Coffee & Wisdom

David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a humanist congregation historically. And so we talk about topics from a secular viewpoint, philosophical viewpoint, and we look at religious and theological trends in the United States. This week we’ve been looking at what I’m calling the Holes in liberalism. And I had added an essay because that’s one of the holes, as we have so many different definitions of what liberalism is. It’s not just the contemporary social liberalism that we tend to think of here in the United States and in European terms. It is very much a different kind of thing to be looking at today. I wanted to think a little bit about the way our political system works with religion a little bit here. The idea here is what percent of each political party is Christian, etc. and this is a Pew Research term and it says that among conservatives, e ighty five percent of conservatives in the U.S. consider themselves Christian. Of that, 38 percent are evangelical Protestant. That would be 38 percent of all conservatives do notice that we have then mainline Protestants at about 15 percent of conservatives, historically black Protestants, about six percent and Catholics at twenty one percent. And that is going down as time goes on, as the Catholic Roman Catholic Church itself bifurcates into two very different political stances.

This comes from religion dispatches. I’ve mentioned this before. It is a daily email that looks at religion in the United States. This particular article from Monday says, I have. “Why do evangelicals finally lost control of the narrative?” This is by one of the writers for religion dispatches, Chrissy Stroope. And she talks, for example, about a whole host of hashtags that are going on in social media now, people who are leaving evangelicalism. So X-band Jellico empty the pews, a church to to to write deconstruction decolonized. Yeah, I leave loud. Don’t just don’t just leave leave loud and say why you’re leaving white evangelicalism behind. She has this to say in that particular article that I think is interesting. Evangelicals understand the power of narrative, which is why they’re so concerned with controlling the stories the public hears not only about themselves, but also about those of us who leave evangelicalism and tell the truth about how it has harmed us. Criticizing evangelical theology as well as the racism, misogyny, anti LGBTQ animus and culture whoring politics that theology bolsters as evangelicals’ own story of engaging politically out of serious concerns about morality and sincerely held religious beliefs, has lost influence with the public because of the transparent hypocrisy they displayed to the trumpeter’s. Space has opened up for a shift in the national discussion that includes a sympathetic hearing for ex evangelicals.

Stories and perspectives, shifting the national conversation as elite evangelicals and right wing political strategies are well aware, lays the groundwork for shifts in politics and policy. Yes, what we’re talking about is that thirty eight percent of the conservative base that it calls itself evangelical Christian and that does appear to be eroding at the present time. Again, over the questions of what was the support of Trump all about. We’ve discussed that on “Coffee and Wisdom”. It is a little bit complicated because different theology within fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity see this in very different ways. But as I have mentioned the last couple of days, studies have found that religious individuals an...

David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the senior minister of First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at “liberalisms” and I’m calling it “The Holes in Liberalism”. And then I added an “s” because we’ve been discovering that there are lots and lots of different kinds of liberalisms that goes all the way from an ultra-rightism to an ultra-leftism and all points in between. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out that there is no one form of liberalism and the fractures, the different kinds of liberalism occur, well, when we think about what it means to have liberty, which is what liberalism is all about, and at least in its classic form. Classic liberalism is freedom “from”, we discussed this is Isaiah Berlin, a famous 20th century philosopher who said the basic liberalism is about freedom from regulation, government interference, etc. Contemporary liberalism tends to be a freedom “to”. This is not entirely a U.S. invention, but it tends to be more so here in the United States. So if you begin to look at other definitions of liberalism from Europe and around the world, you’re going to see very different takes on this. And then I mentioned that there is a theological liberalism that can be a little bit confusing because it is based in classic liberalism all the way back to the Enlightenment Era of the 16- and 1700s. But it’s now moving toward a contemporary liberalism as time passes. Well, one of the ideas here and one of the difficulties is sussing out exactly what liberal means and where it fits on a larger chart of different political and social systems, because we are talking about both political and social, and then we’re adding back in the religious or theological.

