Over the past year we've spoken about, and in some way experienced, Process Theology, Mysticism, and Earth-based spirituality in an ongoing exploration of theologies that influence Unitarian Universalism and which we name as sources of our tradition. We have met god, spirit, energy, however you understand that, as a being-becoming, as something we know through direct experience, as alive on a living planet. Each service has taken on the style of the theology it examined. For the earth-based spirituality we had a spring ritual; for mysticism I and some of you shared deeply personal mystical experiences; for process theology we saw ourselves as co-creators of the world. This is fun. It's also important. It's important to discover what you believe, what speaks to you, because what you believe influences your attitudes and actions, your values and judgments. If we are to walk the talk we'd better understand the sources of the talk. Consciously or unconsciously we turn to what we believe in times of stress and uncertainty and tragedy. Will our beliefs hold us? Will they provide us with the strength to endure?

Where might you place yourself and your beliefs about the nature and meaning of life? Here, there, none of the above? We Unitarian Universalists have no one scripture, no one voice of truth that governs us. Rather we claim the freedom and the responsibility of each person to construct and discover his/her own faith, beliefs, philosophies. Thus the variety of sources named by Unitarian Universalism. Our theological diversity presents us with a challenge each Sunday as we come together. What touches one may not touch you. What speaks to you may not speak to the person beside you. No one ever said freedom came easily, but if we are to accept one another in community it means that we recognize and respect our diverse beliefs and ways of expressing them. Today we'll look at humanist teachings as a source of Unitarian Universalism, or as it says in our statement of Principles and Purposes: "Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit." And in the style of humanism, today we'll take a rational approach.

Not too long ago Mary Stevens sent me an e-mail about Baruch Spinoza, the 17th c. philosopher and scientist often viewed as a major influence on the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Mary had attended a workshop and come away with many thoughts, ideas, questions. She asked if I might consider talking about Spinoza as a Sunday topic. I'd been reading a fair amount of philosophy lately, (always with the question, or really the plea, Why don't they just say what they mean?) and so Spinoza did interest me. In my subsequent research, and somewhat to my surprise, I found Spinoza in Ralph Waldo Emerson, in myself, and, if taken on a certain path, one can locate much of Spinoza's thinking at the base of what is now called religious humanism. You just never know where someone will lead you.

How many people here would describe themselves as humanists? How many would like to know what humanism is? According to Wikipedia, "Humanism is a broad category of ethical philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by appeal to universal human qualities”particularly rationalism. Humanism has several branches, among them secular humanism and religious humanism. Both look to humanity, rather than to a divinity, as the authority for morality and meaning in life and in general do not consider relevant a personal god. Secular humanism generally wants nothing to do with religious practices or language, asserting that religion is, at best, irrelevant, and at worst, dangerous. Secular humanists more often than not identify themselves as atheists. Religious humanists do not reject religion outright. Some religious humanists identify as agnostics, while others might recognize some force, impersonal or abstract, greater than humanity. Both branches of humanism make use of a scientific, rational methodology. Baruch Spinoza, while not a religious humanist in his own time “ the term did not exist as we understand it now “ nevertheless occupies a link in the chain that eventually led, in the 20th century, to the humanist movement as we know it. That movement plays an important role in Unitarian Universalism today.

Baruch Spinoza was born in 1632 in Amsterdam, son of immigrant Portuguese Jews who were called Marranos. The Portuguese had compelled Jews to accept Christianity, at least outwardly. When, in the early 17th century, they came to the Netherlands, they were determined to recover their religious heritage. Spinoza was educated as a Jew but, at the age of 23, was expelled from the Jewish community. From the decree of expulsion: "The Senhores of the Mahamad make it known that they have long since been cognizant of the wrong opinions and behavior of Baruch " Espinoza and tried various means and promises to dissuade him from his evil ways. But as they effected no improvement. . . they now excommunicate him with the following ban . . . We order that nobody should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, . . . or read anything composed or written by him." He was branded an atheist for his rationalist philosophy and ideas about god. He dared not even publish under his own name. In 1670 he published anonymously his Theological-Political Treatise, but his major work, the Ethics, only came out after his death in 1677. He made his living as a lens grinder and a lens maker and was a respected optical scientist.

