Honorable Harvest (March 26, 2017)

I’d never heard of ramps before I moved to Ithaca. They are a kind of wild leek that often grows by the side of the road, or under a tree in the woods in our part of the world. But over these past 10 years ramps have become so popular, you see recipes for them in Huffpost[i] and the New York Times. I imagine this is part of our “field to table” ethic that has become increasingly popular; we love the idea of foraged food, vegetables that grow wild in the forest. The problem is that ramps are becoming extinct. We are literally loving them out of existence. The wild plants grow very slowly, taking up to four years to flower and reproduce. Americans are used to being able to buy pretty much any fruit or vegetable we want any day of the year. We are shocked when we find an empty place in the grocery store where strawberries or apples or grapefruits usually are - even if the produce person assures us they are expecting a shipment tomorrow. It is trendy, now, to crave locally sourced seasonal foods, and this has its roots in our desire for a new, more sustainable food ethic, but unfortunately we are taking our supermarket habits out into our local ecosystems which follow other rules.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, who wrote today’s readings, is a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation. She writes:

“Collectively the indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life is known as the Honorable Harvest. They are rules of sorts that govern our taking, shape our relationships with the natural world, and rein in our tendency to consume—that the world might be as rich for the seventh generation as it is for our own. [Braiding Sweetgrass p. 180]

Regardless of how we voted in the presidential election, I think everyone agrees that we are living at an important crossroads. The choices we make in the present always impact the future, but things are changing so quickly in our world that this moment we are living in right now appears to be a particularly critical time. I believe that each of us is called to work to steer this change in a positive direction, and I believe that there are at least as many ways to lend a hand as there are people. I was lucky to have the chance to study with Buddhist teacher and activist, Joanna Macy. She is one of the folks thinking about how to create a cultural shift that would take us in a sustainable direction. She describes 3 different approaches to guiding this change.[ii]

The first is “Actions to slow the damage to Earth and its beings.” This includes the things we usually think of as activism – calling your senator, picking up a sign and heading to a protest. This is the kind of work our state wide UU legislative advocacy groups do, like, Interfaith Impact here in NY state.
 Like efforts to ban fracking in NY state, or to prevent the storage of Liquid Natural Gas under Lake Seneca. Macy calls these “holding actions” actions that say “this far and no farther.” If we wanted to make sure ramps would be here in the twin tiers each spring for our children and grandchildren, this kind of approach might involve working with county officials to create some kind of law against picking amps on public land until the population could return to normal. Or creating limits like we have for hunting and fishing.

To make such activism truly meaningful, and not just a gesture of political showmanship, we would have to understand something about ramps. We would have to learn how they grow, how quickly they can recover when harvested, and what conditions they need to thrive. Therefore the second path of the Great Turning is “Analysis of structural causes and the creation of structural alternatives.” Sometimes we are so busy arguing about our legal territory, we don’t really know which actions are going to lead to substantive change. I bet we can all think of an example of a piece of legislation that helped politicians with their poll numbers, but didn’t really fix the problem it was designed to solve. To make our actions truly effective, we need to study, and observe, and listen. We need to experiment with new ways of doing things, and see what works.

Project Grow is one of the ways we do that in the Athens UU congregation. While there is a strong history of family farms in the region, the younger generations have lost the knowledge and wisdom their parents and grandparents learned through years of experience about how to grow food here. Project Grow is trying to find ways to help all of us understand that food doesn’t come from a store, it comes from the earth, from seeds planted and tended. To this end we have built community gardens where anyone can come and plant and tend and then take home part of the harvest of fresh food. Project Grow is also a teaching program helping kids learn how to cook their own fresh foods, through the Mad Kitchen, helping teens get job skills by tending our gardens in the Summer YTI program and an exciting new hydroponic program coming to the Waverly High School Green House.

One of the core values of Project Grow is[iii]:

“Responsible land use includes agricultural practices that protect and nourish nutrient-rich soil, beneficial insects, local wildlife, and local flora and fauna within our valley watershed.”

So we use Permaculture techniques like Berm and Swale and the 3 sisters to embody our values in our gardens. And after a season of harvesting the abundant fruits from our gardens, we take time to put the “beds to bed” making sure we give back to the soil so that it can have something to give us when the earth wakes up in the spring.

