You've Got To Believe It To See It
	Rev. Edmund Robinson
	UU Church of Wakefield
	October 19, 2003

	When I was talking about emergence a few weeks ago, I likened it to a TV or computer screen. If you get up close, all you see are dots, but when you step back, the dots arrange themselves into something your mind recognizes as a picture.  The cartoon which gives this morning’s title1 applies, it seems to me, in the situations where the picture is not instantly so clear.  Sometimes the arrangement of dots is ambiguous, and it is in those situations that how we connect the dots becomes a matter of what we believe we are going to find there. My basic thesis is that those situations are usually the most important ones in life, concerning matters such as God, our basic selves, where we’re going, what we really need to be afraid of and what to do about it.
	But I can’t say that I’ve got it all worked out in a coherent whole, so to illustrate my point I’ve formed this sermon into a series of dots which I will visit one by one in a kind of oratorical pointillism, and leave it to you to connect them according to you own beliefs, in true UU fashion.
	The first dot is why this cartoon speaks to me.  In my own life, as illuminated by dreams, conversations, therapy, meditation and yoga, I am constantly coming across illusion, denial and delusion. I will find myself acting some way and realize the assumptions behind the action are false. Maybe this happens to you.  I find it useful to distinguish those three level of red herrings: illusion is something which occurs between the outside world and my perception of it, like the shimmer on the road which looks like a pool of water.  It turns out to be only an optical property of the heat and the pavement.  Denial is my refusal to accept evidence which does not conform to my beliefs about myself or the way the world works.  And delusion, is an illusion that I have taken in and owned, a fairy tale, if you will, which I tell myself.
	The second dot is a story told by Michael Hennessy, who taught me several courses on Buddhism in Divinity School. In Sri Lanka, a country which is majority Buddhist, this story appeared in the local newspaper.    It seemed that a child of about four years of age had simply walked out of his house and was missing for some period of time.  When his worried parents finally found him, they discovered that he had walked to a village several miles away.  In this village, he entered the house of a widow whose husband had died five years before.  Without saying anything to anybody, this child had entered the room of the deceased husband, and had picked up several objects associated with him such as his watch and his comb and his pipe.  He had even retrieved the key to the gun cabinet from where it was hidden.
	This was taken as proof of the doctrine of rebirth, which is a belief held by most of Sri Lanka’s Buddhists.  Prof. Hennessy said that stories like this appear in the Sri Lankan newspapers very regularly.  Yet none of them make the news here in the U.S.  The reason: people in the U.S. don’t believe in rebirth, and thus wouldn’t be interested in reading about stories suggesting rebirth.  You have to believe it to see it.  If you don’t believe it, you won’t pay attention to it, and the editors won’t print it, because they are in the business of getting and keeping your attention.
	The third dot is skepticism.  The phrase, “you’ve got to believe it to see it,” catches our attention because it is an inversion of the usual cliche, “I won’t believe it until I see it.”  This cliche expresses the attitude of the skeptic. You have to show me.  I won’t take it on faith, or on your authority.
	Now I am by nature and training a skeptic.  It is necessary as a trial lawyer to be a skeptic; you must never fully believe the other side’s case or, more importantly, your own.   My clients are sometimes surprised by this, but I tell them that as soon as I start giving my complete credence to either side, I lose sight of the other, and I become a less effective advocate. The discipline of the trial lawyer is to be able to see both sides throughout the case.
	So in certain situations, skepticism is a useful attitude to have.  Philosophically, skepticism is allied with empiricism, the movement proceeding from David Hume in the Eighteenth Century, which holds that all we can know is what we take in with our five senses.  As I noted in my talks on Emerson, Transcendentalism was partly a reaction against this kind of empiricism;  Emerson forcefully asserted that there was a sixth sense, called intuition, by which we could know some things directly.
	The fourth dot is epistemology.  The inversion of the skeptic’s phrase, you have to believe it to see it, points up a deeper problem with skepticism: not how the information comes in, but what is there in the box to begin with.  The conventional phase, I’ve got to see it to believe it, assumes that our minds are tabula rasa, empty slates, and that nothing gets written on them unless it comes in through the senses and passes rigorous tests of logic, untainted by emotion. It’s kind of a computer model. Our minds are like a new laptop straight from the factory before any programs or data are loaded in.
	But the neuroscientists tell us that the brain doesn’t work like a computer.  The brain has its own distinctive hard-wiring, which has been given us by millions of years of evolutionary history.  On top of that, we have the soft-wiring of our own life experiences, which form conceptual worlds inside our minds.  Those conceptual worlds dictate what we choose to look at and what we can see of the stuff that is there.  In the normal situation, if we don’t believe it, we are not likely to see it.
