Even more important than sharing compatible interests, is for intimate partners to share compatible flaws.

If religion is the opiate of the masses,

then love is the opiate of the individual.

And that is all that it is -

So do yourself a favor: don’t delude yourself about it being something grander than that.

One thing I’ve always wondered about the Milgram experiment - why didn’t anyone wonder why on earth they needed to pay a volunteer to ask the questions and apply the shocks if the experiment were really on the learning?  I mean there was an experimenter right in there with them coaching them to apply the shocks - didn’t anyone say, “Hey? Why do you need me to do this?  This makes no sense if what you are testing is this other dude’s ability to learn.  YOU could save yourselves $4 a pop and just read the words and administer the shocks yourself. ”
I’m sure I must be missing something important here.  Otherwise can someone say “Knock, knock - anybody home?”

Today’s sermon wasn’t as killer as some of the other ones have been, but it contained a very nice and important reminder.

When we choose to take “the road less travelled” (or even the one more travelled, for that matter) it not a single choice which then dictates how our life will go.  It is one choice, just one, in an endless (until we die) series of choices that decide the shape and substance of our lives.

This point I think is at the heart of the idea of conscious living.  When we live consciously, every step we take is a choice considered and made.  Most of our choices are not considered.  We simply take the same path we see other people take, or the same path we’ve taken before in this situation, or the path that seems immediately expedient.  But we don’t THINK about this.  We don’t say, “I think I will do this, even though I COULD do this, that, or the other, because I’ve always done it this way before and it has worked well for me.”  We just do it, almost as a spinal cord mediated reflex rather than anything our brains actually touch.

It is so difficult to live consciously when one has spent one’s entire life practicing living in a less-than-conscious, fairly reactive, state.  So this week I’m going to make a concerted effort to consider every thing I do as a choice made and acted on.  I’ll probably make notes on this in posts or tweets throughout the week.

The denomination? Unitarian Universalism

The church? Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation

After attending a number of services*, all of which I found to resonate deeply with my spiritual beliefs, I decided to attend a “Intro to UU” session yesterday afternoon.  In addition to meeting a number of interesting people, I learned that the church is even more liberal than I had ever thought when I would say that people did not convert to UU from other religions - they just convert UU into including their religion.  And yesterday I discovered it is actually even more radical than that.

This is a church that, while it holds to certain tenets - covenants more related to how we relate to one other than how we relate to any god - it does not dictate any answers to the questions traditionally answered by religions.  Instead it provides a framework for each of us to individually explore these questions and to develop our own answers to them.  Because it is so individualist, one cannot really generalize about all UU churches and fellowships.  But the one I’m thinking of joining does not seem to hold Christianity in any more primacy than other religious teachings, or even “secular” teachings of science and philosophy.  In the first service I attended, the sermon was centered on Charles Darwin.  (And NO he wasn’t presented as Satan incarnate - LOL.)   That sermon knocked my socks off.  And those I attended after that were compelling and thought provoking also.

Right now I’m reading a “primer” to the denomination - a book called A Chosen Faith (John A Buehrens and Forrest Church).  So I’ll probably be sharing some of the insight that I pull from the book in this blog, as well as my own questions and ponderings.

*They record the sermons and post them here, if you are interested.

“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.  Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.”

from Outliers
by Malcolm Gladwell

*FYI - “Reading,” in quotes = “listening to as an audio book”