Yet Another Unitarian Universalist
A postmodern heretic's spiritual journey.
From an interview in Esquire with Scott Galloway, who is clinical professor of marketing at the Stern School of Business, New York University:
“When I was younger, I considered myself a scientist, and I was disparaging about religion and people who practiced it. What I’ve generally found is that people getting together once a week to be in the agency of something bigger than themselves and wish their neighbors good tidings is a good thing.”
(Thank you, Carol, for finding this.)
The San Francisco Standard recently published an article by Zara Stone titled “How Gifted Is Your 3-year-old? IQ tests for preschoolers become the norm in Silicon Valley: Psychologists have seen a surge in Bay Area parents seeking a leg-up for admissions to elite schools.” Now remember — it’s elite preschools for which they’re seeking a leg up. That’s 3 years olds.
The long title of the article pretty much tells the whole sick story, but some of the quotes are revealing. The author interviews Tsunami Turner, who works as an educational psychologist at a company in San Jose that provides “child-centered therapy” as well as IQ testing services:
“‘Some parents come in with an IQ number in mind. They are really wanting to have their child hit a specific number,’ she said. Their kids are often very accomplished, taking dace, soccer, art, and music — and know they ‘have to get a certain number.’ They show up ‘highly anxious,’ she said. If scores come in lower than expected, Turner gets pushback and requests for retests.
“‘There’s a lot of societal pressure. The family is incredibly busy and wants their kid in a school that challenges their intellect and supports their development,’ she said. It can spiral quickly. ‘The goal is that a child will get into a good primary school, and that will lead them to getting into a good college, which will lead them to getting a good job and doing really well in the world.'”
In my 13 years working as a minister of religious education in Silicon Valley, I saw some of this — not so much among the families in the UU congregation there, because if you’re trying to fast-track your kids in this way, you don’t waste time on things like moral and spiritual education — but I did see it happening. It really is true, some well-to-do Silicon Valley parents start trying to build their child’s resume starting when the child is 2 years old. I feel this phenomenon is bad for children, and tends to result in accomplished but stunted and less-than-fully-human adults.
I use AI tools for certain tasks. But there are other tasks I would never use them for. Bloomberg News has an article on how AI-generated recipes are taking over both the web and social media. And it’s not going well, neither for the food bloggers, nor for the people trying to use AI-generated recipes. They interview Eb Gargano, who writes the Easy Peasy Foodie blog:
“Instead of sending home cooks to her decade-old, well-tested recipes, Google increasingly inserts AI-generated summaries stitched together from bits of her work and others’ that often get the basics wrong. An AI-assembled version of Gargano’s Christmas cake, for instance, would have people cooking a 6-inch cake for 3 to 4 hours at 320°F (160°C). ‘You’d end up with charcoal!’ she said. Meanwhile, traffic to her turkey recipe is already down 40% year over year….
“All of this, food bloggers say, erodes the simple promise of a recipe: that someone has actually cooked it before you have. To Gargano, this is the core issue. ‘No matter how clever the AI is,’ she said in a recent interview, ‘it can never actually test a recipe in a real kitchen and see how it works.’”
Religion News Service reporter Kathryn Post has an interview with William J. Kole about his new book, “In Guns We Trust,” to report on White evangelical gun culture. In the interview, titled “‘In Guns We Trust’ challenges white evangelicals to rethink their alliance with firearms,” Kole says that he was a part of White evangelical churches, but has been “deconstructing” his Christian faith over his perception that gun culture (and its ally, Christian nationalism) has nothing to do with Christianity:
“…I feel like the historical Jesus is objectively nonviolent. I understand that evangelicals will cherry-pick Scripture to find a few verses to help them feel more comfortable with gun culture, but I find it completely unbiblical. The churches that are embracing gun culture now were almost entirely pacifist up until the late ’60s and early ’70s, when a shift began. Even the Assemblies of God, where I served as a lay missionary for three years in Europe, was officially pacifist in its constitution and bylaws. So, they’ve had to pivot, and it’s a perplexing pivot for me. I just don’t see how weapons have anything to do with a faith tradition that is rooted in nonviolence.”
Kole also says that he’s now “reconstructing” his Christian faith, adding:
“I just can’t, in good conscience, continue in the evangelical tradition.”
