Sermons

“Dear Mr. President”
An election sermon in letter form
10-5-08
The Reverend Douglas Taylor
Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Binghamton, NY

Dear Senators McCain and Obama,

I hope my letter finds you well. I imagine your campaigns are wearing on each of you at this point with less than a month to Election Day. I have been paying attention to your campaigns and have been at turns thrilled and dismayed, proud of the moments of true leadership and resigned to the banal mediocrity of it all. And so I imagine you each are also tired and that the walls of ‘us vs. them’ and the standards of partisanship have begun to solidify again. Would that it could be different this time. I would like to pretend, however, that my letter can recall to each of you the common goal of our national future. I would like to further pretend that you will each have time to read my letter, that you will hear my concerns and my hopes for the future as words of encouragement and challenge, and that you will personally respond to my letter – even though I know neither of you would really have time to do any of that simply as senators representing your home states let alone as candidates in the last long run to Election Day. But I will pretend anyway, and write my thoughtful letter with the idea that you will really hear it.

In fairness, I ought to locate myself: I am a Unitarian Universalist minister serving a congregation in New York State. This may be enough information for you to assume I am politically liberal because the faith tradition in which I serve is religiously liberal and the state in which I reside is “blue.” I will be honest and tell you that the jokes about Unitarian Universalism being the ‘religious arm of the Democratic party’ set my teeth on edge. While I am a man of faith, our faith is not one that invests itself in the levels of certitude that lead to fanaticism. Instead we remind each other in our congregation that all truth is partial and our understanding is ever unfolding and improving. This helps us, when we allow ourselves to be at our best, to forgo stereotypes and simplified sound-bytes even in the midst of divisive political times. I have found that this congregation I serve has people who are as likely to vote Independent, Libertarian or Green as they are to vote either Democrat or Republican.

But that is not why I am writing this letter – I am not promising votes for one side or another, I am not encouraging the members of this congregation to vote for one candidate or another or a third. We don’t tell each other who to vote for and which social issues God cares about, rather we bid one another to be involved and engaged. While there are some who would say that faith and politics do not mix, I disagree. I disagree, as do a significant number of people in the congregation I serve. To abstain entirely from social issues, to say you are not going to muck around in that political stuff is a disservice to the faithful pursuit of a spiritual life.  As it says in the Epistle from James, “Faith without works is dead.” A deep faith requires the faithful to act for justice, and to speak out against injustice.  We Unitarian Universalists affirm that our beliefs and our behavior ought to line up. That faith and action are two sides of the same coin.  One follows the other as night follows day.  The day does not cause the night or vice versa: they just go together, that’s how it works.  I understand that the Internal Revenue Service has rules about the mixture of faith and politics. I am mindful of such rules and will engage with the moral arguments and the ethical side of the political conversations.

And so I wade into the conversation, I engage the debate. I will try to contain myself and not create a laundry list of issues that I care about, a laundry list of my version of a moral agenda. Tempting though it is, I will strive to focus on what I see to be a few very big issues that we as a nation must deal with in the next few years. I will certainly encourage the members of my congregation to sign their names to this letter I have written, or to write their own letters to each of you that they may convey their own hopes to you. I am writing in anticipation of January when one or the other of you is in office and will take the reins of this, the most powerful nation in the world today. I write to you now, before one or the other of you is elected, to cast before you my hopes for the future of our nation. I write to you as a citizen and as a minister; the issues I seek to address are not political issues, but moral ones. Setting aside any dramatic differences there are between your positions, Senators Obama and McCain, I wish to lift up what I greatly trust either of you will pay attention to in the years of your presidency.

Let me begin with the economy. The economy has dominated the attention and the fears of people, and for good reason. I have been struggling to understand what has been going on, asking many questions and learning a lot abut our national economy that I had not previously known. While I have only a basic layman’s understanding of all this I can see clearly that we are long past time for a reality check and a decency check in terms of the practices and policies of our economy. This seven hundred billion dollar bail-out has set us on a trajectory that is deeply troubling. I get it that a bail-out was about the only thing we could do at this point. I get it that small businesses and regular people would be hit negatively and dramatically by the freezing up of the financial system. I get it that simple things like student loans and car loans and inventory credit for small businesses would dry up. But by turning the free market’s debts over to us tax-payers, thereby excusing the financial scoundrels of the consequences of their reckless mistakes and greed, we have effectively tied the hands of any future administrations. Senators McCain and Obama, which ever of you will be elected, you will be grossly limited in your ability to pay for any initiatives you have promised us in your campaigns. Your work during your first and perhaps only term in office will be to repair and rebuild from the failures we now witness. Whatever tactics you propose for doing that repair work and rebuilding work, I pray that you keep the people of this nation in mind. I can imagine the distinctions between a Republican’s response and a Democrat’s response, yet I trust that whichever of you is in the oval office come January, there will be a response. Please, I pray, allow your response to be not only a reality check but a decency check. We are in this financial mess because of greed. Greed on the part of people who wanted to own houses unreasonably beyond their means. Greed on the part of lenders who issued loans they knew people could not sustain. Greed on the part of insurance companies who covered the bad loans on the assumption that there was no end in sight for the steroidal growth of the housing market. Greed on the part of the banks and other companies who bought into these problems for the promise of a cheap, easy profit at the expense of reality itself. Greed has become the new American Dream and that is sick: both morally and financially sick.

May I propose a radical idea? I think if we were to invest our nation’s resources into the people rather than ideas and schemes then we would see a return to financial stability. The odd spin that went around your statement, Senator McCain, about the fundamentals of our economy being sound, that spin was very deft and I applaud it. The fundamentals of our economy are the people of our country who have a strong work ethic and ingenuity. If we truly invest in such fundamentals we will rebound. Our number one resource is people and we should put our people back to work. I cannot recommend strongly enough the wisdom of Van Jones, an author, community organizer, and founder of “Green for All” when he writes about the New Green Deal and the Green Collar Economy. “It’s time to stop borrowing and start building,” Jones writes. “America’s No. 1 resource is not oil or mortgages. Our No. 1 resource is our people. Let’s put people back to work retrofitting and repowering America. … You can’t base a national economy on credit cards. But you can base it on solar panels, wind turbines, smart bio-fuels and a massive program to weatherize every building and home in America.”

In seeing that the vehicle through which our economy fell was the ridiculously poor management of buying and selling land, perhaps paying attention to and caring for the land can be our avenue back to a sound economy. The land that we so greedily parceled out and upon which we built up a house of cards is the same land that can teach us and heal us and save us. Rather than believing that a sound environmental policy with reasonable regulations would harm the American economy (as the current administration has gone on record as believing); the next administration, either yours Senator Obama or yours Senator McCain, must recognize that aiming for an environmentally sustainable future will be exactly the policy that will produce an economically sustainable future. The earth can show the way out the economic failure through which we now stumble. As it says in the Ute Prayer (Adapted):
Earth teach me stillness as the grasses are stilled with light.
Earth teach me suffering as old stones suffer with memory.
Earth teach me humility as blossoms are humble with beginning.
Earth teach me caring as the mother who secures her young.
Earth teach me courage as the tree which stands all alone.
Earth teach me limitation as the ant which crawls on the ground.
Earth teach me freedom as the eagle which soars in the sky.
Earth teach me resignation as the leaves which die in the fall.
Earth teach me regeneration as the seed which rises in the spring.
Earth teach me to forget myself as melted snow forgets its life.
Earth teach me to remember kindness As dry fields weep with rain.
Earth teach me how to live.

