The Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica

My message comes from thinking I have done to understand religious scripture, encouraged by painful experience in my personal life.

Scripture from virtually every religion offers valuable ethic guidelines for leading happy, productive lives among the followers. Unfortunately scripture also often has aspects inadvertently detrimental to humanity in general. Well-intentioned guidelines for supporting the growth of a faith often have inadvertent consequences resulting from intolerance.

The proven methods of science demand that logic and reason prevail in explaining all aspects of observed phenomena. Application of these methods to understanding the basis for scripture that generates intolerance, leads to drawing an analogy between faith systems and life forms. For a life form to succeed and proliferate, its birth rate must simply exceed its death rate. For a faith system to succeed and proliferate, the rate at which people are drawn into it must simply exceed the rate at which people leave it.

Exclusive salvation of believers, declared to be an edict from God, is easily understood as an effective agent to protect and proliferate a faith, as evidenced by its loud message in the two most dominant religions on this planet. Such aspects are clearly designed by humankind, with the intention of making a religion thrive through a process analogous to Darwinian natural selection. The unfortunate consequence is the unwitting creation of an intolerant monster, which leads to wars and horrific suffering. It’s like asking the genie that grants you three wishes to end all suffering only to find that he accomplishes it by annihilating humanity. Be careful what you wish for. You may have to use your last two wishes to fix the damage from the first wish!

Through the application of logic and reason to a full understanding, such aspects of religion can be recognized for what they are: agents designed by humankind and not edicts from God. Through such understanding, illogical scripture and all the concomitant negative aspects to humanity can be eliminated.

I light this chalice in recognition of the power of logic, reason, and the methods of science in the eventual elimination of scripture that leads to intolerance.