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Occam - 22 September 2007 03:34 PM

“Management Style” translates to me as dictatorship.  While Kurtz is very bright, he appears to me to be overbearing, disdainful of critics, and certainly extremely loquacious.  His idea seems to be, never say in one sentence what you can stretch out to a page.  I think that’s why H.M.II is much longer than H.M.III. 

Many of the ministers who signed the first Manifesto were Unitarian and agnostic or atheist.  Unfortunately, they have mostly died off and that denomination has been taken over by the Universalists and become quite theistic.  I can’t imagine a Universalist minister signing III.

Occam

This is true, they are not the same.  However U.U. ministers did sign the III.

Zarcus, I only met him twice when he was in California.  One time he gave a talk at the CFI.  Some young people who weren’t too familiar with humanism asked some questions, and Kurtz was, in my opinion, rather nasty in his response.  I agree that the questions weren’t too sophisticated, but the questioners didn’t need to be put down as harshly as he did.  I stood and listened to him in a group of his acolytes after the talk and he came across as supercilious.  Now, he may have been having a bad day or was suffering from jetlag, but he didn’t come across too well to me.

Mriana, I’m sorry.  I went back and re-read your post.  I should have seen that you were talking about 2000, not III, when you said no ministers signed the document.  While there are still UUs that are humanists, the younger ministers being recruited are of the Universalist ilk.

Occam

Thus you see why I went with those who are of the Spong and Culpitt school of thought as a way of saying the Unitarians probably thought thus and such…  The U.U. today is not the same.  Spong et al are the closest we have today of the thinking the 1933 Unitarians.  It’s a rough comparison since most of us were not there, BUT Spong has gotten many a death threat from Christians because of his non-realism and they equate his form non-theism, as he calls it, with atheism.  Sea of Faith is considered atheist, just as Spong is, with their non-realism.  I don’t think we have any example that is better than their ideas to the Unitarians of the time, at least not any that are as well known.