One way of doing this is putting authoritarianism at the top, libertarianism at the bottom, and saying that we’re going to go from the most despotic and controlling down to complete anarchism and all points in between. When we do this, what you’re going to notice is that, yes, we have Social Democratic Authoritarianism, Marxism, Leninism, Fascism. Over here, Social Democracy, which is much this is a much more at a European type of type of politics. Liberalism, then, falls somewhere half in half and then we have conservatism. So where does the U.S. fall into this? Because then you see, this is above the line is the democratic, both left and right, and then socialism, and as this diagram calls it, the vast sea of libertarianism. So where does your particular political views fall on this continuum? And where is the U.S. electorate in this in this kind of diagram? It’s a very good question. As I discussed yesterday, one of the confounding factors of all this is, again, liberal theology. Where is that going? And recently, a couple of weeks ago, I was talking about the the idea that New Age shamanism has now become a right wing QAnon idea. So how has New Age, especially ideas, permeated American culture? We used to think of that as a kind of a very educated, well-off person who was able to make some distinctions due to education and money and just the ease of their privileged lives.

But nowadays, that’s not exactly what’s going on with New Age belief systems, and they are spreading into a wider culture. So where are the political factions in the United States? What is liberal about liberalism? And one of the things we have to look at is consequentialism and deontology. These are ethical, moral systems. And I note here that nothing is personal.

David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is coffee and Wisdom. This week we’re looking at the holes in liberalism. And, yeah, I’m going to add an “s” on that, because one of the confusing things about liberalism is there are a bunch of them. So there is a plural of that kind. I have a little circle here that says the leftism, rightism, and centrism and then ultra-rightism and ultra-leftism in which it says whoever doesn’t think like me must die. Those are the wingnuts on both sides. Actually, not quite like that probably, but we do in psychological terms, call the extreme left and extreme right “moral panic”; what the folks tend to experience on the extremes of left and right. So as we look at this centrism being the vast middle about, you know, both of you extremists are wrong here. Let’s talk about that, how we can walk down this more accepting path. And that really is what we’re calling classic liberalism, a much older form than we are experiencing as contemporary liberalism in the United States today. So the political spectrum, this is actually a British diagram. So it’s a little different from American social socialism and capitalism and what they mean by nationalism and classical liberalism, etc. But we want to look at how these different ideas of liberalism cross over because classical liberalism and contemporary liberalism are not the same thing.

So as I discussed yesterday, quickly look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. There is no one form of liberalism. That’s one of the problems. And the fractures in liberalism tend to occur over the definition of the word itself. What is liberty? I mentioned yesterday that classic liberalism is “freedom from” that is freedom from control by government. Contemporary liberalism, on the other hand, is tends to be “freedom to” people having access to various kinds of social help, assistance, etc. in order to be free. And then there’s a third form that we do need to keep in mind, which is theological liberalism, which is based in classic liberalism, because both of them are the same age going back into the Enlightenment period of the 16 and 1700s, but also then the switch from that kind of theological liberalism to a liberalism of the more contemporary sort. We’ve discussed this in Coffee and Wisdom. Part of that has to do with the social gospel movement of the 19th and 20th centuries. But we’ll get back to that. For example, this is a study from Pew from 2017 that says six in 10 Christians and “nones” hold at least one New Age beliefs. So Christians and “nones”, six in 10, over half have at least one New Age belief. Now, of course, how are they defining New Age belief? And with that, we’re going to they believe in some kind of spiritual energy that can be located in physical things.

They believe in psychics, they believe in reincarnation, or they believe in astrology. All right. So 42% of us, adults of all kinds, believe that there is some kind of spiritual energy located in physical things. Forty one percent believe in psychics. Thirty three percent believe in reincarnation. And twenty nine percent believe that astrology does indeed predict some something of value. All right. Now, we should look down here at this and see that Christians, for example, drop a little bit below the norm in terms of this spiritual energy being in some kind of thing, and then Pew breaks it down further. But many believe in psychics – about the norm ...

