Coming of Age
Credo Statements
__________
Sebastian Dobrow
During the summer of ’06 my family and I took a trip to South Africa were we took a tour of the townships near Cape Town. These people were incredibly poor and one lady we met was working at her shop selling goat heads and goat head soup. The money she made was decent but she provided for 14 other people. She didn’t seem to be visibly suffering but she was very shy and seemingly embarrassed by her business and tattered clothing in front of these tourists from all over the world. I put my arm around her to take a picture and she was still smiling after the shot, the first time we had seen her smile since we had met her.
We also visited a daycare center in the township run by a remarkable woman who ran a daycare out of two rooms and had turned her home into the worlds smallest B&B, to provide extra income for the kids and herself. When the group of us entered the kids at the daycare center all gathered around me and sung The Wheels on the Bus go Round and Round and a couple other American songs. They were so happy to share what they had learned with us and were sad to see us go.
Suffering is very real and sometimes caused by horrific and devastating things but sometimes small things can help and a little time and a little effort could go along way. If I could be the bright spot in someone’s day, no matter how far away, it would be worth it. I believe that suffering can helped and that it just takes often a little effort to ease the pain, for a little while but I understand that there is no that way I could have solved all their problems by myself.
I believe that suffering is caused by hatred, feelings of superiority, greed, natural disasters and health and illness. I believe that suffering is caused by nature and inter personal conflict, not by a higher being who is punishing those who have done wrong, so I believe that it is humans that are responsible for solving the problems that they have caused. Not someone else.
My school has this class one period a week called TAG, teacher advisory group. Most TAG groups spend their 45 minutes a week doing homework, watching movies or playing kickball but ours was determined to work on a project to serve the greater good. We began learning about the war in Uganda and the horrors that were taking and have been taking place for the last seven years. Tens of thousands of children abducted by rebel soldiers, brain washed and turned into soldiers themselves, as well as laborers and sex slaves. Seven years of this has gone by and not much press has been devoted to this topic. Such great suffering was told by Martin P., age 13. “Early on when my brothers and I were captured, the LRA [Lords Resistance Army] explained to us that all five brothers couldn’t serve in the LRA because we would not perform well. So they tied up my two younger brothers and invited us to watch. Then they beat them with sticks until the two of them died. They told us it would give us strength to fight. My youngest brother was nine years old.” This quote is from a website we used to learn about the situation and were deeply moved. We chose to try to help the children and to do what we could to ease their suffering. It wasn’t very fun but we knew that it was a good thing to be doing even though some of us didn’t show it.
Growing up as a Unitarian Universalist I have had the opportunity and support to create my own ideas, from my own experiences to create my own personal understanding of my religion and faith. Most UU’s have different beliefs but what makes us similar is that all UU’s arrive at those beliefs by the same process. The Unitarian Univarsalist principles are sort of a guide as a young UU creates his or her own faith. I believe the principles to be good ideas that are a little too idealistic. They are good building bocks to creating beliefs but very hard to live out perfectly. I am a very practical person and someone who doesn’t believe in extraordinary things. I tend to agree with Occam’s Razor, the principle that basically says, in a circumstance, the simplest possibility is usually the correct one. I don’t believe in a god, a person who sits up there and controls what happens down here. In a matter like this, where there is no evidence of a higher being ever existing I don’t believe there is one. I believe that the notion of god was invented to give hope and comfort in difficult times and I agree with that. The idea of God, gave me comfort In South Africa when we were at a photo safari camp in the middle of nowhere and one night I felt sick. I was in bed and was very hot despite the cool African night. I took off my blankets and started shivering; these are early symptoms of malaria. I was sitting in my bed and found my self asking god to not let me die, at least in the middle of nowhere QuaZulu Natal. I didn’t believe in a god that could help me at all and I don’t now but I was, not praying, but hoping that if their was someone up there he could be on my side. I definitely believe the saying that “there are no atheists in fox holes” is correct. When I think about it I know I don’t believe in a god but it gave me hope and seemed natural to lean on an idea of god when I was in trouble. It gave me hope but two diarrhea pills gave me comfort as we learned it was just food poisoning. I don’t think that god had anything to do with it but the fact that there might have been someone helping me out was comfort to me, I was scared. To me god is hope, and not a real being of somesorts that controls things. God is a way to explain the extraordinary and to me and others, an ear in the dark to help you get to tomorrow.
I am looking forward to continuing my UU involvement and as I had the power to sculpt my own faith I am looking forward to high school and more freedom and choices to come.
