Finding Meaning, Hope And Morality Without Believing In God with Rev. Dr. David Breeden

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hey there, everybody.

00:00:03
Speaker 2: We are so excited. We have another installation of our spiritual Sunday. We've yet to rename it. Is it sticking.

00:00:13
Speaker 3: Still? You know what, We're being lazy right now. We'll get on it. Every time you say it, I complain about it, but I haven't come up with another solution, so I should shut.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Up, all right. So today we're very excited to have the Reverend doctor David Breden here with us. He is the senior Minister of the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis. He is an author, he is a professor. He studies this, he lives this, and he preaches it, and so we're excited to have him here with us. And Reverend doctor David. First, I was actually googling this because I'm not and I don't think you were either exceptionally familiar with the Unitarian Church. Can you explain us, explain to us what it is to be a Unitarian and Universalist minister?

00:01:04
Speaker 4: Okay, Unitarian universalism and you can google it. It's a very very liberal religious tradition. It goes all the way back to the Puritans in Massachusetts, which feels odd, but it's actually true because you know, they also started Harvard, for example, So they got more and more liberal the longer they were here. And so at this point in time, there are still Christian Unitarian Universalists, but most of us have become some form of humanist slash Buddhist slash Hindu slash Taoists, etc. And my Congregation First Unitarian Society is where congregational humanism was invented. So congregational humanism means that we're humanists. Almost everybody is either an atheist or an agnostic or.

00:02:07
Speaker 1: Just don't know. And many people, you know, we have apatheists.

00:02:13
Speaker 4: Many people don't care, they don't think deeply about this stuff as I do. But that's the tradition that I'm in, and I identify as a humanist, and I fight for secular government, the separation or church and state, so that we who have edited the Christian round are still able to do what we do because you know, there's a lot of threats to what we're doing at the moment.

00:02:47
Speaker 1: So that's what that's what it is.

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Speaker 3: Okay, where do you fall then, even if it's not Christianity, do you still consider it a religion?

00:02:57
Speaker 1: Yep, yes, absolutely, yes. Human is a.

00:03:01
Speaker 4: Is a religious slash spiritual worldview.

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Speaker 3: How did you find it? How does one find it and get into it? How did you?

00:03:10
Speaker 1: Well? I found it a long time ago.

00:03:13
Speaker 4: But I was born of pentecostal I was raised Pentecostal, which is over time it has become more and more right wing, unfortunately. I love Pentecostalism. I love the history of Pentecostalism. I love the fact that Pentecostalism is the religion of the poorest of the poor in our world.

00:03:37
Speaker 1: Frankly, and my parents were illiterate, etc. I went to college. I was very lucky to go to college. And when I went to college.

00:03:46
Speaker 4: I began reading American literature where everyone was a Unitarian, because almost all East Coast nineteenth century authors were Unitarian. So I started saying, Oh, that's where, that's what those guys are, and they're still around, and I want to be one of those. And I did many years as a layperson, and then I went into ministry.

00:04:10
Speaker 2: All right, so you so you believe in a god, though correct, just to like make it like to believe in a god, you don't.

00:04:22
Speaker 1: Now, I I'm a Spinotzen.

00:04:25
Speaker 4: Spinoza said either nature or God, you can say either one. And so I say nature all right, because because I don't think that there's a god that does some things that people wish a god did. So I don't bother with the word because I don't want people to think that I think I have some corner on a god that can do something for them personally.

00:04:55
Speaker 3: How does it work for you? Because so many people turn to religion for for help, for guidance, how do you apply for a person who is religious Christian? How does your religion apply to your day to day life and your problem solving and your morals? How does it apply to your life the way Christians would apply their religion would apply to them.

00:05:17
Speaker 4: Well, we do have a tradition, and so Ralph Waldo Emerson had a lot of ideas and in many many writers, poets, etc. Have ideas about how to act in the world.

00:05:33
Speaker 1: I believe in nature. I believe in what I can see.

00:05:36
Speaker 4: I don't think there's anything supernatural out there, although I do think that there's a lot of stuff I don't know and that science can't figure out. So that's not a problem. As a matter of fact, I believe that it is egotistical of we humans to make speculation about any of the gods or God or whatever I.

00:06:02
Speaker 1: Believe in what I see.

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Speaker 4: I'm a poet, and so I study the minute shy of nature and try to see the way the world actually works. And you know, Mother Nature is not kind, that's for sure, but we can count on nature to do certain things with us and for us.

