Rev. Hardies: We have a tradition every year on the Sunday that I come back from my summer study and vacation, instead of a regular sermon, we have a question and answer format sermon. This has a couple of benefits, the first of which is that it offers an opportunity for there to be some dialog and for me to get a little bit of a sense of the kind of questions of faith that are on the minds of people in the congregation which informs not only my answers today but my preaching then throughout the year. I keep all those questions. It has the added benefit of meaning that I don't have to write a sermon for my first Sunday back! [Laughter]

I've seen the questions, but I didn't choose the questions. They've been submitted over the last two weeks on cards in the pews, and the worship associates have chosen the questions. I just saw them briefly last night, but I'm going to be giving spontaneous answers to them today. So they're not researched answers; this is just an impromptu question and answer service. So Nancy Gist and Sharmila Khare are going to be asking the questions that you all have submitted.

Question: The issue of war and peace has been on a lot of peoples' minds. We had quite a number of questions around that issue. I will give you, Rob, a multiply compound question which incorporates several together.

Please give us your views on the conditions under which war is justified. How does this fit with our faith? Are there good ways and bad ways to conduct a war? Please try to draw some distinctions and relate these back to UU beliefs. What is the UU position on non-violence and pacifism? Is it similar to the Quakers? Given the inherent worth of all humans, is it ever justified to kill each other? [Rev. Hardies motioned "enough!" and there was laughter] And finally ... But wait, there's more. Does the UU church support the "just war" hypothesis? Is any war justifiable based on the UU tradition?

Rev. Hardies: Those are important questions. Let me speak a little bit about the Unitarian tradition and its relationship to positions around war and peace. Traditionally, there are three religious attitudes toward war and peace. One possible religious attitude is that people can be pacifists and oppose war and violence under all circumstances. A second position is the position of the "holy warrior," who believes that his or her cause is righteous and is therefore fighting under God's banner. That's a second religious attitude toward war. The third is what Nancy alluded to, the "just war" tradition, which comes out of the Western Christian tradition; it's the notion that war is evil, war is wrong, but there are circumstances under which war is necessary. So, kind of like the holy warrior position, people in the "just war" tradition admit that war is a sin and that it's evil and therefore try to put limits on how war is conducted and under what circumstances it is waged.

I myself personally adhere to that third position of the "just war" tradition. I am not a pacifist, but I believe that the violence that war does obviously creates an ethical presumption against it, and that war is evil and sometimes an evil that is justified to prevent more evil, or greater evil, from taking place. And that's where the Unitarian tradition has come down most often. There are several notable pacifists in the Unitarian tradition, but the tradition as a whole has been a "just war" tradition, and even, frankly, a "holy war" tradition. Interestingly, I've been reading this summer a book about the "secret six." The secret six were six men in New England who funded John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, just before the Civil War. Many of them, almost all of them were Unitarians, many of them were Unitarian ministers and abolitionists. They believed that the violence that John Brown was going to do at Harper's Ferry was indeed ordained by God and a holy cause. So, it's interesting in the light of contemporary discussions about holy war and terrorists who believe that their violent cause is holy to remember that in our nation and in our own tradition there has been that feeling as well.

But "just war" is where I come down. You know, I think that, just to comment on the current war a little bit, the reason why I opposed the war in Iraq from the very beginning was that I didn't, one of the conditions for "just war" is that war must be a last resort. The ethical presumption against war is so great that all means must be exhausted before war can be waged and then the war must be a response that is limited to the violence that caused the war in the first place. So it has to be a proportionate response. I oppose the war in Iraq really on the first grounds, believing that it wasn't the last resort and that, in fact, there wasn't just cause to invade Iraq. I think that's all I'll say right now about just war and peace. Many Unitarians are pacifists today; I know that a number of people in this church are pacifists and that, of course, is also an ethical commitment that I really respect. I guess I wasn't done yet! [Laughter]

Ultimately, it really comes down to what you think religion is for. There are two schools of thought. Is religion supposed to be, are religious people supposed to make a witness to a pure faith and stand on that principle and witness to that pure faith. Or is there a responsibility of people of faith to get down in the sort of dirtiness if you will, in the mess and the moral ambiguity of politics in the world? Quakers are very much in the tradition of "stand on the witness," and Unitarians have been more in the tradition of, in order to make the world more proximately just, more just than it is, one actually needs to engage in the political system. And that means that your political witness isn't always, can't always be pure, and therefore this notion that war is a justifiable sin in certain circumstances, to prevent more evil, that's where that comes from. So it really gets to a more philosophical discussion of, is your faith an idealistic witness to a pure faith, or a faith that is willing to sort of get down and dirty in the politics of a broken world.

Question: Thanks, Rob. We had a lot of members of the congregation who were interested in life after death and what happens after we die. So, what is your view on life after death? Is there an afterlife, or is this just something that we have created to comfort ourselves? And, if that's all it is, does it lessen its value or meaning? And, for some this will be a fun question, for others serious, but, if you believe in the afterlife, do you believe in the spirit of dogs?

