"Those who belong to the orthodox faiths claim that the authority of their faith rests on revelation, and that revelation is given in the pages of books and accounts of miracles and wonders whose nature is supernatural. But those of us who have long discarded the belief in the supernatural still are in the presence of revelations which are the foundation of faith. We too have our revealed religion. We have looked upon the face of men and women that can be to us the symbols of that which is holy. We have heard words of sacred wisdom and truth spoken in the human voice. Out of the universe there have come to us these experience which, when accepted, give to us revelations, not of supernatural religion, but of a natural and inevitable faith in the spiritual powers that animate and dwell in the center of [a person's] being."
-John Lovejoy Elliott, "Spiritual
Discoveries,"
in The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Ethical Movement,1876-1926
Singing proves there is intelligent life on Earth!
Ethical Culture Roots: Perspectives from the history of Ethical Culture
Festival
of the Winter Solstice
Felix Adler - 1884
The festival of the Winter Solstice was originally designed to celebrate the indestructible life in nature. The higher thought today is that the moral life of the world which appears so far as we know, in human beings only, is also indestructible - that after every defeat it rises to new victory - that after every obscuration it shines forth with new brightness.
What is the symbol to which all shall express the thoughts that we in Ethical Culture would connect with the festival of the Winter Solstice? Is it the Christmas tree. or the old Yule tree which prior to the Christmas tree, symbolized the rekindling of the darkened light of the sun? But it expresses only the physical side of the festival, the fact of the evergreen life of external nature. For the higher, the spiritual nature, it does not stand.
The only symbol that can be adequate for us is the child - the child not merely as it plays around the tree, not as it enjoys its gifts, not in relation to its parents who take great pleasure in its happiness, but the child apart from all these connections, the child as the vehicle of a new moral life, and therefore the type of the ever-recurring renewal of the moral life, the child as the promise and the pledge of the whole unspeakable future.
(contributed by Dick Reichart, from a
posting by Jean Kotkin, December, 2002 and Jone Johnson Lewis,