Instead of chasing after non-renewable energy such as oil and coal, energy sources that have a limit; let us focus on renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, wave, and bio-fuels. Oil is a product of death, oil is dead plants and animals from millions of years back. It is not created quickly and there will come a time when it is gone. Why sink any more money in pulling this death-based energy from our mother earth? Wind and sun are life. We can set wind turbines throughout the Midwest. We can build solar panels on the roofs of the skyscrapers and the tenement buildings. We can plant rooftop gardens and community gardens throughout our towns and cities. We can invest and innovate our way out of this crisis: out of this financial crisis, this environmental crisis, this moral crisis! Forget about digging death out of the ground – we can’t drill and burn out way to a health economy, we must invest in the innovation of real people and together create a new Green economy. Because who will design all those wind turbines and who will build them and who will maintain them? Who will design and build and maintain the solar panels? Who will design and build and maintain all those community gardens? People! And how will we pay for it? Come on! If we can authorize $700 billion dollars for a bail out to the big wigs, surely we can find enough money to fund the creation of hundreds of thousands of green jobs! If we can pull out seven hundred billion dollars to patch up past failures of a handful of greedy rich people, then by God we better be able to pull out a fraction of that to invest in the future of the regular people of our nation!

By simply taking care of the earth we will find that the earth can take care of us. That is how it has worked for ages, yet we in our modern civilizations have forgotten our basic relationship with our mother and are reaping the consequences. But we can turn out attention and our policies back to the land that holds us and we can live.

All of which, interestingly enough, leads me to foreign policy. Would that I could ask each of you to promise to get us out of Iraq as one of your ‘first hundred days in office’ promises. Would that I could implore you to reinstate our reputation in the world by the capacity of our compassion rather than the magnitude of our military within the ‘first hundred days in office’. But I know such things involve long hard work. Although I can offer one quick action that will create amazingly positive results in terms of our global reputation and your ability as the next president to begin the hard work of being the leader of the most powerful nation in the world. Close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. That simple action would send a signal to the world that they are dealing with a new administration that will take its role in the world as something other than the insecure and immature bully among the nations. Close the prison in Guantanamo Bay and you will see foreign policy opportunities open up before you.

But really what I want to suggest, rather than any hopes for a particular foreign policy agenda items that either you Senator McCain or you Senator Obama might promote, I wish to offer an overarching theme that may prove productive. And the reason this suggestion will tie back into what I was saying earlier about the earth is that I would hope for a foreign policy grounded in the promotion of agriculture. Hungry people are angry people. Hungry nations are hard to work with unless you are offering to help them with food. If we approached the world from the perspective of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs we would easily see that feeding people is a greater insurance toward peace than bombing them. I was astonished to learn, for example, that in Afghanistan after we had uprooted the Taliban back in ’02 and ’03 we failed to think about agriculture. If you are going to wage war you must be prepared to lead after the war is done, you must prepare to wage peace. If this notion did not already have enough examples to support it here is another one. In Afghanistan after we broke the hold of the Taliban we could have invested a relatively small amount of money in crops; we invaded Iraq instead. When the people who had fled the war returned they had no money to plant crops and no government in place to help them. So they planted the easiest crop they could get hold of: Poppies, which require practically no water or tending. So Afghanistan became the lead exporter of opium in the world. And who gets the bulk of that money made on Afghanistan’s opium? Al Qaida through the Taliban. I hear that providing electricity is a fundamental benchmark in nation-building. Surely providing food and the means to food is closer to the true needs of the people. A hungry people are an angry people. Look at the world with an eye toward feeding people and the possibilities of a successful foreign policy agenda will become clearer. You may not pad the pockets of the movers and shakers in Washington or enrich your buddies with such an agenda – but you will be on the path to redeeming the soul of our nation.

I hope that your administration is up to the task. Remember the earth and the blessings it can offer if you learn its lessons and learn your place. I will pray for you, whichever of you is elected. And may God bless your work and may God challenge your conscience to do the right work.

Yours in faith,
The Reverend Douglas Taylor
Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Binghamton, NY

A Feisty Peace for Unquiet Times
September, 21 2008
Rev. Douglas Taylor

Over the years, the United Nations has set days aside as special UN holidays to honor the environment, world hunger, literacy, or public service. World AIDS day is December 1, for example. Universal Children’s Day is November 20, while June 26 is International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. Sometimes these days really capture the imagination of people and become rallying points for change. World AIDS day is a stellar case in point. Many events are coordinated with the UN December 1st World AIDS day and it has increased awareness and global response for this disease.

Lately there has been excitement building for September 21, the United Nation’s International Peace Day. For twenty years through the ‘80’s and ‘90’s International Peace Day was celebrated on the opening day of the United Nations session, the third Tuesday of September, “commemorating and strengthening the ideals of peace within and among all nations and people.” It was a relatively unnoticed day until a young man named Jeremy Gilley worked over four years to get it changed from September’s third Tuesday to September 21st, and then continued to work over the next several years to raise global awareness for the day. Along with the adjustment in the date, Gilley also pushed for the Day of Peace to include specific expectations that it would also be a 24-hour cease-fire around the world; a “day of global ceasefire and non-violence… through education and public awareness and to cooperate in the establishment of a global ceasefire.” Thus it shifted from a passive effort to celebrate the ideals of peace to an active effort to create peace through the cessation of violence. International Peace day is no calm and tranquil day to honor quietude and serenity. It is a festive and feisty day to work for peace, to establish peace, to create the world we long for.

But does it work? I know this question is in some ways irrelevant. Whether it works or not is beside the point: the point is that this is the right thing to pursue! And yet the cynic is me wonders if the effort is worth it, is it an effective use of energy, does it actually accomplish peace? Jeremy Gilley managed to bring the United Nations delegates a resolution that passed unanimously. It was remarkably exciting for him and for many others. It was the 7th of September and Kofi Annan scheduled a press release four days later to announce to the world that International Peace Day was now September 21st and officially a day for non-violence. Unfortunately four days after September 7th is September 11th, and this was 2001. At 8:45 as part of the press release, children from around the world were performing music meanwhile planes were crashing into the World Trade Center. Jeremy Gilley and his press release for peace had to evacuate the building. It was not an auspicious beginning. Yet it does highlight the hard reality that peace does not happen just because we make an announcement, pass a resolution, or plant a peace pole in our church courtyard. It takes continued effort.

