Quote:
Originally Posted by maineguy8888
Some valid points, but remember: 150/100 years ago, when Unitarian Universalism was becoming big, it was the "anti-tradition". It seemed to do away with the stolid, Christain-based legacy for a New Way. But check it out: it would hardly be considered much different at all by today's standards! If you could transport 19th century Unitarianism into today, it would seem more "same old, same old" than different. (The stained glass window on my town's old UU church has an open Bible smack dab in the center.) In other words, there really wasn't any big movement away from traditional religious belief 100 or 150 years ago; even what presented itself as the "alternative" wasn't all that different. (The UU has mirrored society's shifts by becoming completely separated from traditional Christianity over the last 50 years).
Today, the "alternative" is TRULY different: stout, antipathetic atheism; and it's sizable (and growing).
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I think that UUs are pretty different than most mainstream Christianity. No proselytizing, no trinity, no eternal damnation. It wass essentially humanism with a "spiritual" gloss. In addition at that time there was movement toward humanism as an alternative religion, as in the Free Religion Association, the Humanistic Religion Association, and Ethical Culture societies. This was a big thing.
And it wasn't all nicey nice either. Ingersoll was a rockstar of his day drawing huge crowds, the Hitchens of the late 1800's, and his agnosticism was not a gentle sort. For example:
“The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be believed only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called faith.”
―
Robert G. Ingersoll
“Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.”
―
Robert G. Ingersoll
“Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.”
―
Robert G. Ingersoll
These are not the remnants of a meek sort of disagreement with religion. No, I think that the ideas of freethought, of religious skepticism, of doubt have only started down the road toward recovering the kind of sway they once had in America. If anything, I think the debate has gotten more polarized because of the politicization of particularly conservative Christianity in the 1970's, not because atheists are somehow more strident than ever before in history... I think in large part we are simply slowly uncovering out birthright, the history of heresy, doubt, and unbelief that has been buried.
-NoCapo
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If you need some interesting reading, Try Jennifer Michael Hecht's book, "Doubt: a history". It was really eyeopening to me what a rich legacy unfolds when you trace doubt, skepticism, freethought and the like through history. The influence of these men and women who bucked orthodoxy and embraced questioning and seeking is both tremendous, and tremendously unnoticed. There really is nothing new under the sun, to paraphrase one influential doubter, the author of Ecclesiastes. 
