Religion

At the Spiritual Activism conference, there were a lot of religious types, as attendees and at the podium. At times this was challenging for me, because I have long ago left religion and not looked back. I was confirmed in the UCC Christian Protestant denomination. (They aired commercials last year openly welcoming gays and lesbians. Note: not all congregations are that open.) After I was confirmed, I stopped going to church. The only real reason I had been going was the youth group. I soon found that the ties there were pretty shallow.

After UCC, I attended a tiny Unity church for a couple of years. I was the only high-schooler in the congregation. I appreciated that the adults treated me with respect. I learned a lot of important principles there. Unity is a lot like the Unitarian Universalists - both take a more pan-religious approach to being a good person. It was here I first learned about other major world religions. Then, for various teenager related reasons, I stopped going. The only people this really concerned was my grandparents, devout Missouri Synod Lutherns.

So, the conference was definitely the most exposure to religious stuff I'd had in over a decade.

And, ya know, I was pleasantly surprised. I didn't realize that there were so many progressive, open religious types out there. Part of this conference's purpose, was to give structure, strength and courage to the religious progressives, so that their voice can become as strong as the voice of the religious conservatives. I hope it works.

Quotes from the conference

Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics (which is now on my reading list), was one of the keynote speakers.
"Religions' job is to pull out our best stuff."
"Seperation of church and state does not equal segregation of values from the political discourse."
"Faith is about changing the big things."
"We have a choice between hope and cynacism. Hope is believing in spite of the evidence and seeing the evidence change. Cynacism is a place for people who once believed the world could change and is a buffer against committment."
"Vocation is where your gift meets the crushing needs of the world."
"All major progressive movements [abolition, women's suffrage, civil rights...] were fueld by spirit."
"We are the ones we've been waiting for."

Quotes from the Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millinnium
"Religion I take to be concerned with faith in the claims to salvation of one faith tradition or another, an aspect of which is acceptance of some form of metaphysical or supernatural reality, including perhaps an idea of heaven or nirvana. Connected with this are religious teachings or dogma, ritual, prayer, and so on....While ritual and prayer, along with the questions of nirvana and salvation, are directly connected to religious faith, these inner qualities [love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony] need not be, however. There is thus no reason why the individual should not develop them, even to a high degree, without recourse to any religious or metaphysical belief system. This is why I sometimes say that religion is something we can perhaps do without. What we cannot do without are these basic spritual qualities."

In my opinion, the Dalai Lama rocks.