Our values shape the work we do, so beneath our work on holding actions, and our analysis, must be a distillation of our own values, making sure those values will save humanity and the whole biosphere for 7 generations. So the third and final path is working toward a Shift in Consciousness. We must make sure that the way we think about the world is a way that will lead us in a positive direction.

Kimmerer notes that in indigenous cultures, what the earth offers us, whether that be wild strawberries, ramps or sweet grass, are considered gifts. And a gift implies gratitude and reciprocity. When we buy leeks at the grocery story, we feel the transaction has ended, once we have exchanged our money for our consumer product, but a gift “establishes a feeling bond between 2 people”[ p. 26]. When we forage ramps from a woodland park , or from the side of the road, do we understand this as a gift that establishes a bond between us and the ramps? Between us and the land? As we harvest those delicious ramps, and begin to imagine the meal we will make with them, do we also imagine what we will give back in return?

Kimmerer asks “How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again? I know we cannot all become hunter-gatherers, as the living world could not bear our weight, but even in a market economy, can we behave ‘as if’ the living world were a gift?” [p. 31] If we were truly able to make this shift of consciousness, to see ramps as a gift instead of a product, it would have ripples that would affect our actions every day. This is where we come in as a people of faith. Could we UUs help one another and the larger community shift our consciousness, so that we see every ramp, every apple, even the oil we pump into our cars as a gift? What would it mean to receive both fruits and fuel oil in gratitude and reciprocity to the earth?

I would argue that every action we take grows from our vision and values; every action has its roots in the consciousness we cultivate. If we spend time deepening our consciousness to really understand our place in the interdependent web of life, of which we are all a part, we increase the odds that our research actions and our holding actions will bear the fruits we really need, rather than reflexively protect the way things are now.

This Summer, at General Assembly, the UU world will have its first chance to vote on whether to change our first principle from “the inherent worth and dignity of every person”, to “the worth and dignity of every being”. This proposed change of wording represents an evolving of our shared consciousness.

Says Macy: “The realizations we make in the third dimension of the Great Turning save us from succumbing to either panic or paralysis. They help us resist the temptation to stick our heads in the sand, or to turn on each other, for scapegoats on whom to vent our fear and rage.” The panic and fear we have watched sweep over our country during this last presidential election cycle shows us, that there is much work to be done here. It feels to me like we are a culture whose values have come loose of their moorings. As people of faith, we must take the time to know deeply our values, and to reflect them, and to show them in all the circles in which we move, whether on Facebook or in the garden.

Macy is clear that all 3 ways of working for positive change, are important. There are an infinite number of “battles” we could fight right now. Or, to use less militaristic language, there are many seeds we could plant. Some of us will feel called to those holding actions - whether you feel called to protest the LPG storage facility that jeopardizes our fresh water and farmland around Seneca Lake, or to visit your state legislators on this year’s Advocacy day in Albany on May 1. Some of us will be called to analysis of structural causes and the creation of structural alternatives. For example, talking with your neighbors about the life cycle of ramps, teaching them as Russ Cohen, wild foods advocate, recommends, to “[pluck] leaves off of the tender plants and leaving the bulbs intact so that they can reproduce for future years.” Or you could participate in a citizen science project testing local streams for contaminants so we know what impact our human industries are having. Or perhaps you want to start with that important conscious-shifting work of re-visioning our human place in the great web of being, taking the time to weave a shared vision of our path into the future.

This year as the first green shoots of spring break free of the frozen ground, let us wonder together, what we can do to make sure that even 7 generations into the future, people will also know the gift of a full pantry and a full plate. I challenge us to do something more than just wish that it will be so. This year, as we anticipate the first ramps, the first rhubarb, the first asparagus, let us receive all that abundance as a gift - a gift that implies reciprocity and gratitude, and let us begin to imagine how we can give back in return.



Endnotes
[i] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/24/what-are-ramps_n_7128438.html
[ii] http://www.joannamacy.net/thegreatturning/three-dimensions-of-the-great-turning.html
[iii] Project grow is based on 4 values:

1. Growing a family garden instills familiarity and respect for healthy diets and local food sources.
2. Working together in a garden bonds both family and neighbors through mutual labor and reward.
3. Quality local food sources should be available to community members at reasonable cost regardless of income or social status.
4. Responsible land use includes agricultural practices that protect and nourish nutrient-rich soil, beneficial insects, local wildlife, and local flora and fauna within our valley watershed.