I have a story about how the continued effort works, it is from the eighteenth chapter of the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus tells The Parable of the Persistent Widow (Luke 18:2-6).
2He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. 3And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
4”For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care about men, 5yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually wear me out with her coming!’”

This is such an interesting parable. Jesus is saying, ‘sure, you are right, sure it would be fair if it worked in your favor, sure it ought to work out. But really, what’s going to turn it around for you is if you keep at it and don’t give up.’ “I’ll see that she gets justice so that she won’t eventually wear me out.” Jeremy Gilley’s story reminds me of this widow in the parable from the gospel of Luke.  The persistence of the people who seek justice, who make a difference, is remarkable.  The persistence of those who will not sit down and wallow in pity, of those who stand up to injustice though the odds are stacked against them, of those who stare unjust authority in the face and say, “grant me justice against my adversary,” is remarkable indeed.  The persistence of those who practice resistance is the key to accomplishing peace.

When the UN delegates accepted the resolution, Jeremy Gilley did not breathe a happy sigh and say to himself, “Well, that’s done. Now I will get back to the regular grind.” It would have been very easy to look at the September 11 attacks and think, “All that work, for nothing.” But no, he kept up the work to make the resolution real outside the walls of the UN building. On September 21, 2002, the first official Peace Day on the new day, Gilley helped bring together a great Bob Geldof style “Live-Aid” sort of concert. The UN helped publicize a World Peace Prayer that many people used in events in nearly a hundred different countries around the world. The most exciting piece of the 2002 events was how “the community of Amaekpu in Nigeria used the peace day to publicly declare an end to ten years of violence and hatred. They held a celebration of unity and reconciliation to heal families and neighborhoods that had been destroyed because of fighting and civil unrest in the region.” (from Peace One Day by Jeremy Gilley)

Since that day, Jeremy Gilley and people from the United Nations have been working build more success stories like that. This year, Afghanistan is the focus, and it is working. You probably don’t know this, because I only learned about it on the UN website. But for the past month and a half various steps have been happening to realize a 24 hour cease-fire in Afghanistan for International Peace Day. (reported by Homayon Khoram at
HYPERLINK “http://www.unama-afg.org/_peaceday/_peace_news/08sep20-peace-sets-agenda.html” http://www.unama-afg.org/_peaceday/_peace_news/08sep20-peace-sets-agenda.html)

“Afghan security forces, international forces under the command of NATO, the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan are set to observe Peace Day on 21 September, a United Nations General Assembly specially mandated day of ceasefire.
The biggest-ever peace campaign in Afghanistan is coming to its final climax with Government institutions, NGOs (Non-governmental Organizations), the United Nations, schools and universities, businesses, media, sports stars and artists, and people from all walks of life joining the campaign.
The campaign got a boost when Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Friday ordered Afghan security forces not to conduct any military operations on Peace Day.
“On the occasion of the auspicious Peace Day I order all Afghan security forces not to fire unless fired upon and I advise the international forces to act in the same way,” said President Karzai in a statement.
Following the President’s statement the Taliban also announced their support for Peace Day.
“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has ordered its Mujahedeen to hold defending positions on the Peace Day,” reads the Taliban statement.
General David McKiernan, Commander of ISAF, has also instructed all forces under his command in the country to observe Peace Day.
“In support of the UNAMA Peace Day ISAF forces will not engage in offensive operations from midnight on Saturday 20 September 2008 until midnight on 21 September 2008,” said a statement from ISAF.
“The aim of this whole process is to get peace back onto the agenda here. It’s as simple as that,” he said. “It won’t work through one Peace Day alone. We’re not naive about that. What you do with Peace Day is you provide a window, an opening” said Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the U.N. mission in Afghanistan.”

I subsequently searched the internet news organizations to see if it was working. Nobody is talking about this story. I did find a Reuters review talking about four soldiers killed here and a civilian shot dead there throughout Afghanistan, but it is hard to determine if those are events happened before the 24-hour ceasefire or not. Last night when I was writing this, we were 7 hours into the ceasefire. [The 9:30 is 18 hours into the 24 hour ceasefire. The 11:15 is 19 ¾ hours into the ceasefire.]

Meanwhile, parades, concerts, sporting events, vigils, and prayer ceremonies will be held to honor the day. We [will be planting / have planted] our own Peace Pole in the courtyard. The Red Cross and the Red Crescent will be delivering vaccinations to large numbers of children, particularly take advantage of any ceasefires to move around war-torn regions for these health needs. So, it is stuff like this that quells the cynic in me, allowing me to hope for real peace. And when that hope is there, we can build. With persistence we can create the world we need, like the widow in the story from Luke, like Gandhi with his work in India, like Jeremy Gilley and the enlivening of International Peace Day, like countless other peacemakers in the real world making real differences.

I love the words for the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus said, “Blessed are the Peacemakers.” According to biblical scholarship in which they study which phrases Jesus is likely to have really said and which phrases were attributed to him and passed on through the oral tradition over the decades until it was written down. “Blessed are the Peacemakers” is a phrase that is generally considered highly suspect. If that is the case, I think it is one of the best lines Jesus never said!

Blessed are the Peacemakers! You have to make it! The line is not, “Blessed are the peaceful, or the peace-loving.” Jesus is not saying “Blessed are you who find inner peace in this crazy mix-up world of ours.” No. He is saying “Blessed are you who make peace a reality in this world. Blessed are you who work to realize the kingdom of heaven here on earth.”

So how does that fit in with us today? We have our peace pole and our own UUA resolutions for peace. And we have war and terrorism still large in the world today. What are we to do now? I’ve told the story before I’m sure about the young school girl who was not afraid of nuclear war. I heard the story from a colleague and have no cause to doubt its authenticity. An elementary school teacher, back in the ‘80’s was aware of the anxiety and fear that was all over the news and in everyone’s conversations. And she could tell the children were aware of it too. There was a lot of talk back then about the possibility of nuclear war. One morning she asked her class, by a show of hands, who thought a nuclear war would happen. Every hand went up, except one. And as stunned as the teacher was that almost every child held that global fear, she was even more amazed that one child did not. So she asked the child, why are you not afraid of a nuclear war happening? The child say, “I know there will not be a nuclear war because my mom and my dad go to church every Tuesday night for a meeting to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

That was us. That is what we did, here and in synagogues and churches all over Binghamton and the country and the whole world. That was us, and that is what we did: we made peace; we persisted in our calls against the injustice until we wore away the powers to bring up a step or two back from the edge. We’re not done! We have not yet dismantled the bombs, but the rhetoric of the ‘80’s eased for a time.

Today’s rhetoric is just as dangerous and calls for just as persistent a level of peacemaking attention as ever before. We have our peace pole; we have our UN official Day of Peace: a serious day for non-violence and ceasefires! Today’s work for peace is bold and feisty, just like it has always needed to be for it to work. What will we do as a congregation now that our pole is in the ground? Certainly we will sing and pray and light candles; and we will also write letters and sign petitions and call our elected officials; certainly we will vote and march and speak out and listen to other voices.