David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is coffee and wisdom. Each week we take up a topic and think it through a little bit things that have to do with American culture, from religion, politics, theology, philosophy. This week we want to look at the idea of liberalism, and I’m calling it “The Holes in Liberalism”, as I want to look at some of the contradictions and challenges that the idea of liberalism might have for us. I should start with a definition, I suppose, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; I mention this source quite often. It is online, but it is a juried magazine that takes up these issues with professional philosophers, and so usually the definitions are pretty darn good. We should know that there is no one form of liberalism and that would be one of the problems is how do we define it? The fractures in these definitions occur over the term of, well, guess what, liberty, because that’s what liberalism is all about. So from the very get go with the definition, we already have some confusions going on. So let’s look at the types of liberty. Well, number one is political and legal. That’s what we probably think of, first off is the political idea of liberty in terms of liberal governments. But there are also ideas of liberality around economic freedoms and social freedoms. As you see, those, of course, mesh into not only international relations, but then into governments in various nations themselves.So what are the grounds of liberty, if famously – and we talked about this a couple of weeks ago when we were looking at the idea of being endowed by the creator with these inalienable rights with deism – that natural law, the idea of some kind of providence or creator was in the 18th and 19th centuries, the idea behind who was guaranteeing liberty. First off, the natural law, but also the natural or the self-evident, as they’re called in US history, rights based in the human amoral imagination. Because the idea says, you remember, if you’ve been watching, had the idea that the creator created us as rational beings and moral beings with the moral imagination and then simply stepped away. So now we are on our own to figure it out. So the moral imagination then of the human is the arbiter of what these rights of liberties should be. One other one is utility, and we will be coming back to that one in a bit. So there are classic liberalisms with their basic principles, which is life, liberty, and property, things that a government ought to, as endowed by their creator, to guarantee the citizens. So, wait a minute. In the US, in our Declaration of Independence, it’s a life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. How come that is what it says in US political history when life, liberty, and property was very clearly the idea from British common law? Well, the British historian Peter Garnsey in his book Thinking About Property, has this to say about that:“This was an important and awkward issue because nobody claimed that the American Indians, though primitive, had no natural rights. The admission of a natural right to property would have put under suspicion virtually all land held by descendants of European settlers in America. Also contentious was the matter of a natural right to property in relation to the legitimacy of slavery.” So, Thomas Jefferson, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And as I mentioned last week, happiness is really a very old mistranslation of the idea of eudaimonia, how to live well. And by golly,

David Breeden is speaking all week about Eupraxsophy.

Transcription:

