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Please remember our Church fundraising program through Kroger foundation and the Kroger plus program. Our identifying number is 80237 .
Go to www.kroger.com
Click on the “Plus Card” in the upper right had corner of the screen
Follow the proceedures in “Create a new account” and when you get to the place where they want you to enter the number from your affiliated organization, enter 80237 for us.
Dispatch religion reporter Meredith Heagney talks to a religious atheist.
Stan Bradley likes Bible stories, admires Martin Luther and uses expressions such as ‘heavens, no.’
The Lithopolis man is president of a local congregation and rarely misses a Sunday service. Occasionally, he goes to his wife’s church instead.
For these and other reasons, Bradley considers himself religious.
He is also an atheist.
His house of worship is Unitarian Universalist Congregation East in Reynoldsburg. Unitarian Universalism is a liberal denomination whose members claim different identities – Christian, atheist, others – but come together for shared prayer and songs.
Like Bradley, some atheists participate in organized religion for its social and psychological benefits.
“Community is important,” Bradley said, explaining why he is part of a congregation that meets weekly. “You get with people, share your concerns and joys.”
Another local congregation open to atheism is the Humanist Jewish Chavurah of Columbus. Only 25 people strong, the group meets once a month in the same building as Bradley’s congregation at 1789 Lancaster Ave. in Reynoldsburg.
Chavurah is a Hebrew word for a small group of people within a congregation who get together for discussion, board president Ellen Rapkin said.
She and other humanistic Jews believe it’s important to maintain their cultural Judaism, even if they don’t believe in God.
They meet on Sundays, rather than the Jewish Sabbath of Friday sunset to Saturday sunset. They celebrate Jewish holidays in a secular way.
On Passover, they focus more on the Jewish exodus from Eastern Europe after World War II than God’s role in the biblical Exodus from Egypt, Rapkin said.
“‘Where was God during the Holocaust?” is a big question for humanistic Jews, she said.
Yom Kippur is still a time to think about how they’ve behaved and how they’ve treated others, just as in mainstream Judaism.
“I don’t see it as being religious – I see it as more of a cultural thing,” Rapkin said. “Somehow (Jews) survived. You don’t want to chuck that out.”
The social supports found in churches and other houses of worship are difficult to replicate elsewhere, said Lindsay Jones, director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Ohio State University.
Churches are great places to find friends, support and youth education, so nonbelievers and believers alike join congregations to fill those needs, he said.
He has spoken to elderly and sick people who can no longer go to church and they say they most miss the feeling of community.
Recent research from Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin backs him up. It found that religious people tend to be happier than nonreligious people, not because of belief but because of the friendships found at church.
And being part of a group of like-minded people provides a sense of worth, Jones said. A congregation, with or without a belief system, offers a “strategy to mitigate the sense of helplessness” that can accompany life’s ups and downs.
Bradley, 61, grew up Presbyterian and once believed in God. He was drawn to humanism by the late evangelist Jerry Falwell.
“I heard him complaining so much about humanists, I thought I’d look up and see what these people were about,” he said.
Through reading and after a lot of thought, he decided in his 50s that God and Jesus did not exist. But, he said, he has no “burr in my saddle” with religion. His wife, Beth, believes in God and is an elder in the Bloom Presbyterian Church in Lithopolis.
People have asked him where his morality comes from if he doesn’t believe in God. He tells them his values come from his parents and his country – and from reason.
“As social animals, it makes sense you don’t club each other over the head, you don’t steal from each other,” he said.
“Helping others – it just makes sense.”
Announcements: The Kroger Foundation application for the church is back on hold again. Stan had a conversation with them about the status of UUCE as a congregation. The Jewish Humanist group is haveing a pot luck at the end of August and we are invited. We will conbine our congregational pot luck with their event for this month. There is a gathering for world peace in Battelle park on August 6.
We lit a candle for Emily’s friend’s father who had a heart attack. Betty has created new art for us to wear in late summer. Everyone should display theirs when you come to church on Sunday. It is the little art card. Your name is written on yours so you know which piece of art you are supposed to wear.
Jim spoke to us about unknown unknowns. In epistemology (the theory of knowledge and how knowledge is aquired), the term unknown unknown refers to circumstances or outcomes that were not conceived of by an observer at a given point in time. The meaning of the term becomes more clear when it is contrasted with the known unknown, which refers to circumstances or outcomes that are known to be possible, but it is unknown whether or not they will be realized. Jim pointed out the differences between people who read the signs but don’t comprehend them (that is, people who know that they have been warned even if they do not understand the threat) and people who don’t read the signs (that is, people who have no idea that a warning has been given and a threat is imminent.) Knowing what you don’t know is the first step in learning. If you don’t even know that you lack knowledge, then you are not prepared to learn. For example, if your religion teachs with certainty that what is said in the Christian bible is without factual error, then anything that conflicts with that certainty will be forever closed and unknown you.