What are we to do about evil? (February 26, 2017)

Unitarian Universalists have trouble with Evil. Our movement was born as an alternative to fire and brimstone theologies that railed against the sinfulness of humankind, and warned of the real threat of hell, and the temptation of the devil. We, as an alternative, offered a theology of a loving, forgiving god (from the Universalists) and a positive view of human nature and progress. The humanists taught us that the world is in our hands, so we better get started building a world of justice and compassion.

We strive to be a faith that is not about sin and guilt, but how can we work for justice if we can’t see clearly the broken-ness of our world? 15 minutes of watching the evening news shows us a less hopeful side to our human nature. In 1913, the Rev. William Wallace Fenn, a Unitarian Minister, wrote of this faith:

“We must seriously question whether [this faith] can bear the weight of the tragedies of human experience. Does not its amiable faith in inherent goodness appear but a ghastly mockery when confronted by the facts of life. And what of human sin? Here more than anywhere else, the weakness of Modern Liberal [religion] shows itself. It may be conceded that traditional theology made too much of sin (and evil), but surely that was better than to make light of it.” [i]

One of the most disturbing “tragedies of human experience” in the last 50 years is the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Our faith must be able to hold even something as appalling as this. In her book “Finding Beauty in a Broken World” Terry Tempest Williams Writes-

“This is a hell of our own making – those who killed and those of us who looked away. No surgical strikes, computerized or digitized by military minds and top gun pilots, the eyes of these killers were on the eyes of those they killed. By hand. One million Tutsis were murdered in 100 days. Their killers were neighbors with farm tools, machetes, and hoes.” [p. 227]

How does it happen that an estimated 500,000–1,000,000 Rwandans could be killed during in 100 days? Although history tells that us the genocide was planned by political elites in the Rwandan government, huge numbers of ordinary people were swept up in the homicidal urge, neighbor attached neighbor; even clergy were involved in the killing. Historian Omer Bartov explains that in the 19th century German and Belgian missionaries to Rwanda privileged the Tutsis because they were seen as “more European”. In the 1950s a new generation of missionaries a backlash “that identified the Tutsi as culprits in Rwandan history while ignoring exploitation by the German and Belgian colonial rulers. Hence when a Hutu uprising occurred in 1959, attacks were directed against the Tutsi rather than Belgian administrators. The inaccurate ideal promulgated by the missionaries that the Tutsi had grossly exploited the Hutu for centuries continues to shape Hutu understandings of Rwandan History and eventually became a primary ideological justification for genocide.” [Finding Beauty in a Broken World p. 305] This false rhetoric was cultivated and fanned for generations, until the fire was easy to spark in 1994.

In those 100 days, every manner of atrocity you can imagine occurred. I will spare you a description of them this morning. But as many as 70% of the Tutsi and 20% of Rwanda's total population were killed in those 100 days. If that is not evil, I don’t know what is. We can’t blame this on one evil supervillain, but a rushing river of systemic forces that swept up ordinary citizens into the killing frenzy where people like you and I committed evil acts against neighbor and friend.

What do we believe about evil? UU theologian Rebecca Parker answered that “We believe evil is trans-personal, that it exists in structures and cultural systems outside ourselves. We believe that all humans have the capacity for a huge range of good and evil.” Humans aren’t evil, but they can do evil and participate in evil. Parker clarified that Evil is NOT a transcendent being that takes control of us – we are not a faith that talks much about devils and demons - but I wondered, but when we get swept up in an evil system, is that really so different than being possessed by evil?

When we learn about some evil perpetrated in our world, we reflexively look for a single individual to blame and punish. But this belies the complexity of how evil enters the world. Every person, every event happens in a web of other people and events. The Rwandan Genocide is one dark dark place in the recent human history where it is very difficult to narrow the blame, because so many thousands were swept up in what are surely evil acts. There is blame to go around, not only for the political elites, not only the armed militias, not only the ordinary civilians that took up violence against their neighbors, not only the churches that fomented and encouraged this ideology and violence, not only the missionaries who first taught that the Tutsi’s were the source of all that was wrong in Rwanda, but all the countries, including our own, who had the power to act but instead watched without speaking up, without intervening, as the evil spun out. Certainly individuals were to blame, and individuals were punished - The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda met for 20 years, convicted 61 individuals[ii]. But just this summer the U.N. Committee Against Torture warned that recent acts of violence and incitement to hatred against the ethnic Tutsi minority in Burundi have the potential develop into genocide. Jens Modvig Chair of the U.N. Committee Against Torture told reporters that “you could consider that systematic torture directed towards certain political and ethnic groups could be an early warning sign of a process that could deteriorate into genocide.”[iii] So even though 61 individuals were convicted, still the hatred and violence simmers, waiting to erupt. This, I believe, is what Parker meant when she said “We believe evil is trans-personal, that it exists in structures and cultural systems outside ourselves.”