Blessed are the peacemakers, it is written, for they shall be called the children of God, … and theirs will be the kingdom of God.  Blessed are the peacemakers who see that a spirited peace is possible. I say more blessed are those who gather in groups to make peace for they shall build the kingdom of God here on earth.  We, together, will build peace.

In a world without end, may it be so.

Forgive Again
September 14, 2008
Rev. Douglas Taylor

Almost two years ago a man with a gun entered the West Nickel Mines School, took hostages, eventually killing five girls and himself. The one-room school house was part of the Amish community in Lancaster county Pennsylvania. The community’s response was to emphasize forgiveness and reconciliation, in particular the Amish families reached out to the family of the gunman. Indeed the response of the Amish Community has become a model of forgiveness for our times.

Gun violence in schools has become unfortunately common: Columbine in ’99, Red Lake Minnesota in ’05, Virginia Tech in ’07 – just to name a few of the bigger ones. The Virginia Tech massacre is particularly striking in the near refusal to approach issues of forgiveness and reconciliation. For example, soon after the shooting, a makeshift memorial was erected with 32 stones for the 32 victims. Someone smuggled in a 33rd stone for the shooter who killed himself in the end, but that stone did not last. The final official memorial on Virginia Tech’s campus has only the 32 stones to mark the 33 souls who died there that day.

The responses in Amish school and Virginia Tech are almost the two extremes in terms of forgiveness. Of course, the difference is that Virginia Tech and other schools on the list are purely secular schools while the West Nickel Mines School is a private religious school. The one example from the long list of school shootings that featured forgiveness was a religious school. And this shooting at the Amish school also appears on the newly-growing list of churches and other faith communities that experience gun violence. One recent CNN report claimed that there have been four significant church shootings in the past 15 months. However, the public does not track church shootings carefully the way we track school shootings. So it is difficult to draw objective conclusions about any trends. One can at least say that generally the topic of forgiveness comes up more quickly and more often in the wake of a church shooting compared to a school shooting.

At the end of July, a man entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and opened fire with a shotgun. He killed two people and injured several others. He was tackled by congregants when he stopped to reload. The story of the Tennessee Valley shooting is about the heroism of regular people: the member who blocked the gunman’s path at the cost of his own life, the members who subdued the gunman, the Religious Educator who shepherded the children out of the building, the Presbyterian congregation across the street who stopped their regular worship to take in and harbor the frightened children. Heroism is the hallmark of the response to the shooting in our UU church community nearly two months ago; while forgiveness is the feature of the response to the shooting among the Amish nearly two years ago.

Yet the question of forgiveness did appear fairly quickly in the public conversation about the Tennessee Valley shooting: Should the Unitarian Universalists forgive the gunman? There are some voices that say yes, others say wait and see. When would be the time to forgive, after sentencing? There are some voices that say the Unitarian Universalists should forgive him now, why wait, it is the path to healing; others say it is too early to speak of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is complicated and often misunderstood work. I mean, generally it is agreed that forgiving is a good thing to do; it is healthy part of living. The religions around the world say that offering forgiveness is a holy activity, something you do if you are pious, or faithful, or enlightened. Withholding forgiveness is seen as, dare I say, ‘un-religious’! And, yet that is exactly what Simon Wiesenthal did. And then he wrote a book about it.

The Sunflower is Holocaust-survivor Simon Wiesenthal’s account of his experience in the Lemberg concentration camp and it evokes issues of forgiveness. The title comes from Wiesenthal’s observation of a German military cemetery, seeing a sunflower on each grave, and fearing his own placement in an un-marked, mass grave. The genius of the book is how Wiesenthal constructs his experience into a question, “Would you forgive the dying SS soldier?”; and then crafts the book’s second half as a Symposium of answers from various people, including Holocaust survivors and former Nazis, theologians, political figures, and poets.

In brief, this is Wiesenthal’s story:
At the Lemberg Concentration Camp in 1943, Wiesenthal is summoned to the bed-side of the dying Nazi soldier Karl Seidl. The soldier tells him he is seeking “a Jew’s” (Wiesenthal’s) forgiveness for a crime that has haunted him (Seidl) his entire life. The man confesses to him having destroyed, by fire and armaments, a house full of 150 Jews. He also states that as the Jews tried to leap out of windows to escape the burning building, he gunned them down. Wiesenthal was so troubled he simply walked out of the hospital room silently. Later, he re-counted the tale to other prisoners in the camp and asked them if he was justified in his silence, getting varied responses.
(from http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display)

And in the Symposium section of The Sunflower, there is also a range of responses. Theodore M. Hesburgh, a Catholic priest and academic who has served under four popes writes this response to Wiesenthal: “Who am I to advise a person of another religion who has suffered incredibly more than I have? I would not ordinarily presume to do so, but I was requested to do so, so I do. My whole instinct is to forgive. … If asked to forgive, by anyone for anything, I would forgive because God would forgive.”(p.169) Meanwhile, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, as I shared during the reading this morning, writes, “No one can forgive crimes committed against other people.”(p.171) One respondent, Eva Fleischner, a professor who had previously used an earlier version of The Sunflower in her college classes, found that almost without exception, her Christian students “come out in favor of forgiveness, while the Jewish students feel that Simon did the right thing by not granting the dying man’s wish.” (p.139)

Differing traditions cast different rules about the work. Offering forgiveness is complicated. Seeking forgiveness, by comparison, is much simpler. To be forgiven involves very clear work, external steps to go through up until the last one. To be forgiven of an offence you have made, you confess, atone, and repent; you admit you’ve done wrong, you make up for it through redress and apology, and then you change your behavior so as to not commit the offence again. Then, after repentance, the other whom you offended may offer forgiveness. Other than that last step, you do your work and it is visible to others that this work has happened.

To forgive is wholly another matter, the work is primarily internal, complex and nuanced depending on variables. It is not clear and external. To forgive another person involves one external step: to offer forgiveness. It entails a great amount of internal work leading up to that offer. “How to be forgiven” is much easier to explain than “how to forgive.”

