If You Want to Know God, Study the World

It was today in 1791 that a series of riots swept through the English city of Birmingham, and continued for three days.

The reasons were many, but they circled sufficiently around the scientist, political activist and Unitarian minister Joseph Priestly, that the incident, or incidents, it was a series of assaults, are often called the “Priestly riots.”

There had been long simmering hostility between the progressive Dissenters and the majority Anglican citizens of the city. The Dissenters had been pushing hard for full civil rights. But the Dissenters’ near unanimous support for the French Revolution offended the conservative majority. And all that they suspected came together in Joseph Priestly’s denial of the trinity and his sermons calling people to a more naturalistic humanism, humanism in the classical sense rather than our twentieth and twenty-first century understanding of the term.

The core thread running through Priestly’s preaching was his insistence that human reason rather that divine revelation was the secret of our possibility.

If you want to know God, study the world.

Rational Religion.

It seems the spark for the riots was the insistence of some that Priestley’s books be included on the shelves of the city’s library.

Apparently free access to his ideas was the bridge too far.

Starting with Priestly’s home, laboratory and chapel (Dissenter’s could not call their religious centers “churches”), the rioters burned four Chapels, several businesses, and twenty-seven houses.

Later the King, George III, is said to have said, “I cannot but feel better pleased that Priestley is the sufferer for the doctrines he and his party have instilled, and that the people see them in their true light.”

Priestly fled the country just ahead of a series of arrests and the notorious “1794 Treason Trials,” coming to the warm embrace of America.

Taking refuge in Philadelphia, he gave a series of sermons which would result in the gathering of the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, the first church in America to claim the name “unitarian.”

Priestly would continue to follow the facts as he found them revealing the world as it actually is as best he could at that moment, and from that best stance he could find to make conclusions, and from that to make trouble for the rest of his life…

If you want to know God, study the world.

Rational Religion…