00:06:27
Speaker 1: My belief is that all of.

00:06:29
Speaker 4: Us are very very small bits of the huge cosmos, and we're all connected to that cosmos. That connection implies a duty, I think, to help all other people and all of the living things, because you know, the grasshopper is my kin. Now, maybe I need to kill that grasshopper for various reasons, and we can think that through. But still yet we need to think about it for sure, and so the nature stops being this thing that we manipulate whenever we want to burn something down or make something or whatever. But nature is us and we need to take care of it. So that's the main moral point, is simply looking at everything closely to see what my moral obligation is to that so called thing.

00:07:31
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and I'm curious, so you know, Look, obviously, religion has divided so many people since the beginning of time, But a lot of times when you look at Islam, when you look at Christianity, when you look at Judaism, the same principles applied. There are still there's still morality, there's still ethics. Does how do you how does the Unitarian I don't even know if you call it a faith, but the Unitarian religion, how is it like other religions? And how is it different other? Obviously the God thing I get is the big difference. But do you have, perhaps from that perspective, more in common than you have uncommon with religions around the world that we are more familiar with.

00:08:18
Speaker 1: Yes, well absolutely.

00:08:20
Speaker 4: The humanist position on that is that all religion is human made. We made it up, and we made it up, and it's pretty clear if you start looking around we made it up differently in different geographical locations. Christianity got moved over here by European settlers. It didn't belong here, the natives didn't like it, but here it is, and people felt obligated to spread that Christianity. But you know, for me anyway, it's all made up. It's all historical, as we would call it, that is, it was all invented within human historical principles, and so I respect them. All the again, the only thing that I see, well, you know the old Bob Dylan thing, don't hate anything but hatred. You know, it gets contradicted really quickly. But as long as religion is about human flourishing as I call it, and number one, human flourishing, so religion is good and so far as it helps us flourish.

00:09:41
Speaker 1: In this life.

00:09:42
Speaker 4: That's why I don't disagree with Pentecostalism, even though I don't believe it.

00:09:47
Speaker 1: A lot of people who have almost.

00:09:49
Speaker 4: No hope in our world, it gives them hope and it gives them an ability to get up in the.

00:09:55
Speaker 1: Morning and get on with life.

00:10:00
Speaker 4: Maybe they should be striking instead and insisting on you know, that wage theft and that sort of thing. But and because I do believe in social improvement and flourishing for humans as well. But any religion that is helping people make it through the day and not hurting others as a good religion.

00:10:22
Speaker 1: As far as I'm.

00:10:22
Speaker 3: Concerned, your religion helping you through the day as well. You mentioned hope. Where do you find hope as a universal Unitarian?

00:10:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not speaking for unitarian universalism by the way, because we believe so many different things. But as a humanist, I find hope in that human beings make human problems, and we can unmake human problems. And a human problem is bad economics. We built that, We did that, we're responsible for that, and we can fix that if we have the and work on it.

00:11:02
Speaker 3: You you sound like you want to fix the problem. You should go to Congress, not to your congregation.

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Speaker 4: Well, you know, I find I find myself involved in politics more often than I would like, because, yes, politics is what drives you know, what people are doing on the street. But I don't have the.

00:11:24
Speaker 1: Patience to be a politician.

00:11:26
Speaker 3: But it does. It sounds like problem solving in a kind way. Well it's it really does. What you're describing. It sounds like what a lot of our leaders, elected leaders should be doing. Just nicer about it.

00:11:39
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, being kind humans.

00:11:43
Speaker 1: That's their job.

00:11:45
Speaker 2: Well someone should tell them. Then, I'm curious, doctor Breden, where do you think we go after we die.

00:11:56
Speaker 4: Into the universe, into the great recycling? There's nothing inside it, there's nothing, there's nothing outside it, and everything is inside it.

00:12:07
Speaker 1: So when I go and.

00:12:09
Speaker 4: And am burned and my ashes scattered, Hey, that's just joining the universe again.

00:12:19
Speaker 3: But that has nothing to do again. That's being one with the earth, if you will. But as far as a soul and an afterlife and going to another place, that's not something that's that you subscribe to.

00:12:31
Speaker 1: No, it's not.

