The New York Times\u00a0publishes a weekly advice column in which their Ethicist (Kwame Anthony Appiah,\u00a0author, philosopher, and New York University Professor of Philosophy and Law) responds to moral dilemmas described in readers\u2019 letters.\u00a0 The headline for his column\u00a0this week\u00a0reads, \u201cCan I Go to Church When I Don\u2019t Believe?\u201d<\/p>\n
The query begins, \u201cI grew up in the Catholic tradition, but after obtaining several university degrees \u2014 including one in religion \u2014 it became clear to me that Jesus wasn\u2019t divine\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
The writer adds, \u201cBut boy, oh, boy, do I love the artistic output of Christianity\u2026The music ‘lifts my spirit’ and ‘there\u2019s the lovely sense of community in a congregation.’\u201d<\/p>\n
He goes on to admit, \u201cI\u2019m lying when I turn up at a service and recite the Creed and sing the hymns as lustily as anyone else.\u201d\u00a0 So he asks, \u201cAm I hurting anyone by doing this? Is it, for want of a better word, a sin?\u201d<\/p>\n
Appiah replies that \u201cA church represents\u00a0<\/strong>a confluence of practices, beliefs and community, and its congregants will be drawn for all sorts of reasons.\u201d\u00a0 He\u00a0encourages the writer to continue attending Catholic services and to visit other churches, \u201clike those of the Unitarian Universalists, that explicitly reject creeds.\u201d<\/p>\n Appiah wisely adds, \u201cThere\u2019s no saying what a service means to any of its participants. So your presence and participation can hardly be taken as a declaration of any particular creedal commitments.\u201d<\/p>\n The Sedona Unitarian Universalist Fellowship agrees that attending a Catholic, or any other, traditional religious service, is not harmful, and that it also can be helpful to visit more liberal churches, where congregants are welcome to think and speak freely about their evolving beliefs.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The New York Times\u00a0publishes a weekly advice column in which their Ethicist (Kwame Anthony Appiah,\u00a0author, philosopher, and New York University Professor of Philosophy and Law) responds to moral dilemmas described in readers\u2019 letters.\u00a0 The headline for his column\u00a0this week\u00a0reads, \u201cCan I Go to Church When I Don\u2019t Believe?\u201d The query begins, \u201cI grew up in … Continue reading UU Beliefs and Service Attendance (#132)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8737"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8941,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8737\/revisions\/8941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}