Ben Hoskins
I would like to tell you about how I found religion in the sixth grade. I used to be an atheist but then I decided I would be happier if I had religion. I went through a lot of difficulty in sixth grade and I think that that may have made me start to think about why bad things happen in the world, especially to people who don’t deserve to have those horrible things happen to them. My first idea was that bad things were happening to me because of my behavior. I thought that maybe if I did everything correctly that maybe bad things might stop happening to me. I had an inner feeling of what is right and wrong, but I did not know where that feeling came from. I thought that my sense of morality had to come from somewhere and I thought that it must be some external force such as God. At first, my understanding of God was very simple, just good and evil or God and the Devil. I thought that if I did what I felt to be good and right that I would please God and God would stop the bad things from happening to me in sixth grade. My theory did not prove to be correct.
The problem of sixth grade was solved by my changing of schools. But I continued to think about this problem of bad things happening. My new hypothesis was that what you do in this life determines what happens in the afterlife. However, I could not test my new hypothesis until I was dead. So, in the meantime I looked it up on Wikipedia. I learned that in Buddhism that doing good in general determined what would happen to me in later lives. In Hinduism I learned of an inner measure of good also known as karma. If Karma is a process tracking good and evil through many lives then the God that oversees the process has to be more complex. I realized that God is more complex than I originally thought. I began to think that there were different facets of God. I retained the idea of good and evil and they became two of the facets. I came to think that the world was created out of competition and that the tension of good and evil was not enough to explain how the universe came into being. I learned about the Big Bang theory. I figured that the tiny speck that exploded and created all existence was made of the tensions between good and evil and order and chaos. Therefore I adopted chaos and order as two additional different facets of God. I felt like I was making progress towards understanding God in a way that describes the world as I know it. I have experienced good and evil happening in the world, but I have also felt the influence of order and chaos. An example is that because things were more chaotic, I felt more pressure right before exhibitions at my school, where we display our work, so I was able to get my work done on time.
But something was missing in my idea of God. I was on a hike with my brother and father in the Fells. It was a very windy day and we were climbing up onto a ridge. When we reached the summit, I saw the most beautiful conifer tree I had ever seen. It was standing perfectly straight, perfectly cone shaped, and did not even move in the wind. I saw on the tree these berries which were shiny and changed from purple to blue. I felt strangely serene and fascinated by the tree. That feeling could not be accounted for by the facets of good, evil, chaos, and order. So there had to be another facet to God. What should I call this other facet? I decided to call it life. I began to feel that nothing in the world is more important than life. When I first started thinking about God in sixth grade I asked myself what does God want me to do in order to be a good person. Now, I have come to realize that to me life is the most important facet of God. I have to ask myself again what does God want me to do to be a good person? I conclude that God wants me to help the state of the environment because to me hurting nature is like hurting God.
I now realize that I have always had strong feeling about the environment. Whenever I walk down a sidewalk I have this strange feeling of absolute revulsion at the sight of litter. I think this is a much stronger feeling than other people have. I also have strong feelings for animals. At my father’s house we have a cat named Buddha who sits on the couch all day. She lets my stepmother pet her, but she hisses at other people. But I love Buddha anyway. Like my strong feelings of right and wrong in sixth grade, I understand that my strong feelings for the environment mean that protecting the environment is what God wants me to do.
When Ruth and I first talked about my beliefs, I thought they were not Unitarian Universalist. But, Unitarian Universalists believe that everyone has their own idea of God and of truth. And it is our obligation to test our ideas with the experiences of our own life. And that is what I have been doing. So, I was very surprised to discover that I was a Unitarian Universalist. I realized that this must be true because of the seventh principle, that affirms the interconnected web of all living things and is very similar to my idea of life as a facet of God.
For me to lead a good life and to be a good Unitarian Universalist, I have to be good to nature and stand up for animal rights and nature. That is my mission in life. When I was a small child I read books on science and more specifically the chapters on ecology, pollution, and nature. I cried when I saw pictures of dead animals caught in pollution. I vividly remember one picture of litter in Nepal near Mount Everest. I became more and more environmentally aware as I grew older and saw all the horrible things humans have done to the Earth. Now I am an avid environmentalist, and a supporter of the conservation group Sea Shepherd, which protects whales, seals, dolphins, sharks and many other types of marine life. When I grow up I plan to join Sea Shepherd and later become a writer and environmentalist. These beliefs of the importance of nature and the environment have shaped who I am and who I will be.
