|
|||||
|
How the National Prayer Breakfast invitation edited Thomas Jefferson: “In extracting the pure principles which he [Jesus] taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves….We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus…. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” More: Doubting Thomas: Prayer Breakfast Theocrats Try To Baptize Jefferson How can you make resolutions you’ll actually keep? Making general resolutions to change (”I’ll lose weight” / “I’ll stop smoking” / “I’ll do something about my job”) rarely results in actually achieving what you resolve. Those general statements are good starts, though. Think smart. That’s S – M – A – R – T — a way to look at your goals, to make them work for you. New Year’s resolutions are one kind of goal. We as humans factor in far more than basic probabilities — hope, greed, whatever. I found this article fascinating! Are Birds Smarter Than Humans? – PDF file I cannot fully celebrate anyone’s death. It would make me less than I want to be. It was Osama bin Laden’s celebration of death of others in the service of his ends that led him to inspire so much pain and suffering. I don’t want to be like that, even in a moment. I mourn the pain that he caused to not just those killed by acts he inspired and planned, but to their families. I mourn the happiness lost to millions billions of people through the fear of terrorism. But I also hold just a small place to mourn the person he might have been but was not — the person he chose not to be. I remember hearing just after 9/11 from someone who’d met Osama in college in America. That person remembered an evening when Osama was sitting at a piano and picking out notes and singing “The House of the Rising Sun.” I remember, in the pain and shock of what we call 9/11 as shorthand, thinking of what might have been had he not made some choice, somewhere along the way. I can mourn that self he didn’t become and could have become. That humanity which he long buried in himself and stamped out so that he could do hateful things is one small part of what I mourn today, along with all the other human losses that choice he made led to. One way we can refuse to be like Osama bin Laden is to stubbornly refuse to be drawn into the denial of any person’s core humanity in service of our own ends. Yes, it was probably the lesser of evils BY FAR that he was killed rather than left to live and inspire more death and pain and suffering. But I mourn that killing him was the only alternative we could find, based on his own choices. Recently, someone asked me about the “correct” version of the quote from Felix Adler about “eliciting the best” or “bringing out the best.” Here is an edited version of my response, based on quick research: He said it several different ways. Here are two I can document as actually being from him: The title of a chapter in An Ethical Philosophy of Life is his most common way of wording it, and might be considered canonical: Act So As To Elicit the Best In Others and Thereby In Thy Self. In that essay, you’ll also find his attempts to explain what “the best” meant to him. From a 1926 article on moral education, “Personality: How to Develop It In the Family, The School, and Society,” he worded it this way: “Seek to elicit the best in others, and you will thereby challenge and bring to light the hidden best in yourself.” We have tended to paraphrase. “Yourself” instead of “Thy Self” is quite common, or “bring out” instead of “elicit” or “work to” instead of “act so as to.” Mostly that’s an impulse to bring it up to date and keep it from sounding so Victorian or stilted. (I think of my grandfather’s phrase about not using “ten dollar words.”) Personally, I like “elicit.” “Thy self,” not so much. We don’t use the “Seek” version much and it’s longer but I actually like it better — and he wrote that one for a wider audience (moral educators) and much later in his life, when, like I found this on the way to looking for something else: a paragraph from an early constitution of the “Ethical Union” of the first Ethical Societies in the United States, referred to in a book published in 1896 as being from “a few years ago.”