00:12:31
Speaker 4: I mean, when you start thinking about consciousness, and of course there's a pentecosta, we believe that, you know, you come back, you go to heaven and you look just like you do here or whatever, and oh, well does Grandma have to be eighty eight then, you know, or she will have a glorified body, you know, And there's all of this kind of you know, and well I still hate my cousin, you know, you know, and these these kinds of things. Uh. No, I don't believe that there's a conscious human consciousness after death. Now we can argue about that, because then you know, what is human consciousness? Is is it human? Or is it bigger than that? U? Do rocks have consciousness? You know? We can we can certainly discuss these things. But my consciousness, as far as I'm concerned, is part of my brain, my mind, and it goes away just like when I go to sleep, not there. When I get in an operation, it's not there. So yeah, it goes away. It's it's a nice electrical dream that we have and curish every moment of it, but it ends.

00:13:51
Speaker 2: Doctor Reid. And I'm curious, who finds themselves in your congregation? What types of folks do they come from? Christian bunds? Do they come from not having a belief system and wanting to find a place to belong people who think like them? Can you give us a sense of the types of people who find their way to your congregation.

00:14:16
Speaker 4: Most of them nowadays, they're still like me. They grew up in some kind of Christian tradition. They had the habit of going to church on Sunday morning, and so they do that. But they're looking for a place where they can be extremely questioning. And it's really according to how much you want to question. Some people only want to question so far as the end of liberal Christianity, and that's fine. There's a lot of brilliant thinking on the cutting edge of liberal Christianity, but most people have begun to see Christianity as one option out of many. So we have a lot of people coming in out of Judaism and Christianity slowly. And you know, you both read about how more and more Americans are not Christian and are leaving, and about thirty percent have left religion in general, and many of those people come to us.

00:15:21
Speaker 1: They come to us both in.

00:15:23
Speaker 4: Humanist congregations and through the American Humanists Association, which is totally secular. And for more and more people who were not raised in Christian tradition, you know, they don't have the baggage I do. Oh you know, I got hurt here or the minister said this crazy thing over here, or you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. More and more people don't have any connection. Now of course that that's also regional. I don't know where you are, but on the East Coast, most people, younger people don't have any religious baggage whatsoever.

00:16:02
Speaker 1: Here in the yeah, yeah, Here in the northern.

00:16:07
Speaker 4: Midwest pretty well, people have left Christianity and they don't have that baggage. Now. I met at Jehovah's Witness the other day, who was, you know, searching And we still have those news searchers out there. But more and more people don't have negative baggage about Christianity anymore as they did when I was young.

00:16:28
Speaker 3: When you love to hear a conversation between him and a Jehovah's witness. That would be very interesting. You know, what are your conversation What are your conversations like with believers? With Christians as they might be hearing what you're saying. It might even take offense because you did use the word. You haven't been offensive in my opinion, but you use the word. You think it's a little egomaniacal or egotistical of us to the way we view religion. What are your conversations like? But Christians come at you, are they upset with you?

00:16:58
Speaker 1: Well?

00:16:59
Speaker 4: I don't run into too many fundamentalist Christians in my life anymore. I know they are somewhere around Minnesota, but I don't tend to run into them. Most of the people. Well, I mean, we have a downtown senior clergy group in Minneapolis that includes rabbis and a mom's and Lutheran ministers and Presbyterian ministers, and I get a lot of respect from them. I'm a religious leader as they are. I believe differently than they do, but all of us have faced the fact that faith is easily questioned. And you know, how do you go on being a Lutheran minister when you say, oh, wait a minute, this Bible, when you start looking at it, it starts falling apart. Right, There's so many authors, there are so many time frames, you know, So why what does it mean? What does it mean when I under the truth and the light and no one goes to heaven but by me? You know, that's pretty definite. So you know, as a Christian you have to work with those as well. So, but we have great respect for each other because we've all worked on these problems really hard, whereas maybe, you know, some people just haven't thought about it that much. And I don't have a lot to say to those folks, and they don't have much to say to me.

00:18:29
Speaker 2: Frankly, doctor Reeden, I'm curious if most religions I was raised Catholic, so I can speak through that lens, but most religion the purpose is to there is an ethical boundary that you don't cross, because yes, you want to get to heaven. You want to have a good after life. And part of the meaning of this life is, yes, to learn, but also the hope of a promised after life. What is the meaning of life to a humanist? What's the purpose of life.

