This month’s Unitarian Universalist Blog Carnival invites us to begin with this quotation from James Luther Adams:

A good deal of so-called atheism is itself, from my point of view, theologically significant. It is the working of God in history, and judgement upon the pious. An authentic prophet can be a radical critic of spurious piety, of sham spirituality.

I think the crux of this statement is in the last two words, sham spirituality.

The god that a typical atheist rejects, I would argue, is the hand-holding god that many credit with sports victories, winning awards, and moral superiority over “non-believers.” The god that will damn people eternally for minor infractions against conflicting instructive Bible verses, raise people up eternally for living “moral” lives of judging their fellow human beings against that same conflicting “code,” the one watching every living thing from the sky with the long, flowing white beard, the god of the Jerry Falwells, Jim Bakkers, Bill O’Reillys, General Boykins, and more.

Well, I don’t believe in that god, either. That god is just too small. A god that puts one person above another for rather arbitrary reasons, and that adjusts and controls every small detail of human experience, that god just doesn’t seem likely to me, and not to most Unitarian Universalists I know, either.

But that’s not the point I want to make today. For me, it all comes back to how we use religious language, and who gets to define that religious language. For too long, the word “god” in mainstream American culture has been monopolized by conservative extremists to mean one specific thing, even to those who do not hold that same belief.

The concept of god/creation/source/holy/eternal is bigger than our human language and our human understanding. Does the atheist reject that there is anything bigger than the individual experience, or does the atheist reject that there’s a supernatural being in the sky watching over us?

How many of you recoil at the word god? What about prayer? What about grace? Or salvation? Or holy?

Since when do we surrender these powerful words to those who would use them to put themselves above others, to judge people based on who they love or what they choose to do in the privacy of their own bedrooms, among other things?

Why aren’t we fighting like hell to reclaim these powerful words, to use them in positive, powerful ways, to spread our good news that religion and morality don’t have to be defined by fear mongering?

Why are we letting others define god for us? Unitarian Universalism teaches that we all can have individual contact with the divine, that we need no intermediaries between us and the holy. That we can speak for ourselves.

So why aren’t we shouting?