The word “moral” is not one we tend to use today — perhaps the Moral Majority (which some of us believe was neither) ruined the term for a generation or two. But in the context of the Ethical Movement, “moral” meant then, and means now, living in relationship in ways that respect and draw out the worth of every human being. Apart from the slightly stilted Victorian language of the paragraph, it’s not a bad summary of what we aim to be today as well, here at the Northern Virginia Ethical Society. As we move towards our Opening Sunday of the season on September 12th after our summer break from Sunday meetings, I think that this aim bears repeating. In our 21st century way, we can implement what was there said in 19th century language: help our members and the community to live more ethically, bringing out the best in ourselves and others, and cordially welcome into full participation in our community, anyone who feels themselves also drawn to that aim — recognizing that this common purpose is more important than whether we agree or disagree, believe or disbelieve, on some philosophical or theological matter. We are mentioned in this article in the Post: Atheists gather for a holiday they can believe in: Independence Day Glad to get a mention. Our Ethical Society is definitely an atheist-friendly group with many atheists, but we’re not exclusively an atheist group. We’re nontheist in that belief in deities is not required or even important to our identity. Thus, atheists are comfortable, and so are mixed families and others who don’t believe that people must have a deity to ground ethical behavior. As part of the membership meeting in June, 2010, I asked members to remember two incidents this past year that stood out for them in the life of our Ethical Society — one that they enjoyed, and one that they didn’t enjoy so much. I also asked that they try to boil down to one word the quality of life that they were wanting — a quality of life they found in the moment they enjoyed, a quality of life that they found wanting in the moment that they didn’t enjoy. Out of those words, I created this word cloud:  State of the Society 2010 (Note that I omitted or translated a few words offered that seemed to describe what people didn’t want, or answers that were more than one word long. The more times a word was mentioned, the larger the word in the “wordle.”) As Memorial Day approaches, I remember that the day was initially created to honor the dead on both sides of a major conflict – the American Civil War – and in that remembering, to re-unite the nation that had nearly split in two. It was not to glorify war, or to justify the rightness of either side, but to mourn those who’d died and honor them as people, and to move forward in unity. (more on that: Memorial Day Origins) In that same spirit, Bonnie Hurd Smith tipped me off to this video of an Eric Colville song, End of War (on YouTube). I had tears in my eyes by the end of it. I hope that it inspires some thought and dreams in others, as it did in me. Many of the other Ethical Societies have, somewhere on their building and often near or above the area where the platform speaker stands, some version of the Felix Adler quote, “The place where people meet to seek the highest is holy ground.” (Felix’s original words actually were about “men” but he did seem to mean that in the inclusive sense.) The reference is to the idea in many religions, and especially in the Hebrew scriptures, that there is some space that is especially holy — a place set aside, a place to be especially respected. Adler’s idea was that it was not the place that was holy; it was the act of taking seriously high ideals together, as a community, that created “holiness.” It’s an extension of the idea of the worth of the individual human being: when such human beings act in ways that help to bring out that precious worth in each, we create something that serves, in an ethical society, the same function as a priestly dedication of a space might serve for another group with different emphasis and beliefs. When our Society got started, using rental space, we had no way to put that wording on our space, so we included it explicitly as part of opening words. Now, thanks to the creative and generous gift of member Amy Anderson, we have a banner with the words on it to put on the speaker’s lectern. And so, it would be redundant to use the words as part of our opening. Any change in ritual — even in groups like ours that eschew ritual or deny that we have rituals — will bother some, and please others. For the remaining months before our summer break, we’re going to experiment with some different opening words, seeing how they work. I’d ask that you not react just the first time you hear them, but “try them on for size” as you hear them several times over the next few months. Then, in June, take some time to reflect on which words resonated for you, and which ones didn’t. And also take some time to listen to others about which of the opening words resonate for them, and which haven’t resonated. Perhaps some of the words will just take hold, like the candleholder of the “ethical person” migrated from the food table at a festival to the front table and transplanted what had been at the front table, with very little comment from members — and now she or he just seems to be part of our Sunday mornings. It seems no matter what words we use in the script for Sunday morning, some people like some parts, and dislike others. We’d love to magically find something that speaks to everyone — whether a founding member or a curious newcomer sitting in our midst for the first time, or everyone in between — and that’s not likely to happen. But who knows? Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “All life is an experiment. The more experiments the better.” In our non-ritual rituals, let’s give these experiments some time, and see what happens. |
|||||
|
Copyright © 2012 Ethical Platform - All Rights Reserved |
|||||