00:19:06
Speaker 4: The purpose of life is you have to find it. That's one of the differences between traditional religions and humanism is we don't believe there's a purpose because we believe in Darwin. We believe, you know, in the expanding universe. So what purpose would there be for something little like us in such a grand scheme of things? Are we going to go Jupiter office course? Or you know, no, we're not. There's almost nothing we can do again except destroy our own earth and hurt each other. These are the bad things, right, so let us not do those things. And that is a purpose to life.

00:19:51
Speaker 3: Something we often talk about. We've also asked all of our guests on this segment about people are looking for some kind of help or guidance and making it through very times. How do you through humanism through your church when a lot has happened, Yeah, even on the streets of Minneapolis, or we see wildfires happening, we see mass shootings, we see children being killed, We see these things, these horrible stories, day and day out. How do you, through your religion, help your congregation, help yourself cope with understanding why things happen?

00:20:24
Speaker 4: People did every one of the things you named, there was a perpetrator, or usually a bunch of perpetrators for some reason, we bomb them. Because right Spain is burning because we screwed with the environment. So how can we unscrew the environment is a big human question. I hope that we humans can get ourselves together before the planet burns down. Some days I think we will and some days I think we won't. But you know that's we did it and we need to fix it in any.

00:21:05
Speaker 1: Way that we can.

00:21:06
Speaker 4: So, yes, I was out there on the frozen streets in January. And you know, we are still making deliveries to people who are afraid of ice. That's not over. We did a delivery yesterday. There are people still hiding in their houses here. Uh So yeah, we you know, we believe in getting out there and doing something. So when Alex Petty was killed, I put on my little priest caller because I am I'm into the religion industry. So so I put on my little priest caller and I went out to where he was killed the day after he was killed, and and joined in the in the celebration of life and in the morning process. And you know, some I'm sure Catholic kids said thanks for coming father, and I didn't correct him, right. It's because I was representing a way of thinking that we call religion. So that's what I did. I got out there and did something.

00:22:24
Speaker 2: I actually have one last question for you, Reverend doctor Breeden. You say that you think we return to the universe in whatever way, shape or form. With being a humanist and what your belief system is, I'm curious because you mentioned all the different types of ways you can describe your religion. Among them, you said Buddhists could be a part of your congregation. What are your thoughts on reincarnation. I'm just curious, given what you said, is that a possibility in your brain with your way of thinking.

00:23:00
Speaker 4: No, because it's about continued consciousness. All of us, mathematically, all of us have at least one molecule of Shakespeare in us. Scientifically speaking, we don't all have a molecule of Elvis yet because he was buried and you know, but you know, in another couple thousand years, all humans will have a molecule of Elvis in them. It's what you do with that molecule, you know, go buy yourself a guitar.

00:23:33
Speaker 2: You're talking to a Memphis guy here, so you nailed it.

00:23:38
Speaker 1: Memphis. I used to live down by Memphis. I love Memphis.

00:23:41
Speaker 4: Those guys, those guys on the street, they sound like they're playing three different guitars at the same time.

00:23:48
Speaker 3: That is funny. Of all things. You mentioned Memphis and you mentioned Elvis, who I will say, and we always say, hey, the universe is sending a signal. But you didn't know where I was from, and you mentioned Elvis. My due date. My mom's due date was August sixteenth, nineteen seventy seven, and that was the day that Elvis died. That was her do date with me. It's a weird thing. I always thought about that, that the day he died, I was supposed to be born. I ended up born three days later.

00:24:14
Speaker 2: But yes, Elvis's maybe you have some extra Elvis molecules in you because it dissipated right before you.

00:24:21
Speaker 3: Oh it was August.

00:24:23
Speaker 1: Nights, just chocking.

00:24:25
Speaker 4: I was just jockey at that time, and I had to dig up all the Elvis records to play.

00:24:29
Speaker 3: So yeah, well man, we can't think, Hey, well we just learned a lot. Yeah, I'm serious. We had other questions, but then we ended up getting so curious as you started talking that We just wanted to find out more, and I hope our listeners found something out and could check it out. Look, people are looking for something. If they don't want to go the traditional religious route and people are turned off by it, then maybe they heard something here and they're curious about it. So we appreciate it. Thank you so much for taking the time out and and thank you for answering our questions, as we were curious about a lot of stuff.

00:25:03
Speaker 4: All right, well, thanks a lot, and I enjoyed talking with you.

00:25:06
Speaker 1: And yep, holler again sometimes sure.

00:25:08
Speaker 3: Thank thank you so much to our listeners, thank you as well for spending some time with us. We'll talk to you'll soon.