Sunday, January 15, 2012

My Husband is Saving the World with Faith in Ambiguity


Updated 1/16: I included the YouTube of his sermon below, so now you can actually watch it.

Despite being very annoying, and having a strange sense of humor, my husband sometimes does cool things.

One cool thing he is doing is delivering this sermon at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Fe today.

He has written a lot of very good sermons, all of which can be found on his blog, All Things Reasonable, but this one is the best so far.

It is the best both because of his amazing development as a writer, which I can't say enough about, and because he is so right about what he is saying.

We live in a world where everyone thinks they know a bunch of things that they actually don't know. And so we fight with our spouses and kids. And so we go to war. And so our political system is broken. We don't know how to separate what we know from what we believe.

What might be possible if we could do this one, critical thing?






3 comments:

  1. too true! Just stopped by to say hi and hoping to meet you at the Erma workshop. I'm with the "bird" group. Jody Worsham http://themedicaremom.blogspot.com

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  2. I'd just add that I think the best assumption is to assume one knows NOTHING, and that everything that we think we know is just based (in the best case) on our best guess, based on information that we think we trust, but understand is not necessarily really trustworthy, accurate, or permanent. The minister alluded to this in her opening statement, and I think it's very relevant. "Facts" are most likely fiction (or hypotheses) posing as non-fiction. Hopefully, some of them will be true enough in the moment to help us muddle through — and that may be about as good as it gets.

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  3. @Jody-Looking forward to meeting you@!
    @Rick-I think that's true, but also misleading in some ways. (By the way "the minister" was a worship associate and those were statements Mike chose.) The problem is that people use that argument to justify placing conjecture with almost no evidence–or worse, with strong evidence against it–alongside data that has been tested and subjected to a high level of scrutiny and say that they are both just two potential world views with equal merit. That's magical thinking.

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Faith in Ambiguity by Tara Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License