Myth-Busters: Free to Believe Anything?

A year ago, in October 2006, the California Science Teachers Association named Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage lifetime members. They are the stars of the Discovery Channel television show MythBusters. They use basic elements of the scientific method to test the validity of rumors and urban legends in popular culture. They have confirmed, for instance, the myth that the unaided human voice can shatter glass. They “busted” the myth that a penny dropped from a tall building can kill a person at ground level.∥

Myth Busters have been around for a long time.

The Earth was flat. It was the center of the Universe. It was about six thousand years old. It was all created in seven days. With the rise of science and increased understanding of the scientific method, of testing and verifying, these accepted truths were challenged, and replaced with other assertions — hypotheses, best guesses from the information at hand. In this scientific world, all realms of human endeavor became subject to scrutiny concerning their assertions of truth.

Myth Busters, that’s who we Unitarian Universalists are in the religious world. With the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, all sorts of truth-seekers explored the basis of assertions made by religious authorities, exposing their human sources. We’ve been among them.

We think of Francis David, our sixteenth century Transylvanian forebear who studied himself out of Catholicism and into Lutheranism, and kept studying, and found himself a Calvinist, and kept studying, ultimately rejecting the Trinity as non-Biblical, and founding what we look back to as the first Unitarian churches in the world. Francis David was martyred for his religious beliefs. Do you know on what charge he was convicted? Innovation. He could not be satisfied with the pronouncements of any religious authority, and believed the journey of the human spirit was to follow its conscience in matters of belief. In those days, such “innovation” could cost you your life.

When we look back to the early nineteenth century, and the evolution of religious thought in America, we find our religious ancestor, William Ellery Channing. In 1819, he preached the sermon understood to be the most succinct and thorough explanation of Unitarian thought. It was the most widely read pamphlet of his day.

He used as his text for the sermon, the words from First Thessalonans,∥ “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” Simply, he asserted that all religious truth is open to scrutiny, and there are principles we can apply to such “truths” to test their veracity. He said God made humans capable of reasoning, and we need to apply our reason to our religious beliefs.

In considering the Christian tradition and the Bible, Channing said we must apply historical criticism, and literary criticism to understand them. We must compare Biblical texts with other records of ancient times to see if there is support outside the text. Using such a reasonable approach, Channing rejected Trinitarian dogma, refuting Jesus’ dual nature as both man and God. Jesus was a prophetic teacher, divine in the way that is possible for all of us.

Channing confronted the Calvinism of his time directly arguing that it would be inconsistent and cruel for a moral and loving God to bring into existence humans disposed only to evil. Instead, he said, humans must be measured by our power to choose and to cultivate virtue.

As he said it, “We believe that all virtue has its foundation in the moral nature of (hu)man(s), that is, in conscience, or (one’s) sense of duty, and in the power of forming (one’s)…life according to conscience. We believe that these moral faculties are the grounds of responsibility, and the highest distinction of human nature, and that no act is praiseworthy” that is not grounded in them.∥

Well, this is all fine and good, and, certainly, this high notion of human nature has been a distinguishing feature of Unitarian, and Universalist theology for the last two hundred years. And, it has led us down a road, whose cautionary signs we have sometimes sped by or ignored. In holding high individual freedom of conscience, for instance, all too often we are heard to say, “In Unitarian Universalism you can believe anything you want.”

There is a core of truth in this, but it’s a myth worth busting. Since the days of Channing in the early 1800s, one distinguishing element of Unitarianism has been the absence of a requirement that one adopt a creed, a doctrine, or a certain theology. But the echo of Channing’s call to reason and moral nature cannot be ignored without losing the heart of the freedom he espoused.

You may not be true to this core and disbelieve in another’s freedom. You cannot require that another believe like you do, and be a Unitarian Universalist. At the same time, if the other’s belief excludes you, they are not true to this core. We UUs have evolved a strong commitment to non-discrimination, as we state it in the Bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association, on the basis of “race, color, sex, disability, affectional or sexual orientation, age, or national origin and without requiring adherence to any particular interpretation of religion or to any particular religious belief or creed.”∥ Hitler was not a UU.

So, No, you can’t be a Unitarian Universalist and believe anything you want to believe.