A couple of weeks ago on the Patriotic Millionaires site, Emily McCloskey posted a rant — sorry, a well-reasoned essay — laying out why, when Trump has a national approval rating of just 43%, the Democratic party approval rating is just 27%:
“Trump and Republicans have offered a story to voters to explain their financial woes. They’ve blamed immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA people, government bureaucrats, and more. And while they are morally, historically, and economically wrong to do this, unfortunately, Democrats have not strongly pushed back on these assertions in a way that resonates and sticks with voters.
“If Democrats want to win back the affections of voters, particularly those of working people, the solution is simple: they need to start telling a story. More specifically, they need to tell the RIGHT story about why working people are struggling so much while a handful of millionaires like us are doing so ridiculously well. That story involves ruthless corporations, C-suite executives, Wall Street financiers, and compliant politicians from the past and present. It’s not as simple and straightforward as ‘Immigrants are stealing your jobs,’ but it’s also not that complicated to explain.
“But they can’t stop at telling a story to explain people’s economic problems. They also have to offer a solution to them. And that solution is so uncomplicated that it’s almost painful for us to write: adopt an economic populist platform for people to rally around. An economic populist platform will involve policies that are simple, straightforward, and effective at reducing inequality….”
These days, it can seem as though the leadership of the Unitarian Universalist Association has basically adopted the Democratic party line. I especially notice this as someone who is proudly registered as an independent voter, someone whose political views (such as they are) could be called something like “Jesus socialism.” Not Christian socialism — most Christians in the world would not recognize me as Christian; and for my part, given what Christianity has become here in the United States, I don’t want to be a US Christian. Yet while there’s no way you can call me a Christian, I’ve been deeply influenced by the teachings and philosophy of Jesus. I think Bernard Loomer got it right when he argued that Jesus should be recognized for a major contribution to Western thought, his conception of the universe which places the interdependent web of all existence at the center of everything. Sometimes Jesus called that interdependent web “the Kingdom of Heaven,” sometimes maybe he refers to it obliquely as “God,” sometimes he didn’t really give it a name. However you name it, once you acknowledge the centrality of the interdependent web of all existence, the first thing you’re going to notice is….
Quiz time: If the interdependent web of all existence is your central reality, as it was for Jesus, what’s the first thing you’re going to notice?
Nope, not environmentalism. The first thing Jesus noticed was human beings living in poverty.
Environmentalism is not a bad guess. It’s true that we’re connected to all living things, and Jesus did indeed speak about how his God would know when even a small insignificant animal like a sparrow dies. So we should be concerned with all living beings, and indeed with the non-living world (air, rocks, and so on) as well.
But mostly, it appears that Jesus focused on poor people. In the fragmentary records we have of Jesus’s teachings, sparrows are mentioned once, but he talks about poor people any number of times. Unfortunately, Jesus’s thinking and philosophy have been somewhat obscured by later religiosity, and even atheists tend to think of Jesus as somehow divine. When you think of Jesus as a human being, as a human animal (Homo sapiens), however, then it makes sense that in his widening circles of concern, he begins with human beings.
Then when Jesus looks at what damages human animals, he acknowledges the damage done by what we now call racism (this is the point of the story of the Good Samaritan, as Dr. King made clear), and sexism, and all the isms we like to talk about these days. But Jesus starts with people who are poor — people who don’t have enough to eat, people who struggle to find the basic necessities of shelter and physical safety. So reducing poverty is going to be the starting point for anyone who wants to follow Jesus’s moral example. (Both Pope Francis and now Pope Leo get this; Pope Leo’s first official “exhortation” calls on Catholics to care for the poor.)
Dr. William J. Barber II, one of the few public US Christians whom I respect, has pointed out that poverty cuts across the lines of race, sexual orientation, and all the other isms. Barber, who is Black, reminds us that while it’s true that a greater percentage of Black people than White people live in poverty in the US, in terms of absolute numbers there are more White people than Black people living in poverty. As a result, Barber says, we can’t fall into the trap of believing the myth that poverty in the US is a Black problem — poverty is a White problem, a Black problem, and a problem for every racial group.
