes the gnostic - gnostic is Greek for knowledge. In religious history, the gnostics believed that there were secret truths which, when known, would make everything clear. Gnosticism assumes the existence of a divine plan which we can seek to know, in the light of which everything works out right.

In religious terms, the romantic becomes the charismatic in which one gives up their old life to be “born again,” a new personal relationship with a God which makes everything better if you believe deeply enough.

The tragic in his scheme becomes the canonic. This is the view that there is a plan, but we will never know it so all we can do is accept that it exists as a mystery and trust it.

Finally, Hopewell sees the ironic as being empiric. That means that we do not rely on a supernatural dimension, but believe that all we can know and trust is what our reason sorts out from what our senses tell us about the real world in which we live. Some who claim the label of Nihilist stress that it is a skeptical way of knowing that does not necessarily end up in negativity.

• His comic/gnostic friends sent him books which promised that the greatest likelihood of healing comes from working to “understand” the cancer.

• His romantic/charismatic friends told him to give up his old life – his only hope lay in “yielding to the promise of God’s healing love.”

• His tragic/canonic friends stressed that he simply had to accept that God had some plan for him that he might not understand.

• His ironic/empirical friends said the whole thing was crazy, it made no sense and could not, and all they could do was to offer him their love.

Hopewell observed that whichever of the four perspectives his friends held, they had little respect for or understanding of those who held the others.

Hopewell designed a survey with 27 questions which he used to determine where people fell in relation to these points on the compass. My colleague John Buehrens, a former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, along with a research assistant, modified Hopewell’s questionnaire to utilize the kind of language with which Unitarian Universalists are more comfortable than Hopewell’s Christian terms. Since there are 27 questions, if one was a pure type of any one of these, they would get 27 points in that direction. Virtually everyone is a combination of two or more, many of all four to some degree or another. [I have appended the survey to this sermon.]

I offered the quiz to members of this church in 1996. 85% who took it came out in the ironic/empiric direction – only 15% were inclined toward the romantic/charismatic and of those, 3/4 leaned toward the comic or happy- ending side. Above the line, there was an even split between those on the tragic and those on the comic side, although only one was more than 8 points from the center. But even though we tended toward the empiric, only one was extreme with 21 empiric points: most blended their empiricism with either the comic or the tragic, which is to say that they were not really nihilists, but had some degree of suspicion that life has some meaning or direction to it – split, as I said, between those who anticipated a happy ending and those who were not counting on it. One person came out dead center.

Hopewell’s contention was that there are different churches because people with a common perspective tend to flock together. It is clear that the dominant religious style in Rockford is the charismatic – most of the churches in this community do not value the use of reason and the senses to determine what is important: they are strongly oriented to the supernatural. Some of them combine that romantic/charismatic with the tragic and some with the comic. [In keeping with Hopewell’s theory, I would venture a guess that the core of the new Rock River Unitarian Universalist Congregation is some of our former more romantic/charismatic members.]

The person who asked me the question four weeks ago, is apparently very high on the empirical. He or she asks why if there is no cosmic plan, “If nothing really matters, and we die with nothing, why do we work so hard to be good and do right?” [It was only at this point that the possibility dawned on me that the questioner was actually challenging the nihilist assumption on the basis that we do “work so hard to be good and do right,” but let me say more about the nihilist or empiric perspective.]

Stace spelled it out clearly in our reading. The scientific revolution undercut the religious assumptions that had unified our culture. That’s why religion has been so hostile to science – not only have the answers science raises been challenging, but the whole scientific approach has been seen as threatening basic religious assumptions. Stace, writing a half a century ago, was convinced that the religious/spiritual approach was doomed. His obituary for religion appears to have been premature. Perhaps he underestimated the depth of the need. Stace wrote:

Those who wish to resurrect Christian dogmas are not, of course, consciously dishonest. But they have that kind of unconscious dishonesty which consists in lulling onself with opiates and dreams. Those who talk of a new religion are merely hoping for a new opiate. Both alike refuse to face the truth that there is, in the universe outside [of us], no spirituality, no regard for values, no friend in the sky, no help or comfort for [humans] of any sort. To be perfectly honest in the admission of this fact, not to seek shelter in new or old illusions, not to indulge in wishful dreams about this matter, this is the first thing we shall have to do.

