Our separate fires kindle one flame.
Unitarian Universalist believes a great deal. Our beliefs are of a different order, but they are nonetheless real.
- We believe in humanity, that human beings are endowed with the power to move toward truth.
- We believe that human beings are endowed with the discrimination by which to tell the difference between truth and falsehood and error. Yet we know human beings are fallible. We know that individuals make mistakes.
- We believe humanity is to be trusted — not each human being, but humankind taken together, with the testimony of each checked against each.
- We believe that humankind can find truth, know the right, and do good — again, not each individual, but taken together, with each checked against all the rest.
- We believe human life has meaning, that the high purposes of humanity may be achieved and the spiritual nature of humanity indicates something about humankind and the cosmos as well.
- We believe in the freedom we need if we are to find a sense of selfhood and if we are to find what is the truth for us. We believe in the faculties we possess and in those possessed by others also, for we must believe in our own fallibility, too.
- We believe in the power of love to conquer hate and strife and in its power to suffuse our lives with the glory and the sense of reality that love alone can give.
In this faith we live, by it we labor, and through it we find the courage to carry on amidst all the tragedy, misery, and stupidity of life.
– adapted from the pamphlet “What Do YOU Believe?” by Duncan Howlett (1967). Howlett was minister of First Unitarian in New Bedford in the 1930′s. I prefer this statement of “belief” to the more commonly cited “seven principles.”