Enlightenment: Whitewashing Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

This is going to be messy. I am livid with how the Enlightenment is being used to revise history as a worldview whose ideas come from the West. It is being imposed as the West's contribution to humanity's progress. I cringe at this fakery. It is a whitewashing of reason, humanism, science, and all other things we have developed in the East, that is Asia, Arab countries, Africa, etc. So I'm just cutting and pasting from things I've googled, mostly Wikipedia. Please validate these on your own, but the general thesis is that human advancement didn't begin with the Greeks and Romans.

REASON, the ability to discern through logic and observation, as early as 6th century BCE

SCIENCE, as methodical, started as early as 3500 BC



HUMANISM, the philosophy that human beings are the sum of all things.

In China, Yellow Emperor is regarded as the humanistic primogenitor. Sage kings such as Yao and Shun are humanistic figures as recorded. King Wu of Zhou has the famous saying: "Humanity is the Ling (efficacious essence) of the world (among all)."  1000 BC

EQUALITY OF THE SEXES

SECULARISM - a liberation from religious imposition

As early as 551 BC, here's a good read: "Confucius: The Secular as Sacred".

In Solidarity With Christina Rivera

I have been thinking intermittently since 2014, since I came up-close to the UUA culture, that perhaps this isn't my faith calling. It was only 1 year after my ordination, after 7 years of serving the UU Church of the Philippines mostly on zeal. And tonight, I cry soulful tears for these truths shared by Christina Rivera. And for the first time, I daydreamed in my ride home of how a world would be if I wasn't Unitarian, as it was before. 

Because beyond these mostly posturings we call ritual, there is an emptiness. When watching Youtube, when eating with farmers, when getting lost on the German rail, when relying on the mercy of strangers in Nepal has brought me higher hopes in normalizing non-partisan, transcendent, and enlightened moments of human connections while getting more and more wounded in my encounters in the UUA, I flood myself with hurtful questions whose possible answers point to the fact that there is a culture of complicity, an affirmation of systems of oppression in all their intersectionalities, and a smokescreen of reducing the gargantuan white supremacy to black oppression. We cannot live one-issue lives, so let's get real here. This will be my last post about this religion. I offer my 30-day silence as protest while I dedicate those days to powerful prayer, fasting, healing and discernment.

Her blog is here:
https://uuchristinarivera.wordpress.com/2018/03/04/a-culture-of-complicity/

I have started a 30-day blog of reflections of how I had contributed to this culture of complicity.