. . . the necessity of learning to live with the truth. This means learning to live virtuously and happily, or at least contentedly, without illusions. . . . To be genuinely civilized means to be able to walk straightly and to live honorably without the props and crutches of the childish dreams which have so far supported [us].

No civilization can live without ideals, or to put it another way, without a firm faith in moral ideas. Our ideals and moral ideas have in the past been rooted in religion. But the religious basis of our ideals is plainly tottering.

He acknowledged that there have always been some people who have been able to live moral lives without a religious basis, but he questions whether this can possibly work for “a whole family of peoples composed almost entirely of relatively uneducated men and women. . .”

Perhaps the fallacy in Stace’s argument is his assumption that science has actually undercut the religious beliefs of most people. The surveys show that even in the 21^st century, many more people are clinging to beliefs in a controlling divinity with a plan, than believe in evolution. Gallup polls show that 39% of Americans believe that humans were created by God in one step within the last 10,000 years, 44% believe that we evolved through a God directed process, and only 10% believe in a process of evolution which was entirely undirected – that is in contrast to 5% of those who claim to be scientists who believe in creation, 44% who believe in a God directed process, and 55% who see evolution without a God.

I had a note just this week from a Guilford high school science teacher reporting that some of her colleagues are going to a fundamentalist workshop designed to reinforce the teaching of creationism in its newest guise. These are teachers of our kids! Stace took too much for granted! He spent too much time in the ivory tower of academia. The “triumph” of science cannot yet be declared.

As our survey showed, most of the members of this church in 1996 had an empirical orientation, but that is not to say that they did not see some degree of meaning in life – in fact, they were divided between those who tended toward the comic and those who leaned in the tragic direction. While our primary orientation is to reason, one cannot suggest that reason has necessarily led us to a narrow nihilism.

So we come to the central question: How is it that people who may not expect to be evaluated in the end by a heavenly jurist, nonetheless do “work so hard to be good and do right?”

I want to suggest that we may be confusing cause and effect, the chicken and the egg. Perhaps we fail to adequately appreciate human nature. After all, what is the source of the morality that has been ascribed to the divinities? Have not all the moral visions been articulated by human beings, in their songs and psalms and prophecies? The transmitters, the prophets have ascribed their visions to inspiration or revelation from an external source, and moral ideals have been given authority by attributing them to the supernatural, but can we not, in fact, envision them as rooted in some dimension of the human spirit? Perhaps the theologies have been mere buttresses for mortal moral ideas that could stand on their own.

It is demonstrable that visions of God have changed over the years as God’s followers have changed. As insular people have become more cosmopolitan, so have their Gods. Read the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures: God evolves. Process theology suggests that God is a verb and not a noun – that our ideals shape our God.

I have come to believe that we are at least as likely to find a drive toward love and beauty and justice within people, as we are to find signs of hate and ugliness and greed – and on my good days, I believe that love and beauty and justice are more natural. Why is it that these same values seem to have emerged in diverse cultures in diverse settings across our planet? Is it a coincidence? I would not suggest that it is somehow a divine plan, but that an inclination toward what we consider good may be rooted in the very nature of our species.

There is an awful lot of evidence that one must exclude if one insists on asserting the sinful nature of humanity. There is also an awful lot of evidence that one must exclude if one insists on asserting inherent purity that is only corrupted by society. The greatest likelihood, it seems to me, is that we, like life itself, are indeed mixed. The ancient stories of the battles between forces of good and evil may well be based on the interior human experience of people who are attuned to processes within themselves. The story of Abram wrestling with God is replicated in the lives of great religious teachers through the ages who have experienced a struggle between what they judged to be greater and lesser forces within themselves.