	The fifth dot is the frog’s eye.  As an example of the hard-wiring, years ago, I forget where, I read an article about the eye of a frog.  Scientists were able to hook electrodes up to the layer of optic nerve cells just behind the retina of the frog.  The retina is where the light falls; it’s the actual sensory surface.  What they discovered is that the first layer of nerve cells just behind this sensory screen showed a spike, an excited reaction, when an object of a very particular size and very particular speed and at a very particular distance crossed the field of vision of the frog’s eye.  That size, speed and distance corresponded to lunch – a flying insect within zapping distance of the frog’s tongue.  In other words, the frog’s optic nerves, long before they enter the brain, have evolved to recognize –  lunch.  This facility, of course, helps the frog react quickly, and assures that some of the time he will actually get lunch.
	Life in the animal kingdom has been described as having two basic aspects: getting lunch, and avoiding being lunch.  Those twin aspects of our welfare have shaped the minds of all sentient creatures, including humans.  Humans, when viewed within the world of all animals, can be described as a bipedal, omnivorous and homicidal species.  We walk on two legs, we eat almost anything, and we kill our own kind.  This has certain implications for our bodies and our brains.
	The sixth dot is face recognition.  One of the most striking faculties our minds have is face recognition.  This is so instinctive with us that most of us don’t think it’s any big deal.  You can recognize someone you know and pick that person out of crowd of dozens of others, even if you see them from a weird angle, in clothing, lighting or a context you’ve never seen them in before.  Many excellent computer scientists have spent years trying to teach computers what humans do effortlessly.
	And the reason we have developed the ability to recognize faces is not hard to find from an evolutionary point of view.  In the world in which our brains evolved, it was vitally necessary to be able to distinguish family from foe; it made the difference between getting fed and getting killed.
	The seventh dot is eyewitness identification.  Evolution, in short, has given us templates in our mind.  These templates direct what we see, and we get beliefs about our facilities which direct also what we see.  For example, the ability to recognize faces diminishes when the face is that of a stranger, and the ability to recognize faces of strangers varies widely in the population.  But most of us believe that the human ability to recognize a stranger’s face is not much less than the ability to recognize a friend, and so when we sit on a jury, we are likely to give a great deal of weight to an eyewitness identification: “that’s the man right there.”    Studies show that eyewitness identification is actually about the most unreliable form of evidence, while the general population thinks it is the most reliable.  I will be interested to se how Governor Romney’s panel of scientific experts deal with this issue, which study after study says creates more wrongful convictions than any other facet of the criminal justice system.
	What are we seeing in the dots so far?  Maybe these suggest that, whether we put seeing first or believing first, neither seeing nor believing is as simple an act as it might seem at fist blush.  What we believe affects what we look at and what we see, and what we see can have an effect on what we believe.  This is endemic in the human condition. 
	Now so far I have used the language of psychology, and I have talked about belief.  The eighth dot is faith.  What about faith?  I have usually tried to avoid saying faith equals belief.  For me, faith is more about trust than it is about belief.  Yet as each of us lives by belief, each of us also lives by faith.  Every one of us has faith in something unseen, whether it is God, or Nirvana, or goodness, or the curse of the Bambino, or the forces of the market, or the virtues of the free-enterprise system.  We have faith that we live by, and this determines what we will see.  As our ancestors focused on getting lunch and avoiding being lunch, we will focus our senses on the things that are most important to our own welfare.  
	The ninth dot is Christian faith.  One Christian perspective on faith is presented in the readings I did today2.   In the first, Peter sees Jesus walking across the water of the Sea of Galilee, and thinks to himself, that’s pretty neat, think I’ll try it.  He is able to sustain himself a few steps until he loses his nerve, and starts sinking, only to be rescued by Jesus.  Jesus berates him for having little faith.  Faith, then, is what allows you to walk on water.  In another spot in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, if you had faith the size of a mustard-seed (which is tiny indeed), you would say to this mountain, move from here to there and it would move.
	Now the Gospel of Matthew was written at time when the early church was trying to win converts among the Jews after the whole Jewish world had been thrown into disarray by the disastrous rout of the uprising and the destruction of the temple.  One of the ways the gospel writer sought to make these converts was to make Christianity a matter of faith, and to emphasize that faith can give you supernatural power.  
	Many scholars think that the Gospel of Thomas represents an earlier source of Jesus’ sayings, perhaps before the destruction of the temple. In Thomas’s version of the move a mountain saying, it is not faith, but peace in the household that can move a mountain.  This suggests to me that the emphasis on faith as leading to supernatural powers might have been a later addition by the early church, not part of Jesus’ original teachings.  I’ll get back to this in a moment.