I have been wrestling with this sermon for months, trying to pin down and articulate exactly what evil is- how to define it, how to know it. I have finally resigned myself to the fact that evil is a mystery. It does not announce itself like the supervillains in the comic books. I think if we were going to create a character to portray this abstract concept, it would surely be a shape shifter, sometimes charming and logical, sometimes an ugly monster, and sometimes an ordinary neighbor. That is why I changed the title of the sermon from “What’s a uu to Think about evil”, to “what is a UU to do about evil”. And the answer must be…resist.

We resist by speaking up. My teacher Don Bisson pointed out to in one of his lectures that one of the signs of evil is that people seem to go silent around it. That makes sense as a survival instinct- if you saw a man with a gun pass you in a dark alley, your survival instinct would tell you to get super quiet. But sometimes we allow evil to happen when we go silent. Recently the Athens UU church brought in a trainer from the Abuse and Rape Crisis Center to help us become a safer congregation. She emphasized was the power and danger of secrets. Abusers rely on the silence of those they abuse, and on the silence of those family and friends and co-workers who suspect. Children are taught these words “no- go- tell”: to say no to the thing that makes them feel unsafe, to go away from the situation, and then to tell someone they trust. That’s good advice for us adults as well. Be very suspicious of things on one is talking about, about things people try to shush when you speak them. As UUs we are called to give voice to those very things that make us nervous.

We resist by speaking the truth with love. Both parts of the sentence are important. It is definitely possible to speak the truth in such a way as to cause or perpetuate evil. In the long bitter fight leading up to this presidential election and its aftermath folks on all sides of the issue have said some truly horrible, unkind things about the “other side.” I’m not trying to equate online bullying or hateful speach with genocide, but we know that Hate Radio was used by Hutu extremists “to further their agenda of fueling and igniting the genocide. Writes John K Roth, respected expert on the holocaust, “Genocide depends on raising voices, it cannot exist unless divisions between people are constructed by speech … and killing is unleashed by voices that proclaim it to be necessary” [Finding Beauty in a Broken World p. 307] So I want to suggest that we have a responsibility to resist even with the way we speak to one another, because we never know how the seeds we plant will grow.

How we resist matters. When we try to beat evil at its own game, evil wins. When we fight a bully by bullying back, evil wins. When we avenge violence with violence, evil wins. One of the most seductive ideas is that if we are good, and our cause is just, then whatever we have to do to win is good and just. We live in a time when it has become okay to say- in public - the meanest, most cruel things one can imagine. Why, as a culture, have we decided this is okay? We can’t really think it serves the good, can we? Do we believe that once someone has done something we dislike, that no words can be too cruel? That those who displease us deserve to be punished and we ourselves can do no wrong in the punishing? Or is it that we don’t consider the ethics of our actions because it has become culturally normal? This distinction is critical, because evil seduces us with normality. For those 100 days in Rwanda the most stunning acts of cruelty had become culturally normal.

We resist by remembering that no people are disposable. This should be natural for us if we remember our first principle “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” Every person. Even those whose lives seem purposeless to us. Even those whose choices seem wrong to us. Even those caught in the crossfire of our righteous acts. We can never become comfortable with the idea of collateral damage. When waste of life becomes easy, when waste of life seems like a normal part of doing business, then we risk becoming that which we seek to resist.

We resist by refusing to demonize the other. Consider the Hutus who were taught and believed that all their difficulties came from the Tutsis. The Tutsis, scapegoated for all the evils of Rwanda, were no longer human, no longer had any human rights. And because the Hutus had good on their side, and the Tutsis were cockroaches, there was no limit to the evil that could be perpetrated even on innocent Tutsi children. Unitarian Universalism was founded on the belief that we humans are not 2 distinct camps of people- good and evil, saved and damned, worthy and unworthy. We resist the characterization that some people are humans and others are demons. Because as we have seen in all the great atrocities in Western history- from the Nazi concentration camps, to the African Slave trade, to the Native American genocide, once we have labeled a human being as something less than human, it becomes easy to excuse evil acts against them.