David Breeden is speaking all week about Eupraxsophy.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a Humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at eupraxsophy. What the heck is that? Well, it’s a shot at a secular way of living, of living a life. And what would that mean? The term was coined by Paul Kurtz and it means good practical wisdom. But he is going back into ancient Greek and Roman philosophies and using the language of Greek philosophy to try to talk about how do we live a non-religious life, a secular life, and live that fully and ethically and exuberantly, as Paul Kurtz put it. Because where he’s really getting this idea is the concept of eudaimonia, which was the goal of ancient Greek and Roman philosophies. It’s usually translated as happiness. That is a mistranslation, really. It means human flourishing, how to live that good life of meaning and purpose. There were what were known as you Eudaimonic Schools in ancient Greece and Rome. There are four main ones: Cynics, Epicureans, Stoics and Skeptics. As I pointed out yesterday, these words still exist in the English language today, so they were very important as concepts. The Epicureans and the Stoics are the main ones who have a program developed around living that flourishing life. The cardinal virtues of both Epicureanism and Stoicism go like this: Wisdom, Temperance, Justice and Courage. Those are the the attributes of a person who will be having this meaning-filled, purposeful life, according to these ancient philosophies. or example, Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, said, “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from bad. But I have seen the beauty of the good and the ugliness of the bad. And I have realized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own…not the same family and class, but the same mind…and possessing a share of all that is sacred.” (That’s a) very stoic way of looking at it. Yeah, I know what’s going to happen today. I’m going to meet all kinds of problems and people, but I will not contribute to the ugliness of the world. I choose not to do that. So, spiritual exercises to lead to that kind of purpose-filled, calm and tranquil life. As I mentioned yesterday, Pierre Hadot, who was a classical philosopher and historian in France, 1922-2010, became a Roman Catholic priest, but quit in disillusionment. And he began to think about how we can construct a spiritual practice around ancient philosophy (rather than that which is in the Roman Catholic tradition) which is much more available or was at that time. His central thesis is that ancient philosophy was a bios (where we get the term biography), a bios or a way of life, a way of living a good life. He got this idea because the most famous spiritual exercises in the Western world is The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Every Catholic priest will have studied that. They are spiritual practices that are memorized according to the fingers on the hand, and they break down into four parts that are usually seen as a retreat, a month long retreat. But they also can be four parts of a day or the exercises that you go through. If you’re interested in this, IgnatianSpirituality.com is right there from Loyola Press. I won’t go through them too much. But what Hadot realized is that these practices, which are very taken very seriously by the Roman Catholic tradition and in Christianity itself, actually are, if you take the content out,

David Breeden is speaking all week about Eupraxsophy.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we have been looking at eupraxsophy, which I cannot say three times fast, but ideas about how to live a secular or non-religious life, religiously, if you will. One of those ideas does come from a man by the name of Paul Kurtz. He is the one who took the idea called Secular Humanism and ran with it, writing such books as The Fullness of Life, that I have over here. Also, it mentions that he is the author of The Humanist Manifesto. Not entirely true there, but that’s the way book covers work. But he did indeed figure strongly in two of the humanist manifestos. Eupraxsophy means good practical wisdom. What he was shooting at here is, how do we live a secular life that is mindful and has an ethical and moral core to it that is statable: “A eupraxsophy is a non-religious life…” says Paul Kurtz, “…life stance or worldview emphasizing the importance of living an ethical and exuberant life, and relying on rational methods such as logic, observation and science (rather than faith, mysticism or revelation) toward that end.” So there you see the project that he is going after. What this is really referring back to is what are known as “The “Eudaimonic Schools” of the ancient Greeks and Romans.” That is, those philosophical schools that existed previous to being shut down by the Christians during the Roman Empire period when Christianity was taking over the empire. Epictetus, one of the stoic philosophers, has this to say: “We must not believe the many who say that only free people ought to be educated. But we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.” Epictetus there, one of the stoic philosophers from the first century of the Common Era. You see where they are going with this: Knowledge is Power, if you will, and to be eudaimonic in life, we need to educate ourselves in such a way that we can understand the questions of morality. One of the people who took this idea and ran with it, it was Pierre Hadot, (who) lived from 1922-2010. He was a classical philosopher and an historian in Paris at the College de France. He first became a Roman Catholic priest as a young man, but he quit that in disillusionment. He did not see the Roman Catholic Church being what it said it was. He began looking for truth in pre-Christian philosophy. We know historically that Christianity, one of the sayings goes, is what you get when you put Judaism together with Greek philosophy. That’s a little bit broad, but it does have a lot of validity to it. So what do we do if we look at what the Greek philosophers then going into the Roman Empire period, what were they talking about? What were they doing? Hadot’s Central Thesis is that “ancient philosophy was a bios or a way of life,(maniere de vivre), “…a way of living.” It wasn’t about the abstruse how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It was about how do we live a decent life on this planet, given the reality. One of his major books on this is called What Is Ancient Philosophy. He wrote several. There are two Hadots out there, the very scholarly one who is reading the classical texts for very specific reasons. Then there are those texts that are talking about this idea of how Greek and Roman philosophy can teach us bios, how to live. What is Ancient Philosophy, I think, is probably the most accessible of the group. If you’re particularly interested in Marcus Aurelius, The Inner Citadel is the book for you.