I do not understand my own actions. I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer that I do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can wilkl what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer that I do it, but sin that dwells within me.

We have come to understand the psychology of trying to distance ourselves from those parts of ourselves that Jung referred to as the shadow, those parts of which we are ashamed. Health and wholeness come from accepting our complexity, which is to say the presence in us of the positive and negative.

It gets tricky, of course, when we confuse the positive and the negative – when some decide that the will to power over others, the drive to dominate and exploit, is an expression of the voice of the holy and that to co-operate and share and establish justice is weakness. The demonic remains powerful in our modern world: pick up the newspaper; watch the television news. But don’t ignore the story of the man who risks his life going into the burning railroad car to save a stranger who is trapped. Don’t ignore the compassion and generosity of millions of people for those who suffered in the tsunami. Don’t ignore the whistle blower who risked everything to reveal the evil that was going on in the Iraqi prison. These are as much a part of human nature as are the war makers and the torturers and the corporate scoundrels.

What is the source of the inclination toward goodness? Some of you will recall the story I have often shared told by the great Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker who, when he was four, was walking by a pond in which he saw a tortoise sunning himself. He lifted a stick to kill it, as he had seen other boys do, when he heard a clear, loud voice within himself say, “It is wrong!” When he told his mother what had happened, she took him in her arms and said, “Some call it conscience, but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the [human] soul. If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear, or disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and leave you all in the dark and without a guide. Your life depends on heeding this little voice.”

As I have studied and experienced human nature in my years in the ministry, I have discovered very little correlation between traditional religious expression and moral behavior. It seems as if some people understand their motivation to do the good as somehow coming from a supernatural source, while others are quite content to experience it as coming from the depths of themselves.

This week I have been reading the new book by Jim Wallis, God’s Politics: Why the Right Get’s it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. Wallis, who is a devout Evangelical, and I have little or no theological agreement, but when the rubber meets the road, when it comes to the vision of the kind of world in which we want to live, we have much in common. While he is enamored of the Biblical phrase, “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” he asserts that we have two vision problems today:

One is the lack of vision in public life . . The other is when political leaders have a clear vision – but the wrong one. When politics is being shaped by visions that defend wealth and power, rather than opening up more opportunity; that are more exclusionary than inclusive; that pursue policies that destabilize families and communities; that exalt private interests over the common good; that simply leave too many people behind; that seek national or corporate self-interest over international peace and justice; or that increase conflict rather than reducing it – then such political vision can be as destructive as having no vision at all.

In his book, Wallis refers to an analysis he and some classmates did when in seminary. They discovered that poverty and injustice were the second most prominent theme in the Hebrew scriptures, and that one out of every sixteen verses in the Christian scriptures is about the poor or money. And yet, none of the students could remember having heard a sermon which addressed the issues of poverty or justice. Wallis has devoted himself to a justice-centered ministry. His theology is not highly empirical, but I am impressed by how his theology is manifested in the way he leads his life. Am I to think less of him because he has a different handle on the world?

To be genuinely civilized means to be able to walk straightly and to live honorably without the props and crutches of the childish dreams which have so far supported [us].

I would suggest instead that being genuinely civilized is to be measured by the qualityt of the values we live out, rather than by the “scientific” way in which understand our motivation.

This morning on Fusion I interviewed Sphendim Nadzaku, the new Imam of the Muslim community in Rockford. His religion is one which demands almost total submission to a set of practices based on an understanding of reality that I do not share. He stressed in the interview that Salvation was the key, but the message I heard was that he turned to his ancestral faith because the Christians he hung out with as a teenager did not take the implications of their religion for their lives very seriously. When our taping was finished, our conversation continued and we explored what we hold in common. The kind of life which Sphendim has been inspired to by his belief in the teachings of Muhammed, the values he practices daily, are remarkably close to those I pursue. Our motivations to follow them differ, but the path to which our diverse motivations have led us is a common path.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, in responding to the tsunami and the question of where God was in that tragedy wrote:

