Unitarian-Universalist Testimonial
Unitarian-Universalist Testimonial
Harris B. McKee
March 6, 2011
My name is Harris McKee. I am a U-U and I’m here to speak to you about my faith in Little Green Men. I’ll come back to that. I need to share with you some personal history.
I grew up in a family of Scottish ancestry. We belonged to the United Presbyterian Church of North America, a fairly strict group. When I was young, we didn’t subscribe to a Sunday Paper or play cards on Sunday. My parents thought that learning to speak was desirable so I participated in Bible reading contests and W.C.T.U. (Women’s Christian Temperance Union) Speech Contests.
In high school, I attended two youth groups, our own United Presbyterian group in the country church a mile from home and the Presbyterian group in town. The group in town was larger and it gave me a chance to see Mary. As I learned about Calvin’s idea of Predestination, I began to have questions about the beliefs that I was expected to hold.
I wasn’t really “born again” until I learned about Little Green Men. You may not have been aware that every physical sensation is caused by Little Green Men. Actually, Invisible Little Green Men. When you feel the breeze on your face, it is really caused by Invisible Little Green Men who are caressing your cheek; when you hear sound, there are Invisible Little Green Men, beating on your ear drum. You ask me, “Can you prove it?” I don’t have to prove it. My faith tells me it is true. I learned about this phenomenon in my College Introduction to Philosophy course. But I left out the most important part of the lesson. Any philosophy or religion like this should enhance your ability to predict events. If it doesn’t, discard the parts that don’t add meaning.
Wow! What power I had. There was a problem. Now I was going to hell because respectable people didn’t have such beliefs about religion.
When Mary and I went across the street to our first U-U gathering 45 years ago, a load was lifted. Here were people who had similar beliefs, respectable people who obviously didn’t think that they were headed down to Hell. And we’ve been U-Us ever since.
There have been some concepts that carried over from the old Presbyterian days that have to do with the relationships between minister and congregation. You don’t switch to the church across town because you don’t like the minister. Ministers aren’t perfect and they aren’t always like the minister you’ve idealized from an earlier pastorate. Perhaps the best sermons we ever heard were from a minister who was basically shy and uncomfortable one-on-one. So the congregation picked up on the pastoral duties. Another preached weak sermons but was wonderful in one-on-one sessions.
So I stick with Unitarian-Universalism because this is an institution where I am considered thoughtful for stripping away concepts that don’t add meaning, like Invisible Little Green Men.