The Unitarian free-thinking independent-minded way of approaching religion
and belief is poles apart from accepting a creed because someone higher up the
religious hierarchy tells us to. We are free-thinkers, who place a very high value on personal integrity – on finding
your own way to the best that you know.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have what I would call
absolutist or fundamentalist faiths, those who demand that their believers
accept the whole faith package without question, or be condemned as unbelievers
and heretics. Conforming to such a faith is easy, so long as you don’t mind
your thoughts and actions being dictated by someone else. In effect, you are
accepting and measuring yourself against someone else’s definition of
integrity. You are told what to do and how to act and think, and so long as you
do that, your place among the saved will be assured.
No, sorry, can’t be doing with it. And yet, such faiths have a far larger
following than Unitarianism. Is this because most people would rather not think for themselves, that they
would rather be told how they should
react in any given situation, rather than working it out for themselves? I
think it must be. Because with freedom comes responsibility, and that can be
scarey.
For sure, there are many shades of integrity vs. conformity
along the way. Between the endless questioning of free thinkers and the blind
following of ultra conformist faiths, there are very many believers, who (for
example) quite happily chant the creed in church on a Sunday morning, but whose
personal lives are lived out in varying degrees of conformity with it.
And
within the “stricter” faiths, such as Catholicism and Islam, there are surely
many independent thinkers who live their lives and their faiths with integrity.
I’m certainly not saying that we Unitarians and Quakers and other free thinkers
have a monopoly on integrity – far from it. But our habit of questioning our
beliefs and our actions and not just doing something because the other person
says so should surely make behaving with integrity that much easier.