Stop thinking of God as some big man up in heaven sitting there and making individual judgements about who shall live and who shall die, where he should put a tsunami and where he should put a beautiful sunset. Instead [the Rabbi says], understand God as the force of healing and transformation in the universe, the aspect of the universe that is the source of love, kindness, generosity, social justice, peace, and evolving consciousness, and that this aspect of the universe permeates every ounce of being, every cell, and unifies all being as it moves the being of the universe toward greater and greater levels of love and connection and consciousness, and makes possible the transcending of that which is, toward that which ought to be. Seen this way, God is not the all powerful being that determines every moment of creation, but rather the part of creation aspiring toward love, kindness, generosity, peace and social justice which is evolving toward greater power to shape our common destiny to the extent that we choose to embody it more fully.

The rabbi stands in a tradition from which God language speaks to him, although it is clearly in an empirical rather than a romantic context. He sees a direction of which I am less certain, but it is an evolving process, clearly the kind of process theology of which Ellen Swinford was speaking last Sunday.

Being strongly empirical in my orientation, I, like Stace, am not inclined to posit “in the universe outside [of us], spirituality, regard for values, a friend in the sky, or help or comfort for [humans] of any sort.” But that is not the end of it, because I do find a hunger for more than the materialistic in most people, I do find friends on earth who provide help and comfort. There is meaning in human life if we bring it to life.

Jim Wallis concludes his book with the story of Lisa, a young African American woman from DC, a smart kid from a working class family who earned a PhD. From Yale, but went back to the streets of Washington to work with the children of the streets. She died at the age of forty with a rare heart disease. Wallis says:

There is one thing she often said to all of us that has stayed with me since Lisa died. When people would complain as they often do that we don’t have any leaders today or would ask where the Martin Luther Kings are now, Lisa would get angry. “We are the ones we have been waiting for!” she would declare. Lisa was a person of faith. And hers was a powerful call to leadership and responsibility and deep affirmation of hope. [Wallis goes on to say]

Lisa’s commission is a calling the prophets knew and a lesson learned by every person of faith and conscience who has been used to build movements of spiritual and social change. It’s a calling that is quite consistent with the virtue of humility because it is not about taking ourselves too seriously, but rather about taking the commission seriously. It’s a commission that can only be fiulfilled by very human beings, but people who, because of their faith and hope, believe that the world can be changed. And it is that very belief that changes the world. And if not us, who will believe? After all, we are the ones we have been waiting for.

[I discovered subsequently that the line “we are the ones we have been waiting for” is actually from a “Poem for South African Women” written by June Jordan in 1978.]

There may or may not be a plan or direction in the universe – perhaps entropy is inevitable, perhaps not. What experience teaches us is that there are people whose lives are observably full of meaning, who seek to make a difference, to make life more humane, and they inspire us to the possibilities of our own lives. “Why do we work so hard to do “good” and be “right?” Because we hear a voice within that tells us that we can make a difference, that what we do matters, that only we can do what we can do. That is reason enough.

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23.Earlier this year a neighbor complained of a ghost in her house. I think that:

Circle the letter of the answer you gave to each question. If you left the question unanswered, mark an x in the space provided. At the bottom of the column, write the number of responses you circled in that column. Copy the number of responses to each column onto the grid on the next page. The total number of responses should equal 27.

1	A	C	B	D
2	D	B	A	C
3	C	A	D	B
4	C	B	A	D
5	D	A	B	C
6	C	A	B	D
7	C	B	D	A
8	B	A	D	C
9	A	D	B	C
10	C	B	D	A
11	C	D	B	A
12	C	A	B	D
13	D	C	A	B
14	A	D	C	B
15	D	B	C	A
16	A	D	B	C
17	A	D	B	C
18	D	B	C	A
19	C	A	D	B
20	D	B	A	C
21	C	A	D	B
22	C	D	A	B
23	D	C	A	B
24	D	A	C	B
25	A	C	D	B
26	C	B	D	A
27	D	C	B	A
TOTALS
	EM	CA	CH	GN