In his book, Wounds Not Healed by Time: the power of repentance and forgiveness, Solomon Schimmel, writes
It is easier to preach glibly the virtues and pragmatic value of forgiveness and reconciliation than it is truly to understand why, when, whom, and how to forgive.  Forgiveness is a complex phenomenon.  It is affected, among there factors, by the nature and extent of the injury we have suffered, our relationship with the person who has hurt us, our sense of self, and whether or not the person whom we contemplate forgiving has expressed remorse for his [or her] deed or sought to repair the emotional, physical, or material damage wrought upon us.  Mature forgiveness entails difficult emotional and intellectual work.  (p42)

And to add a layer on top of all this, how do you approach the community level of forgiveness? Hard enough when we are talking about an injury or abuse committed by one person upon one other person; how do we offer forgiveness for World War II and the holocaust? How do we offer forgiveness for 9/11? For Virginia Tech and Columbine? For the shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church? I suppose first you need to be a member of that community, right? A Christian can’t forgive the Holocaust anymore than I can forgive someone I’ve never met for shooting and killing a person I only read about in the newspaper.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, writes, “No one can forgive crimes committed against other people” (p. 171). In the telling of his own story, Wiesenthal shares how his friend Josek tells him that no one can offer forgiveness on behalf of another victim. Schimmel writes, “Forgiveness is a social action that happens between people.  It is a step toward returning the relationship between them to the condition it had before the transgression.” (Solomon Schimmel, Wounds Not Healed by Time)

Yet Simon Wiesenthal is not so sure. At one point in his story he questions this, asking, “Aren’t we a single community with the same destiny, and one must answer for the other?”(p. 65) How does the community respond? If the German government apologizes for the Nazi Regime and the holocaust, if the US government apologizes for slavery and for colonization of the native lands, if an Arab Muslim government apologizes for the 9/11 … Or if just some members of the German government or the US government or an Arab Muslim government were to apologize for transgressions. Who is authorized to make such apologies? Too what end, what is accomplished? How many times will an offending community need to acknowledge the offence with apology? We begin to sink into the quagmire of collective guilt: these Germans and Americans and Muslims are not the actual individuals who caused any injury. So, is it even fair for any such apologies to be offered? And yet, as Wiesenthal asks, are we not a single community with a shared destiny? Are we not tied to each other by our bond of identity? The apology is an attempt to repair the brokenness. The request for forgiveness is a reaching to rebuild the relationship.

But this takes us out onto thin ice. Who will receive such apologies? Who is authorized to extend forgiveness on behalf of Virginia Tech? The president of the college, the dean, parents of the victims, their friends? This was a pivotal question behind the basic question in Simon Wiesenthal’s book. The basic question: would you have forgiven the SS soldier? Behind that question we wade into the question of collective forgiveness: Forgive him of what – the whole holocaust, his small role in killing 150 Jews, or any personal offences he actually committed to you (sitting in Mr. Wiesenthal’s place) of which there were none. What are you authorized to forgive? According to Rabbi Heschel and the bulk of Jewish responders in Wiesenthal’s book, “No one can forgive crimes committed against other people.” According to the bulk of the Christian responders as well as the Buddhists who responded, forgiveness was seen as both possible and desirable.

Is there a Unitarian Universalist answer? If the man who killed two and wounded several others were to express remorse and ask forgiveness of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, should forgiveness be given? What is the Unitarian Universalist answer to this? I suspect if I poled the room this morning I would be able to fill my own symposium book. I suspect, however, that in general we are more like the Jews on this point than like the Christians. I would not presume to tell you what the Tennessee Valley community should do. They need to sort that out themselves. There certainly are guiding principles and examples from our tradition, but ultimately the move to forgive or withhold forgiveness is in the hands of that community.

And as I am talking I see that I am assuming that the community would wait to see if the shooter even goes through the work of atonement and repentance to seek forgiveness. There is, I will hold out, a certain value in offering forgiveness to an unrepentant soul. The value is not in restoring the relationship; rather it is in releasing the unreasonable hold the event may still have on the community, to release pent up anger and hate over the incident. As Ann Landers often said, “hate is like an acid. It destroys the vessel in which it is stored.”

The Aramaic word for ‘forgive’ is literally: to untie, disentangle, to let loose. Forgiveness is a way of getting unstuck, of loosening the knot that held you to the person or event.  As a Universalist I do hold the belief that all souls are redeemable, that forgiveness is always a possibility. Yet I also recognize that forgiveness is tucked within both love and justice. Communal forgiveness is complicated work, but possible. I imagine we would strive to forgive if the circumstances provided.

When the major news story had moved from the Amish school shooting to the Amish forgiveness, reporters tried to share how the community had the move into forgiveness so quickly. One Amish woman laughed and said, in effect, ‘it almost seems like you are asking if we had a meeting and decided together to offer forgiveness, but that is not what happened. This is just who we are and how we live.’

Well, I respect the Amish and see their wisdom. But my people are a people who would call a meeting and decide together what path to follow. My people are a people who would try to get every one in the room, every voice at the table; and together build the bridges we need and uncover the path we must follow: the path tucked somewhere between love and justice.

In a world without end
May it be so.

Radically Interconnected
8-24-08
Rev. Douglas Taylor

Context is everything. Therefore it behooves us to speak for a time about the context in which we live and move and have our being. This can refer to our social or political situation, but not today. Today I wish to speak of our cosmology, our theological framework of everything, our cosmic context. Unitarian Universalism boldly claims a theological cosmology of interconnectedness: that at some level, we are all kindred.

Of course, I always feel the hesitancy of the typical Unitarian Universalist when I say anything about our common theology. Unitarian Universalism is a non-creedal faith tradition.  We do not have a confession or statement of faith, no doctrine or creed that all must sign and adhere to before being considered a true Unitarian Universalist.  You don’t need to agree to or abide by a belief statement written hundreds or thousands of years ago to be here.  We are proudly non-creedal. Yet we actually do have common theology that binds us as one faith at our core.
To be sure, the common theology we share does not serve as a test.  We’re all over the map, theologically speaking. We are Pagans, Theists, Humanists, Mystics, Agnostics and seekers.  And within each of these labels are nuances that spread us quite wide.  There are as many ways to approach the Holy as there are people to approach it.

This is how we gather as a people.  Our congregation encourages each person to have his or her own personal theology rather than asking anyone to bend to a corporate theology.  We have an adult curriculum called “Building Your Own Theology” we have offered from time to time in which participants work to craft a credo statement, an “I believe” statement.  Our “Coming of Age” program for youth is modeled in much the same way.  We recognize that faith is built not from doctrines, but from life.  Beliefs are borne from experience.  We certainly do not say, “You can believe anything you want,” rather we say, “You can believe as you must, as your conscience demands.”  It is a fierce commitment to the freedom of conscience.

All this, I have said before. And I have said before that despite the truth of all this – we do have a common theology at our core. Not a creed, but a common theology. We have many things we hold in common at our core; shared theology is only one of them. We also have a shared sociology, a shared history, shared values, rituals, symbols, stories, songs, literature, and sources of authority and inspiration. There are many ways to name our core, today I again want to sift through some of the common theology at our core.

A few years back there was an effort to nail down our Unitarian Universalist theological core identity so we charged an independent committee with that task. Isn’t that so like us? So the Commission on Appraisal worked for four years and produced a document entitled Engaging Our Theological Diversity; after four years of study we wrote, not a one-page statement or a pampnlet, but a book. Isn’t that so like us? The document, sadly, did not answer the question with which it had been charged. Instead it proposed, among other things, a series of insightful questions to help illicit conversation. Isn’t that just so like us? But with careful reading, one can uncover remarkable findings in that report on our Unitarian Universalist common theology.