David Breeden is speaking all week about Eupraxsophy.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society in Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we are looking at “eupraxophy,” which I cannot say three times fast because, you know, that’s a pretty hard word. But it …is a term coined by a Secular Humanist, Paul Kurtz. He later changed the spelling to add the S (eupraxsophy), so it looks more like phil-os-ophy, and that would be the correct spelling actually, if you’re using the Greek roots. What does it mean to be practicing that? eu is “good.” Then the next word probably is prax that becomes sort of English “praxis.” We do use the term even though it’s still in its Greek form, or it could be praktike, which becomes the English word “practical,” somehow about doing or embodying “sophy” (i.e.) “wisdom.” So it’s something about good doing wisdom or good practical wisdom is the idea. Paul Kurtz, 1925-2012. He was the author and editor of more than 50 books, a professor, well known worldwide. He was the founder and chair of the Institute of Science and Human Values, founder and chair of the Center for Inquiry. And you see him here featured on the front of the magazine Free Inquiry. Also, he founded the Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, which is one of those things we need to talk about some time as a group, looking at the supernatural and magical claims and debunking those to try figuring out how they’re done. “Eudaimonia” is the actual base of what Paul Kurtz was talking about. It is a Greek term and it does come directly out of Greek and then goes into Roman philosophy. Eudaimonia is often mistranslated as happiness. Actually, in the ancient world, people weren’t talking about what we would consider happiness, but rather they were talking about eu, “good,” and daimon, “a good spirit,” having a good spirit, being content with life. How do you become content in your life? was the basic question for all of the various Greek philosophical forms that then go into the Roman days and often on into Christianity, or they are blotted out at the time of Christianity, but continue somehow within Western literature and sometimes goes into Islamic thought. The “Eudaimonic Schools” of the Greeks and Romans is what I want to talk about today, the Eudaimonic Schools where those philosophies that said, how do we live a good life? How do we become flourishing, fulfilled, purpose-filled human beings? Most of the Greek philosophical schools were based in this idea. The up front for all of these schools is you have to decide on two things before you start as baseline. Number one, what is the nature of the universe or reality? and two, what is the human being capable of doing and knowing? Now, we have to look at this closely because…Oh, well, everybody knows that. Well, no, everybody doesn’t know that. This is exactly where people begin their disagreement about what reality is like. What is the nature of the universe? Well, God created it, God as a transcendent God outside and rules the universe just like a monarch. That’s one way of seeing the nature of the universe. Ah, the nature of the universe? It came from a “big bang” and is flying apart at an accelerating rate and will eventually stop and die and meet death. That’s another way of looking at reality, etc, etc, etc. There are many ways of doing that. That’s called an ontology, as we have discussed over time, the way that things are being. The second question is epistemology,