What were those ideas about god that got him excommunicated? The climate of mid-17th century Europe had undergone a revolution in the physical sciences, through the theories of Galileo, Bacon and Descartes and Spinoza wished to pursue the implications of these theories for religious thought. In doing so, Spinoza rejected the transcendent yet personalized God of the Hebrew Bible. Spinoza said the natural universe, as conceived by Cartesian natural science, derives its existence from nothing above or beyond it. In other words, there is no creator God out there who made the natural world as we know it. Rather God, as the only existing substance, is nature. In other words, Spinoza located God in nature, or naturalized God. "Since nothing can be or be conceived without God, it is certain that all those things which are in nature involve and express the concept of God. . . " There is only God; there is nothing else and therefore nothing exists independent from God; all exists within God. God is absolutely infinite and self-creating. God did not create us. In a way, God didn't have to create anything. By virtue of God's existence, everything else exists. It's all God. We exist in God, as modes of God. There is no dualistic universe; no separately existing forces of good and evil. In the most ultimate way, there is no human free will. Everything we do and say is within God. It's all God, although on our level it might appear to us that we have freedom of choice. God is nature and we exist within God. By necessity this means the tsunami that takes human life, the panther that takes animal life, that too is God. The human who takes human life is that God too? More on that later.

This is not the God of the Hebrew Bible, the transcendent creator, separate from the universe he made. By identifying God with nature Spinoza was judged to have confounded the highest good "God" with God's creation, which was heresy. Thus he was accused of atheism. Strictly speaking, Spinoza was no atheist in the way we would use the word today. He believed in God, just not the one true God as understood by the Jews of his time. Spinoza said the better we know nature, the better we understand the ways, the laws, of nature, or what we might call science, the better we will know God. Spinoza was a scientist and believed in the methods of rational inquiry. Such a method of approaching God went against the prevalent religious practices of his community and became another factor in his expulsion. What are the implications of Spinoza's God? First, this God is perfect in the sense that God is as God is and there is no other substance. In this sense, Spinoza presented a unitarian view of deity. Second, God is nature and we exist within God. "Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God." If we think that nature is the interconnected web of which we are a part, then God is that web. God is the interconnector. "Human beings stand, for Spinoza, in an intimate relationship both to God-or-Nature, (Deus sive Natura) and to other things within Nature . . . " (Don Garrett, Spinoza's Ethical Theory in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza) Third, when we know and when we apply scientific methods to nature, we know God. Are those ideas you can relate to? Do you equate God with nature? God with the interconnections? God in scientific inquiry? I do, although God is not the word I use for it. To me it is life; it's the nature of life.

This God is not a personal God; it is a rather abstract God. How does one make connection with such a God? Is there any need to make connection? What are the emotional satisfactions for humans in such a God? Emerson's idea that the best place to know God was in nature and that through intuition one could have contact with God might apply also to Spinoza. When in nature we feel a oneness with life, a rapture, an awe so great we are surprised by joy, (to paraphrase Wordsworth), we know this God. You can hear scientists speak in this way. Have you ever had such an experience? There was a time in my life when I studied to become a medical doctor, an obstetrician to be sure. As such I witnessed animals giving birth. My first birth was a rat. A big white rat. As I stood there and watched those babies emerge from her womb, the process of life giving birth to life took my breath away. Maybe I knew God at that moment. As Spinoza said, the better we know nature, the better we know God. Yet why call it God at all? Why not just call it nature? Or life? This God has nothing to do with us in any kind of personal way. The character of this God is the nature of life. You see how very much Spinoza's thought differed from traditional religious ideas. Yet Spinoza did not reject religion out of hand. He took scripture seriously and applied his rational, scientific method to the study of it. "I made the serious decision," he wrote, "to study the scriptures again, to examine them with a free mind, to neither affirm nor admit anything as its doctrine, that could not be most clearly demonstrated to be so." He examined scripture in the original Hebrew, with an eye toward historical context. In these methods Spinoza is among the first to apply what we call modern biblical criticism. If one applies such a rational method to the bible, one is bound to come up not believing a good bit of what the bible says. Spinoza, for instance, denied the existence of miracles. "If there would happen something in nature, which would not follow from its laws . . . , that would be against nature and its laws and consequently the belief in it would make us doubt everything and lead us to atheism." He did, however, allow that things could happen according to natural law which look contrary to that law due to the limits of human knowledge. Miracles distract us from understanding God because "those who run back to the will of God when they are ignorant of something are just silly; it is a ridiculous way of professing ignorance." Spinoza does not approve of attributing things to the will of God just because we cannot explain them. Did you ever do that, or hear someone else do that, especially when bad things happen or natural disaster strikes and we don't know why, or we want some other meaning than the one we have, we say " It's God's will." I know a Protestant minister who says "God is trying to tell us something" with all of these violent storms. Spinoza's God doesn't have a will in the sense that God interferes in human history or speaks directly to humanity. For Spinoza, to think that God moves among us is to distract ourselves from the true nature of God.