	The tenth dot is the Bush administration.   In the months before the invasion of Iraq, many spokes people for the administration talked about connecting the dots. They cited little points of data which might suggest a program of weapons of mass destruction.  In retrospect, it is clear that they connected the dots wrong.  They believed Saddam had a program of weapons, so they looked at the data which seemed to confirm this and ignored the data which disproved this.  Worse yet, as we now know, the pro-war elements in the administration set up their own intelligence operation to feed them highly politicized information, bypassing the normal intelligence agencies.  They believed it and therefore they saw it.
	But from what we know now, and from what many of us were saying at the time, they were probably wrong.  Saddam in fact had no weapons of mass destruction. 
	The eleventh dot is spiritualism, another example of connecting the dots wrong: in the Nineteenth Century, many Universalist ministers became devotees of spiritualism, which was an attempt to communicate with the souls of the departed. In a typical seance, the departed souls communicated through a mysterious series of knocks.  As my colleague Richard Trudeau has pointed out, Universalist ministers liked the idea of talking to dead people, because none of the spirits reported from hell, so it seemed to confirm the Universalist belief that there was no such state.  However, the whole spiritualism movement suffered a fatal blow when it was revealed that the Fox sisters of Rochester NY, who had started the whole thing, actually were making those knocks with their peculiarly double-jointed toes.  	Again, what picture is emerging here?  These wrong connections of dots raise the question about belief which runs through all matters religious, political and personal: if we have to believe it to see it, how are we going to know whether “it” is true or a figment or our wishful thinking?  How do we distinguish between faith and delusion?   In Biblical terms, how are we to tell the false prophets from the true?
	If it were literally true that we never saw anything except what we were already programmed to see, what we already believed in, there would be no hope for us.  We would be at the whim of whatever crazy idea had taken hold initially.   
	The orthodox Christian answer is that faith is justified by the authoritative witness of the scriptures, sealed through the sacrifice of Christ for our sins, and that it is an all-or-nothing proposition.  You either walk on water, or you sink like a stone.  I find this peculiarly unsatisfactory.  If there is one thing that unites religious liberals, it is that “the Bible tells me so” is not a reason to believe anything.  I hasten to point out, however, that the Bible is not irrelevant, and invite those of you who want to learn more about it to com to the two classes I’ve scheduled in early November. 
	The twelfth dot is the path of the Buddha.  It seems to me that in all areas of human understanding, the relation between vision and belief is a dialectical one.  The Buddha recognized this.  The Buddha does not say that you can start meditating and suddenly you will see everything in perfect clarity as it is.  He really does not ask us to take anything on faith.  Rather, he teaches that the person embarking on the path to enlightenment will find the veils of illusion stripped away gradually, one at a time.  As your understanding of the world changes, what you can see changes, and what you see feeds back into a new understanding.
	I said before that each of us lives by faith, whether we acknowledge that or not.  What saves us from being captive to our delusions is that we can examine our faith and ask if it makes sense against the backdrop of what else we know.
	Let us come back to our first dot, our ideas about ourselves.  If I think that I am a perpetual failure, unable to accomplish anything of lasting worth, I may see only the things I’ve done which haven’t been so successful.  My evidence feeds my belief and my belief shapes my evidence and it is a downward spiral.  We’ve all been caught in these whirlpools.  The only way to get out is a paradigm shift: suppose I think of myself as a modest success, and start to look at the instances in which I did do something right.  If there are enough of these, I may be able to convince myself that the picture of success is the true one.
	Let us visit another dot, Adin Ballou.  You sang his hymn last week.  James Luther Adams proclaimed that our movement was the prophethood of all believers.  In other words, don’t listen to the false prophets, be your own prophet.  One person in our history who was his own prophet was Adin Ballou.  Two week ago, I toured Hopedale, the utopian community that Adin Ballou established and ran on Christian Socialist principles here in Massachusetts for 15 years.  He had a faith and that faith enabled him to build a community which embodied it.  That community is gone but its existence is a beacon to all of us through the ages.  Indirectly, Ballou’s nonviolence influenced Gandhi and helped birth India as an independent nation.  The point is that if Ballou had not first believed it, none of us would have been able to see it.
	Which brings us to our last dot, our church.  In this church, our creative and energetic president has launched the Board of Management on a visioning process  which will soon be expanded to the whole congregation.  We have put out some things we’d like to see happen around here in the coming years.   As we think about the future of the church, what we see happen, what we make come into being, is a product of our faith.  How we connect the dots for ourselves, for the church, for the community, nation and world is a function of how big our faith is and what we have faith in.  If you had suggested to anyone around here a year ago that we could have a fundraising event and raise more than $2,000 in one evening, they would have said you’re crazy.  But we just did it.  Let us pray to be led to see things as they are without delusion and to have a faith big enough that we become all we can be.
Amen.