At one point near the end of the Commission on Appraisal’s report, they offer a big, long list of theological “tensions” where they outline for a variety general theological topics “here is where we agree and here is where we disagree.” Concerning our ideas of God, of Sin and Evil, of Spiritual Practice, and on and on – here is where we agree and here is where we disagree. (Isn’t that so like us?) Yet there were three areas where they did not list any disagreement! Noteworthy enough, perhaps, was the long list of agreements standing beside all our beloved theological disagreements; but stunningly significant are these three areas in the list for which there is no disagreement. And yet this is buried in the bowels of this book rather than dramatically featured for all to see. (Isn’t that just so like us!) Clearly there is major ambivalence around naming our common theology.

The first one they list is: Human Nature “We agree that all human beings have worth and dignity and must be respected. We are optimistic about the human capacity for goodness but recognize that every person is capable of evil.” And they also reported that in a survey on beliefs, around 90% of both ministers and lay respondents considered as “highly important” the statement: Humans are born with the potential to be good; we are committed to nurturing good through love and learning. 90% agreement seems fairly convincing to me!

And so, for the past half-dozen years or so, I have been talking about our common theology of human nature, our belief which we share as theists, humanists, pagans, mystics, and everything between and beyond, the theological notion of our human capacity to choose the good. This is part of what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist: to have an optimistic outlook for our capacity to be good. But there where other areas in which we uncovered no disagreement in our list of ‘tensions’ in the Commission’s report. After all, our agreement on what it means to be human must acknowledge the context in which we are human.

The second remarkable agreement that was left unremarked in the report was about our theology of cosmology. “We agree that the natural world is a continuously evolving web of interdependence and mutuality, and that human beings must respect the impact of our actions on the whole.” And over 90 percent of respondents across all demographics considered as “highly important” the statement: The natural world is a web of interdependent connections, of which we are inescapably a part. The commission states that, in fact, this statement is the “largest piece of common ground” among all those who participated in the study. This, then, is the context in which we are human. And context is everything! Having a theology of human nature is meaningless unless we can state something of the context in which we exist.

One GA participant spoke of “the experience of the presence of life within me, within the present moment, within all people and creatures, and intuition that we all share this life and are intimately interconnected in a fragile and durable network of love.” Another wrote, “When we have a felt connection to the interdependent web of existence, we trigger a natural inclination to become our best selves. I call the fact of interconnectedness and our inclination to be our best selves God.” (p73)

Many of you, I am sure, have noticed a connection between these two theological statements and the first and seventh principles of Unitarian Universalism. If you want to refresh yourself they are written in the front of our hymnal just ahead of hymn #1. The first principle states that we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person and the seventh principle says that we affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. It is interesting to note that what we call the seventh principle, the “interdependent web” piece, was not part of the original conversation in the early 1980’s as this iteration of our principles was in draft. It arose during the back and forth of amendments and compromises. And there is not a commensurate statement in any earlier document of our principles. It was new and it arose from the conversation about who we are. While the principles are not theological declarations, you can see hidden within them some deeply theological statements. Though it is not all that hidden in that seventh one, is it?

And again, this is not a creed this is 90% agreement. We’re not describing “the only way to be in the room.” We’re describing what it looks like in the middle of the room. There are individual near the edges that offered no “articulated” disagreements, but I don’t think that means we can ignore the 10% of unarticulated disagreement. But neither do I think it means we can’t go forward with talking about what’s in the middle of the room!

Now, the idea that we are interconnected in this way, that, as John Muir put it, “when we try to pick anything out by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe;” this idea is not a something that has been in our theology all along. I can make a case for our theology of human nature as having been a part of the perspective of early Unitarians and Universalists. But the cosmology of radical inconnectedness is relatively new in comparison. There are hints of the concept in Emerson when he talks about the Oversoul. When UU singer/songwriter Peter Mayer, in the song we listened to this morning, “My Soul”, writes:

So we live this life together, my giant soul and tiny me
One resembling forever, one like smoke upon the breeze
One the deep abiding ocean, one a sudden flashing wave
And counting galaxies like snowflakes, I would swear we were the same
Peter Mayer, when he sings lyrics like these, evokes something of those old transcendentalists with their romantic Vedic overtones. Yet we must allow that our understanding of the universe is more informed by science than by the luminaries in our history. If we had hung our understanding of the universe on even the most forward thinking visionaries of the early 1800’s we would not yet be where we are today in terms of our understanding of the universe and our place therein.

Unitarian Universalism grew out of the western religious tradition which continues to hold a rather dualistic view of the universe: splitting heaven and earth, body and spirit. Yet our cosmology stands in contrast to the Abrahamic faiths on this count. Our theological cosmology is borne of an honest recognition of the insights of science. Science tells us that the earth is roughly spherical in shape – perhaps more accurately it is slightly pear-shaped. It rotates on its own axis while revolving around the sun while both earth and sun gently revolve around the galaxy. This is not in keeping with the pre-scientific views of the earth as flat with a dome of heavens as the authors of the Hebrew Scriptures understood. This is not in keeping with the notion that the round earth was at the center with moon, sun, and stars imbedded in external spheres. This is not in keeping with the notion that the earth is like a two-storied house with heaven on the top-floor, earth on the main level, and hell in the basement. In fairness, however, how else could earlier eras have understood the universe? They had not telescopes to aid their sight. They had not rockets with which to break away from the gravitational pull and look back at earth. Unitarian Universalism grew out of the western religious tradition yet stands in sharp contrast to it in terms of our theology of the universe. We hitched our wagon to the unfolding science and hung on for the ride. While western religious tradition struggles to match up traditional teaching with reality as we now know it, Unitarian Universalism affirms and promotes the interconnectedness of all life.

Indeed Eastern religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism have an easier time merging their cosmological statements with the teachings of science than Western traditions do. In his book Interbeing, Buddhist author Thich Nhat Hanh writes about interconnection, using your experience as the reader of his book to convey his message. He writes:
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper.  Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper.  The cloud is essential for the paper to exist.  If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either.  So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.

One translation of a passage in the Upanishads, a Hindu sacred text, is rendered this way:
As is the human body, so is the cosmic body.
As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind.
As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm.
As is the atom, so is the universe.

As science continues to uncover new and better understandings of the universe, we as people of faith are able to deepen our commitment to our cosmological view that everything in connected. Ours is an evolving faith and we have hitched our cosmology onto the ever-evolving scientific search while allowing poetry and metaphor to enhance the beauty and meaning to the picture. We remain willing to look toward many sources for insight and understanding. However, if we read Robert Fulghum and the Bhagavad-Gita to uncover the context of our living we will still weigh what we uncover against the light of science. When we say that we are interconnected we judge the poetic and metaphorical readings of that statement against the empirical scientific understanding of physics and biochemistry. Delightfully, there is both scientific and poetic truth to our understanding of the cosmos. Delightfully, there are implications for our ethical living in this truth, implications for how we care for our earth and for others around us. Our Enlightened self-interest can expand to a sense of self akin to Emerson’s Oversoul, Peter Mayer’s Giant soul, the whole of creation of which we are a part.

