For anyone that doesn’t know, Unitarian Universalism is considered a “liberal religion” - it is non-sectarian and pluri-religious, up to and including what they consider “secular humanists”, or atheists and agnostics. They seemingly take or at least allow for inspiration from a plethora of different religious and spiritual ideas, including atheistic ones, and consider themselves a politically progressive organization.

There’s a church near me. I don’t know. I am and will likely forever remain an atheist unless something unfathomably drastic happens. I remember looking into this “church” when I was younger and searching for a place of belonging, but I’m not sure it’s the correct path to work on my own ‘spiritual’ growth. I feel as though Marxism-Leninism, and its many brilliant examples of theory and practice, have solidly aided what I’d consider my intellectual growth. It is taking a different kind of effort to discern what ‘spiritual growth’ even means to me, let alone to work on it.

I think - the way I’d describe it from my own experience,- I’d reference when I first read through Rogue State and Killing Hope by William Blum. It was a transformative experience for me, the final realization I needed to have that it wasn’t only domestic capitalism that needed to be utterly destroyed, nor just the state, but empire in its totality. It awakened me to international perspectives I had not been introduced to before. I am so much better informed about the world, it’s likely if I asked someone to name a country I could probably rather confidently inform them (if they do not know) of how our state and our corporations have or are currently fucking over those peoples by orchestrating coups and colour revolutions and extracting those nations’ wealth, or trying to.

But it also utterly fucked me up. ‘My spirit’ felt broken. I could/can barely keep myself afloat. Now the mental burden of knowing that I am constantly standing atop a ground laden with the skulls of people my ancestors likely murdered and that those skulls have gold and lithium inlays woven with the blood of starving, overworked, underpaid, enslaved and tortured human beings almost everywhere in the world by people who have the fucking hubris to call those places “underdeveloped” while counting their blood money. How the fuck do you cope with that?

I stopped eating, sleeping. Doing nothing but listening to extremely overwhelming political podcasts about the worst shit imaginable and robotically playing video games to convince myself I was doing something. Just sent me spiraling further. My ‘spirit’ is not strong, and I think I may want help. What I guess I consider ‘spiritual growth’ to mean, for me, is something like learning the ability to reconcile the mental with the physical and put ideas to work, and to resolve the lingering, insidious defeatism within me that prevents me from wanting to even try. To assess the horrific situations we find ourselves in, say “this has to be addressed”, and begin addressing it, or at least trying to.

In other words, I am in exactly the kind of situation I know cults love. Vulnerable and mentally malleable, confused but open-minded. Makes me wary, but I haven’t heard much negative about the UUs and every one I’ve met has been friendly. I know they show out to Pride events in support, support BLM etc. The “liberal” in “liberal religion” is surely there for a reason (where’s the materialist church tho), but I’m mostly just curious if any of you think it’d be worthwhile, even just as an attempt to meet local progressive-minded folk. Have you met any members or dealt with the church before? How do you think they’d react if I told them I was a communist? How long do you think it’d take for me to attempt to give a sermon on “The Essential Works of Kim Il-Sung”, and how long would it take for them to throw me out?

Thanks for reading 📚 🤓 (nerd)