Judaism finds the source of its ethics in the mandates of God. Given Spinoza 's God, what then of morality? From whom or from whence do we get our ethics? Spinoza asserts that morality is a human construct, though with a high purpose. "Human salvation and happiness are the products of human understanding of the laws of nature. . . "(W.N.A. Klever, "Spinoza's Life and Work" in Spinoza) Remember there is no free will. Spinoza disagrees with the religious view of human nature. "For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself. And they attribute the cause of human impotence, not to the common power of nature, but to I know not what vice of human nature, which they therefore bewail, or laugh at, or (as usually happens) curse."

Everything humans do we do according to the essence of God, so it is almost irrational to ask if something is good or bad in itself. God's essence is perfect so all actions arising from that essence, which are all actions, are part of the perfection. However, Spinoza does not give us an "anything goes" moral relativism. He notes that we are motivated by self-preservation and individual advantage and through the use of reason we can improve our lives. What is good for us is what preserves us, and Spinoza does not mean the preservation of our merely physical beings. "By good I shall understand what we certainly know to be useful to us." Therefore the cooperative virtues of good faith and benevolence are to be cultivated as the rational thing to do. "By evil, however, I shall understand what we certainly know prevents us from being masters of some good." Reason itself leads each human being to produce as much good as he/she can and to reduce evil to the extent that he/she can. When we do that we promote our preservation, our being-ness. That our morality finds its roots in the best ways to preserve the species is hardly limited to Spinoza. Nor is it old-fashioned. You can find it today in the ideas of evolutionary biology.

I take a curious comfort in thinking that we do know the better ways of living together in the service of our continuing lives, and that is a basis for human morality. That is a basis, for example, for the golden rule: treat others the way you'd like to be treated. That 'rule' which appears in so many religions from so many different cultures. We know how to live together. (Would that we carried out what we know.) What do you think? What are the sources for your morality? Anything or anyone beyond humanity, beyond yourself? Are your ethics solely rational?

How does all of this get us to religious humanism? First, the methodology: the rational, scientific approach to the world and to religion. Second, the substance of the theological ideas: the universe is self-created; God, if there is such, is abstract and impersonal and neither guides us nor punishes us. We are embedded in nature, which Spinoza, though not necessarily religious humanists, equates with God. Third, the understanding that ethics arise as human constructs and that, to paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing is good or bad except we think it so. Yet to do good is the human imperative. Spinoza is one of the forebears of religious humanism. He influenced the philosophers of the enlightenment, who in turn exerted some influence on the 18th c Unitarians and Universalists who brought their beliefs to the United States. In subsequent centuries, and especially the 20th c, this methodological philosophy grew and helped give rise to what we know as religious humanism.

It comes down to how we experience the world. Some of us experience it most dominantly through our reason, through our rational faculties. We find the greatest meaning in and through a scientific approach. Our faith, and whatever belief system we articulate for ourselves, rests in the laws of nature which we seek to understand. We use our imagination in the service of trying to figure out how the world works. And in our growing knowledge we constantly meet our own limits.

Albert Einstein said, "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind. . . . The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity. " Perhaps Spinoza would have said the same. May it be so.