Clearly, there is a deep theological commitment to the Freedom of Conscience among us, a commitment to what I see as our theology of human nature. It is our central theological statement, our “first principle.” I mean that as something bigger that the first among our seven UU Principles, although our first UU Principle does refer to our deep central theology of human nature. But when I say it is our “first principle” I mean that it is the primary idea, the first centering concept at the beginning of our organization. Lord Acton said “Every institution finally perishes by an excess of its own first principle.” We Unitarian Universalists would do well to heed this axiom. I see the balance offered by our seventh UU Principle, our theology of cosmology, as a saving possibility for the institution.

And I think that hope is not unfounded because of the third and last statement of tensions among us for which there was no disagreement. Remember those theological ‘tensions’ in the Commission on Appraisal’s report, Engaging our Theological Diversity? And I mentioned there were three areas of ‘tension’ for which there was no tension, no disagreements – only agreements! There was our understanding of human nature and our sense of how we fit in the universe. Well, our hope in being able to balance the individual and the universal in our institution is found in that third area of agreement in the report: Knowledge and Revelation. We agree that revelation and knowledge come from many sources and that truth is always incomplete and evolving.

Ours is a message of blessing and acceptance, that every person has an innate value and worth. Ours is a message declaring that the earth does not belong to us, but that we belong to the earth. Ours is a message of power and action, as we affirm that new light and new truth is ever waiting to break forth into our lives. It is a message that calls us through the hurt and the promise to treat one another and indeed our whole world with care and with justice.

In a world without end,
May it be so

Torture and the Ticking Bomb
Rev. Douglas Taylor
6-1-08

The scenario goes like this: A bomb has been planted in a major city and is about to go off. To heighten the anxiety, let us imagine it to be a nuclear device! We have one of the terrorists in custody, someone who was involved in the plot, who perhaps even set the bomb. This person is a known terrorist, has an established history of involvement in terrorist activities, and knows where the device is hidden. All other sources of information have dried up. No time exists to evacuate the city. Finding the bomb is our only hope. It is imperative this man tell us where the bomb is. Police are certain that he will crack if the right pressure is applied. Torture is the last option available. Is it justified to torture this man to save the lives of thousands of people? The city will be decimated, people you know and love will die, thousands of innocent lives will be lost when the bomb explodes. Can you refuse to save them?

You all know that the answer is supposed to be ‘yes, you can refuse to use torture.’ Torture is always wrong; there are no exceptions. There is not a religious organization that has gone on record as saying that torture, under some extreme situations, may be justifiable. No religious group has said that. Catholics, Evangelicals, orthodox Christians, Unitarian Universalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and so many others have statements of conscience or press releases or issue write-ups that brook no loop-holes or extreme exceptions on the issue of torture. Many have also signed on as participating or endorsing members of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. Theirs is a great website with plenty of information and action suggestions: the National Religious Campaign Against Torture – NRCAT.org. And as you would see on that website, the answer to the scenario is that Torture is always wrong.

But think about that scenario again. Thousands of lives hang in the balance. Here you sit in judgment of what happens next. The terrorist is tortured into providing the location, the bomb is discovered and disarmed, the people are saved. Is the torturer a hero or a villain? The precise legal definition of torture is severe mental or physical pain or suffering to elicit information. According to the nonprofit organization Human Rights First, fewer that four scenes of torture appeared on prime-time television each prior to 2001. In 2007 there were over 100. People are thinking about this stuff a lot these days. TV shows like 24 have used versions of this Ticking Bomb scenario in which the main character breaks the law and occasionally tortures people for the greater good (from Christian Century “Prime Time Torture” June 3, 2008.) Is the torturer a hero as these shows will sometimes suggest – or is he a villain? According to scriptures, this is no hero.

And yet, some one third of the American people say torture is sometimes justified according to 2005 Pew surveys. I place myself among the roughly one third of Americans who contend that torture is never justified. Where would you be? Is torture often justified, sometimes justified, rarely or never? According to the statistic, two thirds of us think torture is justified in at least certain cases that arise rarely. Our military service men and women have very similar perspectives and indeed for them this is not academic. And it certainly cannot be left vague.

The new Army Field Manual that was issued last year bans torture and degrading treatment of prisoners. Interestingly it specifically disallows forced nakedness, hooding and other procedures that have become infamous during the five-year-old war on terrorism. It also specifically mentions water-boarding as an unacceptable interrogation technique. Last year, soon after this version of the Army Field Manual was issued, in July 2007 the administration issued an Executive Order restarting a discontinued CIA program of interrogation using techniques such as water-boarding, extreme temperatures, stress positions and sleep deprivation – techniques that have reportedly been authorized and used. This is in keeping with the bill President Bush signed into law at the end of 2005. The McCain torture ban was binding for the United States military but not for the CIA, and it was further limited by the accompanying signing statement the President added which effectively negated its provisions. In other words, the treatment John McCain went through as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War is not something we condone among our military. But that sort of torture is OK when our CIA agents do it.

There was another attempt at a bill this March which would bind the CIA to the Army Field Manual’s list of interrogation techniques which does not include water-boarding. Our president vetoed the bill when it got to his desk. The sort of techniques that remain available to the CIA, therefore, other than simulated drowning, hooding and forced nakedness mentioned earlier include beating prisoners, sexually humiliating them, threatening them with dogs, depriving them of food or water, performing mock executions, shocking them with electricity, burning them, and causing other pain. All these are ‘on the table’ so to speak.

This country was founded on certain principles of justice and liberty, recognizing each person as a citizen of the free country, affirming that every person has certain unalienable rights be virtue – not of their citizenship – but by virtue simply of their humanity. People might argue that we must fighting fire with fire. They are beheading our non-military citizens. The terrorists are the ones who took it to this level. But what we are fighting for is the ideology of our free country. We lose that battle when we resort to torture. In a war, not against another country, but against an ideology that accepts the use of terrorism as a tool, how can we win by countering with torture?

I remember reading a chat response to an article about torture last year. This was around the time when a bill was watered down and passed by congress, signed by President Bush and then rendered essentially meaningless by the signing clause. During the chat I was amazed at the kind of posturing and simplistic argument passed for conversation online. At one point a chatter offered a lengthy post that became something of a manifesto for some of the others. The post went something like this: There are two types of people in the world: people who will use violence and people who will not. The people who use violence are wolves and those who will not use violence are sheep. The vast majority of people are decent, law-abiding sheep. They are preyed upon by the handful of wolves who are set on destruction and cruelty. Luckily there is a third animal on the scene. There are those who are willing to use violence yet are principled and committed to protecting the sheep: we are the sheepdogs.

