Jonathan Donihue delivered this homily as part of “Humanist Sunday,” Sept. 4, 2016, at Rogue Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. The Humanism Explorations group meets at RVUUF from 3 to 5 p.m. on the first and third Sunday of each month.

I started attending humanist meetings only a short time ago. I don’t think I would identify myself as a humanist at this point, but I do think I can get behind what humanists, in general, stand for.

One thing I’ve discovered in my interactions with humanists and in my limited reading on the subject is that humanists, like Unitarian Universalists, come from many different walks of life and many different belief systems. There are Atheist Humanists, Agnostic Humanist, and Humanists from all sorts of religions. In other words, Humanists are a diverse bunch of folks.

So, that being said, what is it that Humanists have in common? What’s the unifying factor that binds Humanists together?

Humanism, having been born in the Age of Reason, seems to put forth one value above all else. It seems to me that the one unifying value that Humanists tend to share is a belief that Human Reason is the best arbiter of moral values.

Human Reason is the best arbiter of moral values…..I think there’s something to that.

For thousands of years, humans viewed the world around them through the lenses of their religions. For better or for worse, many people still view the world through those same religious lenses. If we look into the sacred texts of the various religious traditions we see that there are a lot of interesting claims. Putting aside for a moment the claims about the existence of gods and demons and origins of the universe, etc., we can see that the majority of the texts that really matter in our everyday lives are the portions that address our interactions with one another.

Now we all know that there are some outlandish and even atrocious suggestions about how we should behave toward one another in the sacred texts of every one of the world’s religions. Genocide, casts systems, subjugation and discrimination based on gender or race, or sexual orientation. Heck, even pacifism, if taken to an extreme, can be a vice.

But each one of these texts also has within it some beautiful and inspired teachings. I don’t mean to quote any one religion over another, however, for the sake of brevity I will quote one scripture from the Christian Bible that seems to be representative of the best teachings of all the traditions. In Galatians 5:22 we find, “The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self control.”

This sounds pretty good, right? Well, unfortunately, not all people, either now or throughout history, have taken those values as the primary message of their holy books. So why do we choose to see those values as the primary message. What allows us to discern the good teachings from the bad?

The answer: We reason it out for ourselves!

It’s reason that tells us that women are not inferior to men. It’s reason that teaches us that no one race is inferior to any other but that each individual person can define and create themselves. Reason has taught us that what a person enjoys doing in the privacy of their own bedroom is no one’s business but their own. And over time, reason is teaching the human race that working together in a spirit of cooperation and compassion will help us create a better world for all.

So we take the lessons that we learn from common sense, reason, and even from science and we use those lessons as a lense through which we view our sacred texts. Now, most people are pretty attached to their sacred texts. Many of us who were brought up in a particular faith were taught from a young age that we should never question the veracity of our sacred texts.

I was raised in a conservative Christian church. I remember when I was young watching a preacher at the pulpit holding forth vehemently saying, “The Bible is 100% true. If even one word of it can be found to be untrue, then the whole thing is untrue!!” Even as a kid I knew that that statement was false. As young and impressionable as I was, I wasn’t naive enough to believe that one false statement in a book necessarily invalidates the rest of the book.

But many otherwise reasonable people hold on to just that idea. There are many people who believe that if something is written in their holy book then it’s true. “We just have to understand how to interpret it,” they say. So these reasonable, ethical people see something in their sacred scripture that they know is unethical and, rather than rejecting the statement outright, they try to reinterpet the text in order to justify it. My question is, “Why?”

I submit to you today that no text is above criticism. I want to encourage you, even challenge you, to look into your own sacred texts, be they New Age, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, or even Scientific texts and ask yourself: Is this reasonable? What I’m proposing here is a sort of line item veto. If you find that a passage or a phrase in your sacred text is ridiculous, unreasonable, or untrue, see if you can hold off, just for a few minutes from justifying or contextualizing the passage. For just a few minutes, allow yourself the freedom to think, “What that person said there just isn’t true! In this one instance, the author was wrong.”

Also in this series:
Humanism and its Historical Connection to Unitarian Universalism by Roy Kindell
Christian Humanism – A Personal View by Victoria Law
Humanism and Hinduism by Diane Newell Meyer