This brings me back to the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). On the national level, Unitarian Universalism does not spend much time worrying about poverty. When you look through the denominational magazine, UUWorld, you will find lots of articles about environmentalism, LGBTQIA+ rights, anti-racism initiatives, feminism, and other worthy causes. I’m glad that the UUA promotes anti-racism, feminism, LGBTQIA+ rights, environmentalism, and so on, and I’m proud to be associated with those causes. But I rarely see articles in UUWorld about poverty. Looking beyond the denominational magazine, here’s another example: at the most recent General Assembly, the annual meeting of the UUA, delegates chose between three Congregational Study Action Issues (CSAIs) to serve as a focus of our social justice efforts. Of the three, only one CSAI touched even remotely on poverty — the CSAI on housing justice — and, not surprisingly, it did not win. I’m glad housing justice made it on the ballot, but I’m not surprised that it did not win.
My take on all this is that the UUA has the same problem as the Democratic party. Like the Democratic party, the UUA supports many worthy causes and initiatives. But, like the Democratic party, the UUA does not spend much time or energy on addressing poverty. Yet William J. Barber II points out that by some measures, nearly half of all US residents are poor (where poor is defined as: a household for which one major expense, e.g. a $1000 car repair, would push that household over the economic edge). Nearly half the US is poor. That’s just astonishing in a so-called First World country. That’s an issue that deserves our full attention.
I’m one of the 73% of US residents who don’t give their full approval to the Democratic party. Unfortunately, I’m starting to feel that way about the UUA. I’m seeing poverty everywhere in the US. Even here in Cohasset, Mass., a supposedly wealthy town, I’m seeing people with their economic backs to the wall. They range from a few people who are homeless to quite a few people who are just one unexpected expense away from economic disaster.
So I’ll repeat that advice that Emily McCloskey of Patriotic Millionaires gave to the Democratic party — but I’m going to direct that advice to Unitarian Universalists (UUs) in the US. We US UUs need to “adopt an economic populist platform for people to rally around [with] policies that are simple, straightforward, and effective at reducing inequality.” Or to put it more bluntly: US UUs, we need to stop ignoring poor people.
Artist Matt Inman has a long cartoon/blog post on his website The Oatmeal, in which he sets forth his feelings about AI-generated art. He is thoughtful, while at the same time he pulls no punches (including the use of some salty language). Here’s an excerpt:
“AI art is an interesting technology because despite its growing popularity, nobody seems to want it. Artists hate using it. Consumers hate consuming it. And yet it thrives, like an Arby’s built inside a protected forest.
“I know it’s bleak. But artists, remember this: Nobody worth giving a damn about wants this technology. No one with a modicum of taste, patience, or culture gives a shit about AI art.
“AI art might eventually have the right number of fingers, but it’ll never have a heart. (I know this is cheesy but fuck you I like it.)”
This was posted to MetaFilter, where one commenter noted:
“Maybe it [AI art[ will get better. I’ve said it before: I don’t know what we (humanity writ large) are capable of achieving with AI, but I know the people and corporations funding AI are in it for profit, not the betterment of culture or humanity.”
On The India Philosophy Blog back on Sept. 28, Amod Lee wrote a post titled “Snakes wrongly grasped: on the psychedelic experiences of [Elon] Musk and [Charles] Manson.” Here’s a brief excerpt (I’ve changed the paragraphing slightly):
“…the transformation from self-centredness to Reality-centredness [following a transcendent experience from e.g. psychedelic drugs] is a fundamentally ethical one: to be far enough along it is to be a saint, one who has had ‘a transcendence of the ego point of view and its replacement by devotion to or centred concentration upon some manifestation of the Real, response to which produces compassion/love towards other human beings or towards all life’ (Interpretation of Religion 301). But I think we need to be very careful about that sort of claim. The point came up in my interview with Osheen Dayal of MAPS Canada, where I pointed to the example of tycoon Elon Musk.
“It is publicly documented that Musk has used psilocybin, LSD and more, and given his known involvement in psychedelic spaces like Burning Man, he’s probably done far more than the documents let on. He has almost certainly had multiple psychedelic experiences of self-transcendence in the face of a larger reality. And yet Musk is about as far as one could imagine from ‘compassion/love towards other human beings or towards all life.’ Rather, he is practically a caricature of a self-absorbed egoist, so confident in his own rightness that he used his brief time in government to destroy thousands of military veterans’ lifelong careers and end the lifelines of thousands of desperately poor people around the world in the name of saving a tiny fraction of money and sometimes nothing at all.