Moreover, if we project evil onto others, it is easy to overlook it in ourselves. Jungian thought suggests that much of what individuals think of as “evil” is really our own shadow. Much of what we hate and fear in the world, Jung suggests, we project onto others who inhabit those characteristics we reject in ourselves. So we resist, as the 12 step programs suggest, doing a “searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Williams writes “if human beings are capable of mass murder within mass hysteria, then I, too, as a human being, am also capable of such things. My only protection is my independent mind. Fear is the mechanism used to get both the masses and the bureaucrats, clergy or clerks, to carry out the anonymous orders of those in power [Finding Beauty in a Broken World p. 307] “ I sit with my own demons as I wonder what violence I am capable of. None of us is immune from inhabiting the dark corners of human nature.” [p. 275]

We resist by sitting with our own demons, by doing our own inner work. For example, it is very common for kids who were abused to grow up and abuse their own children. This cycle of abuse can best be interrupted by the adult who becomes conscious of their history and behavior, and chooses to do whatever is necessary to break the cycle and create a new, healthier pattern. If we do our own inner work, reclaiming and integrating our own shadow, then we can, at least, reduce the amount of evil each of us does in the world.

Finally, we resist by not letting evil set the agenda. Evil is seductive, it can be fascinating. We resist evil by changing the conversation, pointing the system toward health and growth and beauty and life. Because giving our attention to something nurtures it. So plant and nurture the seeds you want to grow. Consider Lily Yeh who has spent her lifetime creating public art in broken places like Rwanda. She writes “we want to create. We long to create. We can transform a very bleak situation into a place of joy and color. … When your environment is beautiful, it gives you dignity. You feel more dignified and your sense of self-esteem grows. All this is nurtured from working together. Seeds. Planting seeds of beauty helps the tree of community with all its branches to grow.” [Finding Beauty in a Broken World p. 270] It would be easy, and understandable, for those who experienced unimaginable suffering in Rwanda to devote their lives to vengeance. But many are devoting themselves to restoring life to their battered communities, to building a new life for their children who paint visions of the future in colorful murals on the walls of the survivor’s village.

Unitarian Universalism must be a faith can bear the weight of the tragedies of human experience. While we focus on compassion and truth, reason and beauty, we must not be afraid to resist evil in all its guises. Let us resist by speaking the truth with love. Let us resist by refusing to demonize or dehumanize the other, because we know that great evil can be done by those who think they have the right on their side. Let us resist by doing a “searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves,” noticing the seeds of good and the seeds of evil in ourselves. Let us resist by sowing seeds of beauty, health, wisdom and peace. As the bible says [Deuteronomy 30:15] See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil… I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.

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[i] (thanks to my colleague Craig Schwallenberg for this quote)

 [ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Tribunal_for_Rwanda

[iii] http://www.voanews.com/a/un-violence-hatred-against-tutsis-in-burundi-could-presage-genocide/3461988.html

The Power of Thinking (January 15, 2017)

I hated Long division when I was a kid. It gave me a stomach ache and a head ache. I remember going to my mom one night in a fit of despair over my math homework. When she offered to help, I handed over a sheet so muddy with partially erased pencil marks that she responded “ah, I see your problem- let’s start with a clean sheet of paper.” She pulled a fresh sheet, and a nice sharp pencil. She re-wrote the first problem on the clean page, and began to write each step down as we worked on it together. Teachers had always told us “show your work so we know how you solved it” but all of a sudden I realized that really, if I could show my work in a way that was legible and understandable to me, then I could understand what I had done, and when I struggled, I could figure out where I’d gone wrong, and I could check my work and be sure that I was right. All of a sudden I loved math. I loved that you could take a clean sheet of paper and a sharp pencil and follow the numbers to their logical conclusion.


This is the power of our thinking minds. It takes fear and confusion and overwhelming emotions and slows everything down to where we can see clearly what our solutions might be. In our political environment right now strong emotions cloud the issues. Our public discourse is more about “who is the enemy” than “what is the most effective path forward for all of us.” And we need real solutions right now, not just emotional rhetoric.