Where do we look for answers? Where do we look for questions? Each of us has a set of filters that we wear so that we don’t have to comprehend everything our senses see and hear. What senses do we not possess, such that we dont even understand what we cannot comprehend?
Anosognosia is a condition in which a person who suffers disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability or defect. See: pointy-haired boss.
In the end, reality is what our senses percieve if BP allows us to know it.
Rick
On July 21 the Sierra Club will show two films on the Gulf Oil Spill and what we can do about it. Movie will be shown here at the church. Stan has agreed to contribute the filing fee for obtaining the needed IRS tax exempt status. We need the status to apply for the Kroger companies grant. Jan is spearheading this effort.
Our refrigerator has started using very high amounts of electricity. A recycling grant of $50 is available to the church if we replace it with an efficient model.
PotLuck was last night. (Come the third Saturday of every month for dinner and a movie.
We lit a candle for Betty, who is still sick, one for Marco who is moving to California and a candle for the earth.
Mark Waite came to talk to us about Sustainable Reynoldsburg. It is a new community group started by just six residents in Reynoldsburg in 2009. Mark said it was a pair of long words that, even taken together are not terribly grand. Yet, they are making changes.
The planning and development of suburbs such as Reynoldsburg Ohio was based on the belief that there were no serious limits to cheap fossil fuels and other natural resources. The planners believed that our world will take all the greenhouse gas and pollution we throw at it. They believed that national chains are an adequate substitute for locally-owned businesses with a stake in the community.
Sustainable Reynoldsburg sees things differently and want to nurture a sense of community and take better care of our local and global environment. The vision for the group is to foster a way for people to connect with each other to do good things. They are trying to create a way for local residents to connect for practical action, positive discussion, and information to help make our community and homes resilient, liveable, and healthful into the future.
The “sustainable” movement is a wide variety of local groups. Mark has worked in other countries and he said members of communities have common circumstances the world over. Being a citizen is
In Candide by Voltaire, the hero travels the world over looking for perfection and ends up believing that working at home, as an individual, is important work. What does it mean to be a member of the Reynoldsburg community? This was the question also raised by David Soliday last week. According to Mark, it is partly to extend love to those around us and to be politically engaged to achieve wider change. What do we do in Reynoldsburg to affect climate change? For one thing, every time we tromp on the gas pedal we use finite resources.
Being a citizen is inextricable from being a good environmental citizen. Being a good citizen is being a good neighbor. Being a good neighbor involves sharing resources.
Sustainable Reynoldsburg is a very small active group of local residents who asked what can be done to help the community be resilient. As residents of Reynoldsburg (if only by church affiliation) “they” becomes “we.” We meet every 3 to 4 months. We use the group to combine energies but have not done anything to cause great publicity to come upon us.
Safe routes to schools: Anew initiate to help students walk and bike safely to school. Each school has a transportation plan, bike safety training, safety enforcement. Some schools start ‘walking schoolbuses.” We hope to leverage this beyond children to get people to ask why is the community question always framed in terms of cost instead of value.
Livingston Community garden: We are the motivating force behind this aspect of the city initiative to revitalize the Brice Livingston neighborhood. In taking responsibility to lay out plots when the snow was still on the ground, we find that others enthusiastically follow.
http:/groups.google.com/group/sustainable-reynoldsburg/
Darby and Rachel helped Thurman clean up his apartment this week and Thurman wanted to thank them publicly. Nick is back in Ohio from College this week. He encountered first hand the mountain-top removal process for mining and he said it was much worse than people realize.
The children’s story this week is “OH the places you’ll go”
Our Community is Our Mountain. It is said, don’t bring the mountain to Mohamed, bring Mohamed to the Mountain.
We host AA meetings and The Humanist groups. We support individuals and we support each other. We invite out members to speak here on Sundays. We have something to offer the neighborhood, the City, the World.
Neighborhood churches transform neighborhoods. Hospitality, discernment, healing, contemplation, testimony (Sharing transformation), diversity, Justice in how we treat each other, worship in how we celebrate what is good, reflection in how we see things from other’s prospective, beauty.
Transformation takes place at the grass roots level. We are the community, we should be involved in the community.
Whatever you ask for in faith, you shall receive.