Shooting debate: quick discernment lesson

Hi. As usual I'm thinking very much of the young people who are living through these times and learning how to weigh the facts and form opinions, exactly when electronic media allows and promotes snap judgments, accusations and conclusions.

I have to make a quick example using the UU church because they themselves are actually raising the subject and of course learning about them is part of everyone's interest in reading this story. I've known about them since college when many of my peers left their church and went to UU because they felt that UU "OK's" whatever imbibing, drug use, sexuality and abortions. This was in the early 1970's and I'm not making a values statement: I'm telling you what my friends told me as they trundled off to the local UU, feeling they could be "spiritual" but still "do their own thing" (to use the popular expression). So I mention this just so people don't say, "Oh, what does MM know about UU?" I know that it was the safe house in my university town for those of my friends who most liked weed, LOL.

Having said that, here is part of the deplorable "dialogue" that is taking place that I must address as an example for my readers to see another challenge in faith and reason discernment. I want to teach you to notice intellectual contradictions. An intellectual, aka logical, contradiction is when someone says one thing, if you believe it, then you can't believe the second thing that they say, because they disagree in some real fundamental way.

So I've noticed that some UU members explain their faith by saying that it pretty much is "bring your own," and they cite that all sorts of believers go there, Christian, Buddhist, pagan, etc. So they present it as everyone is equal and all they care about is goodness and social justice. OK, if one wants a refuge from one's own religion and go to a place of a kind of spiritual social gathering, that's great. But here is the contradiction. They present a kind of "anything is possible" logic in the universe, there may or may not be a creator, that everyone is rewarded in their "journey" "toward" eternal life, etc. But in the same breath I read comments by UU's that state that they "know" that Christianity is incorrect, that Judaism is incorrect, that Islam is incorrect, and so on down the list. So which is it? How do they "know" that every organized religion is wrong? Who told them? How do they know? I mean, OK, say that everyone is welcome, and that it's all a open door groovy love fest of good works and eternal joy. How do you know?

If your head hurts now, so does mine. That's one of the things I least like about humans. They act on one hand like the universe is a great mysterious and all good "unknown," yet on the other hand they somehow "Know" that all organized religion is "wrong." How do they know? How do they know? How do they know?

If they reply to you that it's because flawed humans "wrote" the sacred books, then why would they believe that flawed humans merit eternal bliss in some engine free groovy "everyone is equal" world?

That, dear friends, especially my young friends, is a logical contradiction. They have an open ended faith, except they will tell you that all other faiths are known to be wrong. How do they know? How do they know?

I wish them well, but want to prevent those of you who are reading about them for the first time from falling into a logical error. Many who post on their behalf seem poorly educated in history. For example they will mention Hitler as an example of being 'right wing' (implying in Christian religion) without knowing that he was a pagan (I mean, look at the flags he designed, dummies). So if you dialogue with UU's be aware that they claim on the one hand to be all open ended to the infinite "good" and "equal" possibilities of the "eternal," but they are not open to believing that ANY institutional religion might actually be exactly as it is presented to be. Somehow they have a mysterious knowledge that all religions are "wrong." Hmm? Hmm.