David Breeden is speaking all week about Eupraxsophy.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and we are a historically humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom. And each week we go into some subject to think about how these things impact American culture, popular culture, where religious and philosophical ideas come from, and where they may be heading in the future. This week, we want to look at ways of being non-theistically moral. And these ideas go way back in time. I’m going to call it something that I have a hard time saying, and that is: Eupraxophy, which I won’t say three times fast because I can’t. But we’ll figure out why I can’t exactly say that in just a few minutes.It is a term that was coined by a secular humanist, Paul Kurtz, who was the first person to take the term secular humanist and really embrace it as a term that could be used in a positive way. He was already a humanist, and when the term was used in a court case in the mid-1960s and then began to be used by right wing preachers, television evangelists attacking secular humanism, which wasn’t a thing. So Paul Kurtz took the term and said, well, guess what? I like it. We will look a little bit further into how he dealt with that, even issuing a secular humanist manifesto at one point. But he did come up with this idea that I want to trace a little bit and how he came there.He later changed the spelling, by the way, Eupraxsophy. I’ll show you how the etymology is going to be working in just a moment. But the adding of the “s.” Does that does make a difference? Kurtz had this to say: “I think we will have to coin a new term in order to distinguish non theistic beliefs and practices from other systems of beliefs and practices, a term that could be used in many languages. The best approach is to combine Greek roots, and I have come up with the term Eupraxsophy. EU being the term “good,” the prefix for “good” in Greek, then practice, praxis, we still use that term. It never really became English, praxix, which becomes the term “practice” in the English language, meaning “to do” or “to embody” and then “sophy,” as in “philosophy.” Philosophy is the love of wisdom. This is “good doing wisdom” or “good practical wisdom,” maybe a little bit more English there. But that’s the idea that Paul Kurtz was going after: how to express some kind of a secular way of being, an affirmative, positive way of life. Here’s another of his books, called Exuberance: an Affective Philosophy of Life. I’ll talk later in the week about the foundation that he set up and how to get hold of some of his books, which are still available.Kurtz had this to say: “Eupraxsophy is a non-religious life stance or worldview, emphasizing the importance of living an ethical and exuberant life and relying on rational methods such as logic, observation and science rather than faith, mysticism or revelation toward that end.” So you see exactly where Kurtz is going. We discussed the idea of Deism last week, and we saw that in the very early days, back in the 1600s, Deists were rejecters of the idea of revelation from some kind of God out there into the human mind. This is carrying on with this idea as Kurtz is having it.Now, I should mention, this just came out recently, that Gallup issued the following news release: “US church membership falls below majority for the first time.” Here on Coffee and Wisdom, we’ve talked a lot about this. There has been some speculation that maybe the whole covid pandemic would bring people in the...

David Breeden is speaking all week about Church/State Separation.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is coffee and Wisdom, where this week we’ve been looking at the separation of religion and state kind of worldwide, comparing some nations as a quick review, but then talking about here in the US and how secularism has shaken out over the years. It’s important in all of this, I think, to discuss what the founders were actually thinking, not what we wish they were thinking and what that many of them were thinking about anyway was something called Diesem. I want to look a little bit about that today to kind of trace the idea of Diesem what it actually was, not what it is now or perceived of is now. And look at how this informs the documents that we talk about. So, you know, this this is the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, the unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America, when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. So the first paragraph tells us exactly where the head of the people who are writing this is, and that is the laws of nature and of nature’s God.Now, what the heck are the laws of nature? And what’s this God of nature is what we mean by Deism remembering that the Declaration of Independence was chiefly written by Thomas Jefferson with the input of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Self-evident is a term that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Several things there. First off, Self-evident Truths refers back to that idea of nature and nature’s God that we can read the laws of nature to discover what it means, what human existence means on this earth. Creator is there with a capital C doesn’t say God. It is a much larger concept in this indicus terms and deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Notice that this is making an assertion of the what’s at that time was known as social contract. The idea that people are the ones who form governments, not God, because this refers back to the European fight over whether or not the monarchies were blessed by God, chosen by God to rule over people justly or unjustly didn’t matter because God said so.This is a declaration that the powers that we have as a government are by the consent of the governed, not through the powers of a God. And this is Deism. There’s a symbol of deism there. There are contemporary ideas today. Most of them don’t know that they are, I would argue. But there is a capital D ism that stretches back into late fifteen hundreds, mostly in the sixteen hundreds. And it was beginning to go out of fashion in Europe at the time that the American Revolution was occurring. But the ISM is based on the Latin Dales, meaning God, the Greek word for that is Theos. So we have Davis and Theos D ism and the ISM were used interchangeably in the Middle Ages. You’ll see this in documents if you look at the originals, but it takes on this new meaning. In the late 50s and early 60s,