The End of Universism
I may write a book someday about my experiences with experiments with Un-churches. One of the chapters would concern Universism. For those who don't know, Universism is a "religion" like Unitarian Universalism except that instead of embracing all religious heritages, it rejects all of them in favor of "faith in reason, inspiration in nature, and hope in progress". The emphasis was "on the attitude and spirit in which you address religious questions, and the tools you use to do so, rather than focusing on any conclusions that you may arrive at". Those tools were personal experience and reason. Flaky new-agers did not find a very welcome home among us, despite their attraction to the idea of experimental religion, because they didn't enjoy our disapproval of blind faith, prophets, and gurus.
The movement gained worldwide attention, hosted live internet chats with John Horgan, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins, and many appearances in radio, television and newspapers. Universist YouTube videos still circulate.
Today I found out how that chapter of the book ends. Many of you met Universism's founder, Ford Vox, when he visited me last year and accompanied me to the weekly gathering of fans at Tio's in Ann Arbor. He has replaced the Universism website with a retraction of the desire to present an opposing force to faith. Much of what he says is true and valuable, but no reason to back down.
No doubt this follows from the infighting over differences of opinion, personality quirks, and the accompanying shrill hysteria and paranoid accusations against the admins and opinion leaders, which characterized the web community around which the movement was based. Universism as a social organism did not have mechanisms within its core ideas, organizational structure, or the type of people it attracted, to surmount that type of activity and acheive stability. and I watched this for a couple of years, and eventually drifted away from frequent activity, although we remain Universists by definition. One of the recurring themes we encountered was members deciding they weren't Universists because they didn't like someone prominently attached to Universism. I would suspect if they are so fixated on personalities and group membership that they needed a Universist leader to follow, that they are correct in saying they are not Universists. One already is a Universist. Or one is not. It's not about the group, and not about teachers.
Hence, I wonder why Ford thinks he can re-write the principles that hundreds or thousands of us signed our names to? All the time I was active among my fellow Universists, I said again and again that all Ford did was identify a pre-existing set of positions among a large number of people, and attach a new word to it. Leaders, prophets, and gurus are irrelevant to us-- especially Ford. So, why should it matter to us that the one who came up with the idea to start a movement around this has now changed his mind about changing the world? And why does Ford think he can redefine us into milquetoast apatheists by executive fiat-- just because he owns the web domain name? The Faithless don't submit and obey a holy text of secularism-- the documents obey us. The Humanist Manifesto or Ford's original Principles of Universism identify what it is large numbers of faithless people already have in common. I recognized myself in the original, pre-retraction sense of Universism. I still do.
Comments
paranthropus on Aug. 31, 2006 9:24 PM
I wish all religions only took three years to dwindle into psychobabble, then fade to nothingness. Congrats to Ford for getting it done in record time.
netmouse on Aug. 31, 2006 10:10 PM
*sigh* what a useless and naive philosophy (meaning Vox's new 3-line one). especially point #3 - Do what you want as long as it allows everyone else to do what they want.
Conflict is inevitable. Eventually I will want the same strawberry as you, and we can't both do what we want, which is eat it. And that's aside from letting people walk all over you who actually want to do bad things! How does this principle guide you in any way?
rachelann1977 on Aug. 31, 2006 10:19 PM
So, the title of your post is not completely accurate. I consider myself somewhat of a universist, too, these days, after just over a year of asking lots of questions to myself, and I don't know if this means the movement has permanently lost its steam, but I doubt it. It will reappear under a different name. There is just so much baggage atteched to the word atheist, many rational thinkers find themselves constantly searching for some alternative, some way to gather and talk about real-world issues without requiring any sort of "faith" in something we can never know or understand. Regardless, it's just a leader lost, as you said, in a community that, by all rights, should not require any particular leader. It is sad, though, when a person chooses to cast the results of his own mistake out onto the multitude, so to speak.
rachelann1977 on Aug. 31, 2006 10:32 PM
I ammend that. I should've clicked the link eh? That's arrogance. He's literally changed the meaning of the word universist single-handedly. I only hope somebody with some skills and personality starts a new web site to cantradict it. Oh well.
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