About Us

First Sunday Speakers

by John Warner

January, 2004

I grew up in a strongly fundamentalist Christian background, yet today I am profoundly disappointed with Christianity and do not consider myself a Christian.   

I still accept that Jesus was an exceptional man and that he represented a way of looking at the world and living in it that should be emulated by all of us. However, I do not believe that the Christianity of the modern world, particularly the evangelical side with their narrow-minded certainty, is truly big enough to encompass what we know about the universe today, let alone what we might expect to know in another 100 years.   

As an important example, it is highly probable that within the lifetimes of our grandchildren we will discover that life now exists or has existed elsewhere in the universe.  We currently have the tools to answer this question; it just takes time.  Such an event would certainly threaten the very foundations of many of the world's religions.   

The most disappointing thing to me about Christianity is that throughout history most of it’s outward manifestations have not truly represented the message that Jesus spoke and lived.  Sadly, the early Christians in the 4^th Century under Constantine finally succumbed to the desire to control the lives and the very thoughts of their fellow human beings.  They established a codified set of religious beliefs that made a man into a god and put themselves into the role of demi-gods.  As a result, Christianity became forever male-dominated and god-awful too serious.  It lost the feminine side of the spiritual and became catechized and certain.  

Just about sixteen centuries later, I grew up in an environment that owed its spiritual heritage to these same 4^th Century men.  My father was born in Iowa into a family with eight children, a family totally dominated by a charismatic Christian leader.  My grandmother spent her life hauling her pump organ down to the jails to preach to the inmates and completely ignored her growing family. 

 I have one uncle who travels the world as an evangelist, another is a psychiatrist who still sees devils in his everyday life, and even tells his patients about them.  Another aunt married a minister, and they and their family travel to the rain forests of South America to translate the bible to the heathen Indians.

 Life in this family was prescribed and proscribed.  Hair styles, skirt lengths, suit colors.  Religious thought, political thought.  Church twice a week, prayer before every meal, bible reading everyday. No game playing, no music, no dancing.  Didn't you know?  We were simply not put here to have fun!   Doesn't this sound to you a lot like the Taliban!  It surely does to me!

 I was very fortunate to have escaped this environment.  When I was twelve my father decided to break away from the family and got a teaching job in Ohio.  This meant that he had to leave Iowa and travel across the Mississippi River into the “heathen East”.  This resulted in his receiving poison pen letters from his family for twenty years.

 But, I benefited tremendously during my teen years from the many newly found freedoms in "heathen" Ohio.  I discovered an interest in science and focused in my spiritual life on the potential conflicts between science and religion.  I eventually went to the University of Chicago Divinity School, but it did not satisfy me.  My first interest was clearly science, and ultimately its relationship to religion.  I got my PhD in astronomy and physics, taught and did research for a number of years and then spent the rest of a very fun career in the areas of science and technology.

However, for the last four decades my spiritual life has been meager, completely self-absorbed and eager for dialogue and community.  It was not until I came to New Hampshire and, through my friendship with Fred Creed discovered the UU Church of Concord, that I finally realized that I am not alone in my conflicts with the religion into which I was born. 

Now, for all my problems with Christianity, I do have a few strong beliefs.  Here are just four:

I believe that to ask the basic religious questions and to search for meaning is precisely that which makes us uniquely human and that no one should interfere with this most intimate and basic of human rights.  To do so is simply to de-humanize another human being.

I believe that the search for meaning is not an option that a human being can chose not to pursue.  Religious conversion at an early age or blind acceptance of a creed or script on how to live one’s life does not exempt one from the task of determining the meaning of one’s own life.

I believe that there is no intrinsic conflict between religion and science.  Science simply informs the process of asking religious questions, but our religious ideas must also be big enough to take into account what we learn from science.

I believe that all religious answers, carefully and intimately arrived at through contemplation of the varied aspects of the living of one’s life and which respect the unique humanity of all our fellow men, are valid.

So, I truly appreciate the open and accepting nature of the UU church.    It is an environment that nourishes in people the best that they have to offer to their fellow travelers on this planet.  

However, as we look at what goes on in the world today, it is clear to me that we as UU’ers live on a small island within a very large ocean of narrow-minded thought.  And it is too easy to assume that freedoms, once won, are ours forever.  This is clearly not true; and we must all be vigilant in preserving what we today assume is our right from those who still believe that they know what is best for our souls.

In my long search for community I once asked a friend of mine how he chose his church.  He said to me, “Well, I guess I just looked for the one with the best baseball team!”  (He was a Baptist.) 

I think that I now know the true reason why I found the UU Church of Concord, and it's not baseball.  I have been baking bread for just about 30 years.  It so happens that this church is blessed with the best group of male bread bakers that I have ever met.  Surely that was the reason that we were meant to come here. 

Anyway, thank you for accepting my wife and me into your community.  I am looking forward to baking and eating lots of fabulous bread with all of you and, together, fighting off the screaming hordes of true believers who I am sure are out there thinking that these UU’ers are simply having too much fun!

Thank you.