Atlanta Unitarian

One of my areas of greatest discomfort with Christian theology has been the concept of original sin.  To say that human nature is inherently inclined towards the evil seemed to me unfair and inaccurate.  Also, the score keeping seemed unfair as well:  If you do something wrong, you get the blame, but if you do something right, only God gets the credit.  You own your own flaws but not your own virtues. Now I say all of this as a strict amateur, someone who has never studied Christian theology seriously, so please take it with a grain of salt.  This is less an accurate portrayal of Christian theology than an outline of my own theological thinking. For a long time I think I subscribed to an essentially optimistic view of human nature - that people are born essentially good, and if they gravitate towards bad behavior later in life it is because they were not provided the necessary nurturing and guidance in their childhood.  I think this is a view fairly com...

Spiritual Journeys – Some Definitions Back when I was at the University of Georgia, before I had arrived at any particular set of religious beliefs, I had a roommate named James who was spiritual in the most cliché sense of the word.  He lit a lot of incense and candles and owned lots of crystals and pictures of the moon.  I basically thought of James’ view of the world as silly but mostly harmless. James also had a girlfriend whose belief system ran along similar lines.  However there was one particular practice that this girlfriend engaged in that bothered me.  Whenever things went wrong, whenever she was disappointed, she would repeat this mantra to herself, “Everything is perfect, everything is perfect.”   I think I loosely understand the underlying philosophy behind the mantra – that the plans of the universe are too complex for us to fathom as individuals.  But it was apparent to me that the mantra was in fact terribly destructive for this ...

I've recently joined a few new activities where I was clearly and markedly the worst by a large margin. The first is I've joined the "back-up" choir at my UU church. The second is I went out for some pick-up Ultimate Frisbee this past weekend. In both cases, there was a sense of anxiety that I might be (OK, was) dragging down the group. It can be tough to know that you are the bottom end of that bell curve, scraping against the right edge of the graph. But I think that I also experienced a broader sense of liberation. Being the worst, once it has been clearly and definitively established, frees you from any pretence of image or competition. You can immerse in an activity for whatever it is, on its face value. The subjective experience of being in the moment becomes so much more important, because you are clearly not impressing anyone. It's a great thing to sing, and greater still to sing surrounded by voices of beauty. The music stays with you as you walk -...