This post went on to praise the sheepdogs who have rules of conduct to protect the sheep and fight the wolves, who have consequences when the other sheepdogs stray from the rules of conduct, who live to serve and protect. Rest secure, go about your business, stop meddling and complaining about the sheepdog’s business – instead just go shopping. It was quite a post. My first reaction was: we have these wolves over here and these sheep over there and then these sheep dogs in between, but where are there any human beings? There aren’t any humans in this picture.

My second thought was to complain against the theology implied in the post. To be human is not to be either a wolf or a sheep but to be both. We are not all good or all bad inside, every one of us is capable of committing violence and of withholding violence. Everyone of us has the capacity for both good and evil – the line between good and evil does not run between national borders but down the center of every person’s heart. If there really were a bunch of wolves and sheep and sheep dogs then I think the sheep dogs ought to be fired for failing to get rid of the wolves. Surely if we are talking about a group of evil wolves out there then we could have rounded them all up by now and done away with them. Why haven’t we done that yet? Because that idea is not real! In the war on terrorism, this mentality is a non-starter: it reduces the argument justification by name-calling. “You’re terrorists.” “Well, you’re torturers.” “Oh yeah? You’re the Great Satan,” “Oh, well, you’re just a bunch of wolves.” In this we lose the standing to say, you are violating basic human rights and must stop. We can’t say that because now we are violating them too. The CIA recently reported that three individuals are set to be prosecuted and that water-boarding was used on all three during interrogations. They actually admitted this out loud!

Former President, Jimmy Carter said, back in the fall of 2007 after President Bush vetoed the bill that would halt the official sanction of torture, “Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights. We’ve said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we’ve said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime.” (“Jimmy Carter: US Tortures Prisoners,” Associated Press, October 11, 2007.)

This is a sticking point that has bothered me for a while. Why is there any debate about this? How can it be unclear, is it up to popular opinion as to whether Water-boarding is really torture or not? Is water-boarding a violation of the Geneva Convention? Is the answer a matter of fact, or do intelligent people disagree on this point? Well, strangely enough, there are people who say water-boarding is not torture. The majority of military interrogators, police interrogators, politicians, Christian and secular ethicists, and clergy are clear that water-boarding and other atrocities witnessed at Abu Ghraib prison constitute torture. Of those few who argue that it is not torture, many will concede that these interrogation techniques are “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” a phrase that is often linked with torture. The precise legal definition of torture is severe mental or physical pain or suffering to elicit information. This leaves it somewhat open to opinion as to whether or not a particular activity is torture or not.

What about those who say water-boarding is a violation of the Geneva Conventions? Is it any clearer in there? This has been very enlightening for me. I read significant portions of the Geneva Conventions this week. The Geneva Conventions started as a document in 1864 about the treatment of sick and wounded in the field. This is how the Red Cross began! The second article extends the first to include treatment of wounded at sea. The third convention covers treatment of prisoners of war. The fourth convention covers the treatment of civilians during war. America has developed the category of people between civilians and military, the ‘unlawful combatant.’ And thus are not covered by the conventions. One definition of an unlawful combatant is a spy, or a combatant without a uniform. Well, I’m pretty sure uniforms have not been passed out in the war on terror. People are not becoming terrorists in the name of this country or that country – but in the name of an ideology. It seems to me, we’ve created a scenario whereby the Geneva Conventions cannot ever apply! Anyone who is a terrorist is easily defined as an unlawful combatant! That’s quite a loophole. But not according to the Geneva Conventions, only according to the United States administration!

When we leave such decisions to politicians the expedient answer wins. Torture is seen as expedient. Never mind that the information gained is unreliable, never mind that the process of obtaining the information is highly corruptible, never mind that the toll for such methods is often hidden but always exacted. How apt is the maxim that religion must serve as the conscience of the state in this case. Our country is performing torture in our name and we must rise up and demand an end to such activity. I am frankly baffled that we are even talking about this as a country, that I have to stand in the pulpit and say – torture is morally wrong, as if that were not perfectly clear already.

And yet, people are looking at this pragmatically and saying the ends justify the means. That it is done in the service of good. The ticking bomb scenario is likened to the case made for Just War theory. A few of the standard criteria used to justify a war as a Just War include the requirements that the war is declared to defend against aggression, is carried out by legitimate authority, and is deemed likely effective – to have a reasonable chance of success. So, if we are to consider the possibility of what we might call a Just Torture scenario: the “ticking time-bomb,” that best possible argument, is shown to be ridiculously unsuited. There can be no Just Torture!

These arguments fail and always fail for a number of reasons. For one, they are wildly hypothetical to the point of ridiculous. OK, we can play the ‘would you justify torture for a ticking time-bomb’ game as a thought experiment, but it is not ever going to actually happen that way. It will never be that clean: the terrorist in custody, with known information to give us, with known connections. That is just too perfect a scenario. Another reason this argument fails is that it casts the use of torture as a last resort, as a highly abnormal method. Experience demands we acknowledge that the use of torture in one case breeds cruelty and more torture in other places. The Ticking bomb scenario casts it as an abnormal emergency situation, but such exceptions are used to justify a systematic resort to criminal behavior, it’s easy: just call a permanent state of emergency.

All of these arguments, both for and against, focus on reliability and uncertainty; as if we can ask: is torture practical? Perhaps those who do not recognize this as a moral issue or will not acknowledge the moral culpability of a pro-torture stance could possibly be persuaded by a pragmatic argument against it. Maybe we should not use torture because it doesn’t really work that well. Still, it seems to be to be like saying, referring to that horrid psalm, “let us not dash their babies’ heads against the rocks because it doesn’t actually do anything to alleviate my anger and sense of injustice.” Why not just stand up and say we shall do this because it is immoral, it is wrong!

The ends never justify the means. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, there is no path to peace, peace is the path. You cannot murder and torture your way to peace and justice. You cannot uphold the rule of law by breaking it. You cannot defend the people’s unalienable rights to life and liberty by denying the same. You cannot affirm the inherent worth and dignity of a person if you are dehumanizing them and yourself through the act of torture.

That is, I think, the most significant part of the issue: that torture is dehumanizing. It is not only inflicting pain, it is a process of striping the humanity from a person. But imagine, for a moment, the character of a torturer: imagine the ways in which that person must also suppress aspects of their humanity, strip away compassion and empathy, ignore the fact that this is another human being at the other end of this electrical wire. Torture dehumanizes the victim and the perpetrator. In a way, it dehumanizes each of us for it is done in our name.

Torture is dehumanizing and immoral. Our country, any country should not be involved in such activities. There is no path to peace, peace is the path. Ends don’t justify the means – they corrupt the ends! If you use torture to accomplish peace then when you get there it will not be peace. Torture is always wrong; there are no exceptions. So, send a letter to your elected officials, write a letter to the editor, sign a petition, write a poem, discuss the topic with friends, cry, sing, pray, march, speak out, and rise up to be the conscience of our country.

In a world without end, may it be so.