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By Root 961 0

The University of Chicago, I thought no, the trouble is that neither the adults nor the ministers knew what mattered. The U.U.’s then took a fatal turn. They essentially conducted a poll, to find what members and attendees of the churches happened to believe—in other words, what beliefs had they brought in with them? From this weird process the Seven Principles were born, as “What U.U.’s Believe.” Yet looking through them, they’re simply the generic beliefs shared by all cultural liberals, whether they were religious or not. They had projected their beliefs onto a platform, then worshiped them. So they collapsed into a narcissism that has grown weaker and more desperate since they adopted those Seven Dwarfs in 1985. It became and is even worse.

The Unitarians, like all white moderate-to-liberal Christians and Jews, have seen their role as speaking up for the downtrodden. It’s fair to say that the early civil-rights movement would not have succeeded without the white liberal support. But this changed in the 1960s and 1970s, when Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X didn’t want white folks speaking for them, and had far more charismatic speakers themselves. Same with the women’s movement. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer were miles ahead, and wanted to speak for themselves. After Stonewall, the gays also spoke for themselves. This left white liberals with no useful role in society. They were welcome to follow the black, women, gay leaders, but not to speak for them. When they could no longer speak for anybody, they—and by they I mean the faculties of good humanities divisions and women’s studies—started the political correctness movement. The inane brilliance of this was that, by inventing disadvantaged groups, nobody could say they didn’t have the right to speak for them.14

“By bringing ‘heaven’ down to earth with the Social Gospel, religious and political liberals lost any framework that could critique the things they happened to believe,” Loehr said. “Individual rights have to be balanced by our responsibility to the larger wholes. But why? In the name of what? Few seem to know or care. Cowardice has become one of the identifying traits of moderate-to-liberal religions.

“Even in the Middle Ages, theologians knew the difference between wisdom and knowledge,” Loehr said:They wrote often of the categorical distinction between sapientia and scientia. Sapientia is the Latin word for wisdom, as in our self-flattering species name, homo sapiens. Seven centuries ago, theologians taught that the only knowledge that really mattered was the kind of knowledge that leads to wisdom, that tells us who we most deeply are and how we should live, the demands of love, and the nature of allegiance and responsibility. Even the ancient Greek word filosofia, the love of wisdom, was about the wisdom that leads to a fulfilling life—not factoids and syllogisms.

People have always ascribed human qualities to God. We say things like “God says” and “God tells us,” as though God were a humanoid who spoke only through the mouths of priests, prophets and shamans. But now, in our newspapers and on television every day, we hear people saying, “Science says” and “Science tells us.” Let’s be clear: there is no such thing as science spelled with a capital S. There are many sciences, and many scientists. Scientists say things and don’t always agree. But when we construct a sentence that begins with the words Science says, we have created a humanoid fiction, named it Science, and begun to trust it in the way we once trusted God. Once capitalized, both words are linguistic idols.

Preachers and lay people may say, “In a church, through rituals and traditions, black-robed priests proclaim the revelations of God, helping us learn the beliefs and wisdom that can lead to our salvation.” Scientists and many lay people say, “In a laboratory, under controlled conditions, following the rituals of the scientific method, white-robed scientists proclaim the new theories and discoveries of Science, helping us to gain the understanding and the