We live at a time where it is very hard to tell truth from lie, fact from guess. Have you ever seem something posted on Facebook- so outrageous that you immediately post it to all your friends, only to have someone point out that it was actually just a joke or a fabrication? How can we know what is true? This is especially important when it comes to public policy. We know that when considering new legislation, our elected officials have to consider whether the proposed law increases their popularity, or will be popular with big donors at least as much as whether the law will be effective. Things are not any better in private industry, where the ultimate measurement of success is quarterly returns to shareholders rather than the impact on 7 generations of life on our planet. Scientists who advise both government and industry are routinely silenced because what the scientists are telling us isn’t popular[i]. For the future of our country, I’d like to suggest that the power of thinking can cut through the politics and the partisan passions and help us steer our way forward.

For an example today, let’s use something that should be pretty safe for both liberals and conservatives. Imagine we were buying a new couch for the congregation. Have you ever fallen in love with a piece of furniture – “wow- this is just the perfect thing!” and not until you got it home did you realize it doesn’t actually fit? Maybe later you get the bill in the mail for the couch and realized you can’t really afford it? The best way to prevent both these couch-fails is to check your numbers. Before you head to the showroom, measure the space where you want to put the couch. Then bring a tape measure to the store with you, and measure the couches. And because humans are imperfect, you might even want to measure twice; as my grandfather the cabinet maker used to say “measure twice cut once.” If it’s really important to you, have a friend measure it too. In the great hierarchy of information, this is the most trustworthy-- something you measure or count firsthand, preferably having someone check your work. In the world of science, the secret code for “had my colleagues check my work” is “peer reviewed.” Look for that phrase – it’s a good sign that the data is pretty solid.

Hang on, you may be saying to yourself, can we afford a couch? Good question. So often we buy something because we need it, or we want it, or it seems like something we should be able to afford. This is why we always like to have a copy of our budget and our year-to-date expenditures at board meetings. Not only can I look at the budget and do the math, but the whole board has a copy, and we can check each other’s math. Now budget numbers are a little softer than how many inches a couch is. Just because we usually make $200 in fundraisers, doesn’t mean we will this year. Just because we usually spend $1000 on heat, doesn’t take into account a record cold winter. Just because it is a number on an impressive spreadsheet doesn’t make it true. So part of checking each other’s work is asking questions about the numbers “where did you get these estimates for how much our utilities will be this year” and “what are our plans for this fundraiser?”


In reality, we can’t get to the store to measure the couch in person- we can’t always gather our data first hand. If you are going to order the couch on line, you are probably going to have to trust someone else to measure it for you. Most of the data we get comes to us in a secondary way like this. Exactly how many children graduated from high school last year? How many inches did it rain during the hurricane? No one has time to go count all these things for themselves. At some point you’re going to have to trust a pharmacist to measure your drugs, or an engineer to design your bridge. Choose your expert carefully. Choose them not because they share your political affiliations, but because they check their work and use a good method. We make this mistake a lot- we might trust our Facebook friends before we trust a careful peer-reviewed study by a researcher who voted differently in the last election. For example, I hope most of you trust me and agree with some of my values. But if you really want to choose the couch with the most durable construction for the fellowship, you probably want to go to Frank. And if you want to know if you can afford a couch, start with your treasurer, Leslie.

But don’t give all your trust unquestioningly to the experts, even your beloved church treasurer. Ask questions about who did the counting and how they did the counting. One of the most universally accepted standards for gathering information is the scientific method. Part of that process is explaining exactly what method you used to get your measurements. You can use the word “methodology” if you want to be fancy about it. “I took this tape measure and I measured the back, from one end to the other” and then the scientist has to show their math. Now someone else (maybe far across the country, maybe in another decade) can take the same kind of tape measure, and the same kind of couch, and check your math. An online poll does not use the scientific method. Your Uncle Bob eyeballing the couch from a photo is not the scientific method.

Learning about the method to get the numbers helps you know better what those numbers mean. Last fall, some of the members of my Athens congregation walked out in the middle of the creek bed over by Litchfield Elementary School with Mike Lovegreen, while he explained that sometimes folks who design stream-crossings would calculate the volume of water that had to travel under a bridge, without asking “what happens to all the rocks and stuff in the creek-bed when we build this?” and “How is this bridge going to change the way the creek moves?” And that those un-asked questions often resulted in roads and bridges and parking lots washing out in big storms. As Susan Etlinger, who analyzes data for a living, said “if I don’t know what questions you asked, I don’t know what questions you didn’t ask.”[ii]