“Musk is to today’s generations what Charles Manson was to the baby boomers: a sobering reminder that psychedelic experiences can leave you a terrible person….”
From a story by Fiona Murphy titled “How ‘RaptureTok’ amplified an extreme corner of faith” (Religion New Service, 26 Sept. 2025). The story documents how minority religious views are often mocked and belittled on TikTok….
“Heidi Campbell, director of the Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies at Texas A&M University in College Station, said that since 2016, online discourse has shifted toward what she calls a ‘performance of meanness.’
“‘The screen has allowed us to broadcast so much more diversity, which can be a positive thing,’ Campbell said. ‘But instead of bringing us closer together, which a lot of internet prophets and cyber philosophers kind of said in the 1990s, it’s actually brought more division.’”
This is the conclusion of Bertrand Russell’s chapter on the influence of the philosopher John Locke, from his History of Western Philosophy:
“Enlightened self-interest is, of course, not the loftiest of motives, but those who decry it often substitute, by accident or design, motives which are much worse, such as hatred, envy, and love of power. On the whole, the school which owed its origin to Locke,, and which preached enlightened self-interest, did more to increase human happiness, and less to increase human misery, than the schools which despised it in the name of heroism and self-sacrifice. I do not forget the horrors of early industrialism, but these, after all, were mitigated within the system. And I set against them Russian serfdom, the evils of war and its aftermath of fear and hatred, and the inevitable obscurantism of those who attempt to preserve ancient systems when they have lost their vitality.”
John Locke inspired some of the most important parts of the U.S. Constitution; I think it would be fair to say that one of the unwritten foundations of the U.S. Constitution is enlightened self-interest. We are now in an age when enlightened self-interest is deprecated in favor of naked self-interest. The big philosophical question now is whether the Constitution can survive when the prop of enlightened self-interest is removed.
I’ve been rereading Dave Van Ronk’s memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street (2006). Van Ronk was a musician best remembered for his fingerstyle guitar and his interpretations of blues music, although he thought of himself as more of as a jazz musician manque. He was one of the core musicians of the 1960s Folk Revival, though he never hit it big like his friend Bobby Dylan. Van Ronk was also a serious leftist. He started out as an anarchist, joined the IWW, and wound up as a Troskyite. In his memoir, he reflected on the politics of the 1960s:
“I was encouraged by a lot of the changes that were happening in the 1960s, but as an orthodox leftist I was also a very strong critic of the student movement and the New Left. Of course, I agreed with a lot of their stances — I was strongly pro-civil rights and strongly antiwar — but most of those people were not really radicals, just a bunch of very pissed-off liberals. They had no grounding, and indeed no interest, in theory, and their disdain for studying history and learning economics infuriated me. The core problem with the New Left was that it wasn’t an ideology, it was a mood — and if you are susceptible to one mood, you are susceptible to another. They wanted the world to change, but essentially it was a petty bourgeois movement that had no connection with what was really going on. The working class at least has some power — if the working class folds it arms, the machinery stops — and as for the ruling class, its power is obvious. But what power does the middle class have? They have the power to talk: yak, yak, yak. To interpret, reinterpret, and re-re-reinterpret. And that is the history of the New Left in a nutshell.”
Interestingly, I feel the current Republican party actually does have a serious theoretical grounding. I disagree violently with the Republican party’s economic policies, but you have to admit that they are firmly grounded in Milton Friedman’s economic theories. Even if today’s Republicans have drifted away from Friedman in some respects, still a great deal of their agenda — doing away with Social Security, privatizing the National Park System, getting rid of the Post Office, etc. — comes straight out of his work.
Who on the American left offers any theoretical grounding to compete with Friedmanism? If Dave Van Ronk were still alive he’d no doubt advocate for Trotskyism, although to my mind that’s a non-starter in 2025 America. Personally, I’d vote for William J. Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign. However, I suspect Barber’s Christian affiliation is a dealbreaker for many of today’s pissed-off liberals; plus it has proved difficult to get pissed-off liberals to focus on poverty as a central issue.