Let’s delve a little deeper into this myth busting. What is a myth, anyway?

My Dictionary of Religious Terms gives two, contrasting, definitions that are helpful in developing a job description for a Myth Buster. The first is our most common use of the term myth: “Fiction symbolizing or accepted as religious fact.” The first word is “fiction.” This is the role as played by all those who use their reason to assert that religious claims to truth must be consistent with what we know and discover to be the laws of nature. On this basis religious scholars have declared beliefs such as a “virgin birth” to be only a myth, just fiction.

The second definition is more challenging. Myth is “poetry or prose embodying profound religious truth.” If we consider religion to be the search for, creation, and celebration of meaning in life, this may be done in an abundance of ways. Our human proclivity for meaning-making has produced all the religions of the world. So, with the second definition of “myth,” we are looking at religious truth from a different perspective. It calls not for a process of dissecting and analyzing, but rather one of intuiting, and empathizing. This definition calls not for historical criticism but for understanding the themes of the imagination.

Myths such as that of the Garden of Eden, Joseph Campbell says, “are telling us…of matters fundamental to ourselves, enduring essential principles about which it would be good for us to know; about which, in fact, it will be necessary for us to know if our conscious minds are to be kept in touch with our own most secret, motivating depths”∥

It’s not that there actually was a garden known only to Jews, with a serpent who could talk, with a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and a Tree of Immortality…no, those are myths busted long ago. It is only the most fundamentalist of the Fundamentalists who believe that.

But the deeper truth is that human beings struggle with our knowledge of Good and Evil. The Garden of Eden is not outside us somewhere. It is a “landscape of the soul.”∥ Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of knowledge and are expelled from the Garden, with its tree of life. They lose their innocence and the timeless life they have known.

The myth of The Garden of Eden, describes our longing and our struggle as human beings knowing we will die, and wondering what death will bring.

The power of the later myth of the resurrection of Jesus, is in restoring the vision of immortality that was lost in the expulsion from the Garden. But, even in busting the myth of a physical resurrection, as something in conflict with our understandings of natural law, we are left with the meaning of the myth as a landscape of the soul.

In the Gnostic Book of Thomas, that didn’t make it past the editors to be included in the New Testament, Jesus responds to the question, “When will the rest for the dead take place, and when will the new world come? He says, “”What you look for has come, but you do not know it.”∥ He is talking of the deeper soul meaning of the myth, of our eternal connection with the divine. It’s easy for us not to see it. There are so many distractions and we are always changing. Things are not what they seemed. We are in flux and inherently a part of the constantly changing Universe. We are stardust. Our elements are of the cosmos. Though the forms will change, here is eternity. In this moment, we are all connected.

If we are going to be honest in our Myth Busting we must ask, “What myths do we Unitarian Universalists live by?” And, “How do they function in our religious lives?”

Taking our first principle is a good beginning. We “affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” Surely this is myth. If we consider the behaviors of mass murderers and rapists, and how they deny the dignity of others, how can we proclaim their inherent worth? What do we really mean by this affirmation?

It helps to go to our second definition of myth. Myth is “poetry or prose embodying profound religious truth.” Rather than being a statement of what is, this is a longing for how we wish the world to be. We cast our fate with all who never give up on human potential. Because we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of each person, we believe in second, third and even thirtieth chances. The profound religious truth is that if we all lived as if each person had inherent worth and dignity, an amazing amount of suffering in the world would be relieved.

There would be no rape or murder. There would be no hunger or homelessness. Wars would cease. Guns would be turned into plowshares. It’s a myth not to be busted. It’s a myth worth celebrating.

We come into religious community for many reasons: to have our minds stimulated and our hearts opened. We come into religious community to test our beliefs, to engage others, that we might grow in understanding and deepen our commitment to what is life-transforming toward the good. We come to bust the myths we have held without review, and to claim new myths that speak from the core of our being.

Here you are free to believe what you have sought responsibly, and tested in your conscience. Here you are free to follow the truth you discover and to hone it in community. Here you are invited to reach out, joining hands, to create a world where freedom empowers us to realize the worth and dignity of all.

It’s a myth worth embodying.