Just because someone uses numbers in their Facebook post, doesn’t mean it’s a fact. I read somewhere that 70% of all statistics quoted in conversation are made up on the spot. But you might want to check that for yourself. So another important question you can ask is- who is the source of your data? If the Facebook post doesn’t tell you where the data came from, probably best to disregard it; if no one’s name is on it that means no one has to be accountable for errors or false information. If you are really curious ask for the source. Once you know the source, you know a lot about the data. The Onion is a satirical magazine – but I see my Facebook friends reposting it like it’s real news. If you have data from a researcher at Stanford on one hand and from the Huffington Post on the other hand, I would suggest that probably the Stanford data is more rigorous. If I’ve found a couch with the right measurements and the right price, and the review says “most comfortable couch in the world.” It makes a big difference who is the source of that quote- is it from a couch salesman, or from consumer reports? Ask yourself who benefits, whose pockets will be lined. If the only research about couch safety is done by the couch industry, that’s important to keep in mind. Not to say that the couch industry is not honest, just that they might be motivated to ask questions and collect the data that is more likely to help them sell couches.

You may find that the more questions you answer, the more you drill down into the data, the more questions you have. That means now you are really thinking! Some of you have told me that you are here in a UU church because you came from a religious tradition where asking too many questions was frowned upon. Well, you came to the right place. Asking questions is practically a sacrament for UUs.

UUs are encouraged to “to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, [which] warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit;” UUs understand that no information is perfect. Very fallible human beings bring their biases and blind spots to the work they do. If I really want a certain couch for the church, research has shown that I’m likely to pick and choose data that supports my arguments for buying it.[iii] No person can be completely objective. No measurement is perfect. Every answer is incomplete. So the use of reason and the scientific method helps us challenge the data we have and the conclusions we draw, and the more we challenge those theories the stronger they become.

The Galileo story I read during the Lesson for all ages reminds us how gathering new data and questioning our assumptions can change the way we see the world. I can see clearly that every morning the sun rises in the east, and sets in the west. It’s just common sense that the sun goes around the earth. So, in the 16th century when Nicolaus Copernicus came up with a mathematical model which suggested that actually we went around the sun, people were slow to believe it. No matter how good his math was he could not convince people to question their old idea. When Galileo Galilei found new data using a telescope he designed society pushed back hard. The church asked him to cease and desist, making his life very difficult. Today the idea of the earth orbiting the sun is very uncontroversial- even ordinary people can see for ourselves images from space. Centuries of science confirm the basic idea, and in 1992 the Catholic Church finally changed the official stance to agree that Galileo was right.

But that’s not the end of the story. Astronomers like William Herschel and Friedrich Bessel realized that the sun is only the center of the solar system, not the whole universe. In fact, the latest theory is that the universe has no center; or rather, that everywhere is the center of the universe. At its best, the use of science and reason helps us understand that our knowledge is always incomplete, always growing. It helps us be open to new ideas and new data, because even when an idea seems weird, seems to contradict what we know, we can cool down our instinctive reaction, and start asking helpful questions.

Reason and the scientific method can tell us many things, about the measurements of the couch, the affordability of the couch, maybe the durability of the couch if we know something about materials and engineering, but couch that is the right measurement on the right part price is not a necessarily the right couch for you. As a short person I can tell you that just because something is comfortable for 98% of people doesn’t mean that it will necessarily be comfortable for me. Thinking alone will not give you all the answers. Do you like the couch? Is it beautiful? Is it comfortable? Those are important questions too. We should use all our faculties - heart mind and spirit in making any important decision.

We are living in is an important time in the history not only for our country, but for all the living beings on this planet. As a people who strive to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, we have an important role to play. Let us be on the side of all those who, regardless of their political affiliation, are gathering data carefully, who show their math and their methodology so others can join in the search for solutions. Let us remember to ask good questions as part of our free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and let us use the power of our thinking minds always in service of our compassionate hearts, and a better life for all.

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[i]

http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/center-science-and-democracy/promoting-scientific-integrity/survey-of-epa-scientists.html#.V_Zt6iT-T_g

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/ouster-of-scientist-from-epa-panel-shows-industry-clout/

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/canada-investigates-silenced-scientists/6040.article

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-house-science-committees-anti-science-rampage

http://www.thespec.com/news-story/6085869-muzzles-removed-for-federal-scientists-at-department-of-fisheries-and-oceans/

[ii] http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_etlinger_what_do_we_do_with_all_this_big_data/transcript

[iii] https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/confirmation_bias.htm