The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

Whoa, it's been a long time, eh? I'll bet nobody's even around anymore to read this crap. Not that there were throngs of hits here in my heyday.

Bless me Father, for I have slacked. It's been one month since my last blog entry. Since then I've been screwin' around with lotsa things, blogs not being one of them. One of them is this - the missus and I have become active members of a Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. We actually did this about a year ago, but I did not want to write about it until I figured out whether or not this place was the real deal.

Now don't go thinking I've got religion or anything. Unitarian Universalism is the work of the devil, I assure you. In fact, I think it's a by-product of that other insidious evil - intellectualism, and at times invokes the absolutely depraved philsophical underpinnings of humanism.

I've picked this topic in deference to two very heartfelt blogs about religion recently posted by my two friends, the Viscounte Lacarte and Bobby Lightfoot. Those are here and here, if you're interested.

Given that we live in a country that is run by and largely populated with self-righteous, sanctimonious scumbags who begin sentences with the words "As a Conservative Christian..." when they explain how you are about to be fucked by their corporate oil war machines, we sane folks of like mind often find ourselves in a state of revulsion at the very concept of churchgoing.

That's all well and good. Nobody ever saved the world sitting in a church, anyway.* But this is not a church, it's a fellowship. (UU's get mad when you call it church.) It's a formal organization consisting mainly of people who believe in love, compassion, tolerance and the dignity and equality of all humans. No, seriously. They really believe in that stuff. And the oddest part about it is - there's usually more practicing going on than preaching.

Don't confuse these folks with congregations of people who read platitudes out loud from prayerbooks each week about love, tolerance and the dignity of all humans, smiling and winking and patting themselves on the back for being so fucking upstanding, principled and "right with God", and then cheering for bombing campaigns labeled "shock and awe". That would be a church.

There's no hatin' going on at the UU Fellowship. Or at least very little. And one reason nobody really hates anybody is: There is no sexually repressed, self-proclaimed Earthly representative and spokesperson of a territorially challenged, emotionally retarded SUPREME BEING standing in a pulpit every week telling us all who we should hate. As a matter of fact, there's this mentally stable, relatively normal "minister" who doesn't believe in DOGMA, that stands up from time to time and suggests that we probably shouldn't hate anybody.

Clearly, Satan is behind this. As further evidence, I offer you this inside information.
Here are some of the types of mutant freak show people who make up the congregation -

There are Jews and Christians and Atheists and Agnostics and Buddhists and Muslims who are tired of being railroaded by religious authorities.
There are Jews who don't hate Arabs and Arabs who don't hate Jews.
There are heterosexuals who don't hate homosexuals.
There are homosexuals who don't hate themselves.
There are theists who don't hate atheists and atheists who don't hate theists.
There are people with one color skin married to people with a different color skin.

What we don't seem to have are neocons or fundamentalists. At least I haven't met any. But if they wanted to join us, they'd be welcome. I don't think many of them will tho, because we don't do a lot of the stuff they seem to like. F'rinstance...

Nobody ever says "Glow-reh".
Or uses the word "annoint".
Nobody speaks in tongues.
There is no healing of lepers.
No casting out of demons.
And relatively little, if any, ecstatic convulsing.

So what UUers do, actually?

Well, on Sundays, we get together for a service, where somebody (sometimes the minister, sometimes someone else) researches a life-question topic like, say, dealing with death, or what is compassion, or what makes a fundamentalist a fundamentalist, and creates a service around that topic. My wife just did a really cool one on forgiveness. The service leader also picks some cool, relevant-to-the-topic-music, which some REALLY good musicians deliver from week to week. I've heard everything from Gregorian Chants to Talking Heads at UU services. The service leader delivers a short lecture on what they've researched, and we all sort of discuss the presentation a bit after they're done. You see, you don't have to agree with everthing that's said up at the lectern. Otherwise, it would be a church.

We also have some funky little rituals for the ritually inclined, like the symbolic lighting of a chalice, the ringing of a deep-toned bell to start the service, that sort of thing. Some of the services are intense and enlightening. Some are nothing special. But we all have a good time and sometimes we're inspired to do good stuff.

Which brings me to the other things we do - stuff to make the world a better place. We hold fundraisers for subversive charities like aids foundations and planned parenting organizations. We run environmental cleanup programs. We buy our coffee directly from third world growers and pay them a couple of dollars per pound so they're not otherwise doomed to live in abject poverty selling it to name brand coffee retailers for 17 cents a pound who turn around and sell it to you for $4 per "grande" cup. We do all kinds of diabolical stuff like that.

Now, to get to the point of this long-winded blog - here's why I think this is important, and why I'm bothering to blog about it. I think it's important because atheists and agnostics and just plain non-religious folk are not organized. Why would we be organized? We just simply don't believe something. There is no organization of people-who-don't-believe-in-Sasquatch. But you see a lot of people who believe in weird, hateful, dangerous shit are highly organized, and as such, are able to muster enough power to spread their weird and hateful and dangerous shit all across the land and have it permeate to the extent that we are all becoming the victims of it. And so we need to organize to protect ourselves against it.

And that's what UU is about.

*Nobody ever saved the world, period.