Congregation: Would you repeat that last question?

Rev. Hardies: Do dogs have souls? Are dogs' souls immortal? [Laughter] I'm not going to step on that territory.

Hmmm. How do I start this one? I'll start personally, by saying that ... , well, actually let me start someplace else. The interest in an afterlife, I think, raises a question. What is behind folks' preoccupation with and desire for and interest in an afterlife? And what I think that question gets to, and it's important for us to realize, is that people are searching for, and realizing that the self is not a sufficiently ultimate sphere of concern. So the discussions about immortality are, in part, discussions that are saying "my own life isn't a sufficiently transcendent thing to devote my life to." And so in part, discussions about immortality are discussions about a purpose and a point of transcendence that's greater than our own individual lives.

Now, some people will find that point of transcendence outside of the world and believe that there is an afterlife and that the soul is immortal. And that satisfies that desire for a reference point that's larger than the self. Other people search for that in different ways and find that in giving of the self to things that are larger than the self, that are nonetheless of this world: to a cause, to a community of people, to a principle. So, those are in many ways similar kinds of religions quests, or religious longings, the longing for a reference point to one's life that is greater than the self. And that's a really important thing to realize in religion because that's something that religion teaches, that our selves are not an appropriate or sufficient reference point for our lives. Something larger than the self must be the reference point for our life.

I believe that our souls come from a common soul. Emerson believed in the "oversoul" and I share Emerson's believe in the oversoul. That was his word for God, really, and it was the belief that each of our souls is part and parcel of a common soul, that is God, or Emerson would have spoken of it that way. And that when we die our soul returns to that common soul. Now, I don't have any evidence to point to for that; that's a faith statement. I also believe that each of our actions in this world contributes to a certain kind of, a bodily immortality too, that each of our actions toward justice affects more people which then affects others and others. And in that way, no action is ever lost. No action good or no action evil is ever lost. It just goes out in ripples. And in that way, there's a kind of permanence that comes of the body as well, or at least of our actions in this world. So, those are some of my thoughts on the afterlife, but I think that the question behind the question is a really important one for all of us to consider which is, what reference point in my life greater than the self gives my life meaning and purpose.

Question: There were several versions of this question regarding our denomination. "I'd be interested to know more about how Unitarianism transitioned from a frankly Christian denomination to the pluralistic form it exists in today. Was there a break? A decision? A gradual evolution? What is the role of the historical liberal Christian views in today's UU church?"

Rev. Hardies: We've got an addendum here. Yes?

Question: [inaudible]

Rev. Hardies: Oh, dogs and souls. You know, I'm not going to answer that one today. [Laughter] Okay, so the UUs and the Christian tradition within Unitarian Universalism. This is a really good question; lots of people don't know the history of this.

Unitarianism and Universalism were formerly two denominations, two Protestant Christian denominations that merged in 1961 to form the Unitarian-Universalist Association. Most churches now have these complicated histories of merged denominations and what have you. That's not really so interesting. But what the question gets to is how did traditions which were frankly and explicitly part of the left wing of Protestant Christianity gradually move beyond an exclusively Christian focus? The reason that happened gets back to sort of a core principle of progressive religion which is this question of inspiration. How do you know the truth about questions about God or questions about ultimate things? What is your doctrine of inspiration? What is inspired? Where do inspiration and truth -- revelation -- come from? The orthodox believed that revelation came only from the Bible, for the most part, and that the Bible was the sealed revelation from God. Now, other Protestants believe that revelation could also come through the mediations of the Holy Spirit and that the spirit of God could actually speak to individuals, speak to peoples' souls and that that was a form of authentic revelation as well.

Unitarianism and Universalism both come out of that tradition, the belief that God and people can have an intimate relationship that's not mediated by a priest or by a minister. Emerson was even more radical on this; he believed that human beings could experience God and have an intimate relationship with God in nature, in a loving community, in intimate relationships. He said in one of the most famous speeches in American religious history, The Divinity School Address, he said, "Dare to love God without mediator or veil." And by mediator he meant not only priests and ministers but he meant the Bible. This is where Unitarianism starts to move past explicit Christianity. Emerson basically said "Look, you don't just have to rely on the teachings of Jesus or the Bible to know something about God. You can find inspiration in lots of different places."

So that doctrine then leads itself to the kinds of curious people that you all are, wanting to search for truth wherever your conscience takes you, takes us. And that's something that makes Unitarians unique, the radical freedom with which we undertake that search and the way that we don't place bounds on that search. That commitment isn't antithetical to an ongoing commitment to Christianity, but it's a very radical form of Christianity and it certainly allows for a faith tradition now with a rich pluralism and where people in this congregation draw religious inspiration from lots of different places.