Old FaceBook Note: My thoughts on the UU principles (for my fellow UUs)-Part 1

For info on Unitarian-Universalism: www.uua.org.

As an exercise, I decided to figure out how I'd organize the 7 principles if it was up to me to do so. I used the following criteria:
Historical Importance
Philosophical Importance
Extent to which people overall consider the principles to be fundamental to their UU identity
A whole lot of personal preference (this was the main criterion, in fact)
and some other stuff which I'll go into eventually.
Obviously, things like "Philosophical Importance" are rather pretentious-sounding, and I'll try to explain my reasoning for the placement of each individual principle in future posts. Mostly I just did this for fun.

So here are the original 7 principles:
The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

And here is how I reorganized them:
The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
A free and responsible search for truth and meaning (and the right of conscience);
Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations (and acceptance of one another);
Encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part;
The use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.

My basic idea is that the principles are organized in such a way that they are kind of like Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics, in the sense that the ones at the top override the ones at the bottom (not that they are usually contradictory). Also, I imagine that the ones at the top are considered more "sacred", in the sense that they are less open to change than the ones at the bottom (as I said, I'll explain my reasoning).
You'll probably notice that some of the principles look rather different. This is because some of the principles as originally stated were really two principles that had been combined. While these combined principles are similar and closely related, such combinations made it so that they wouldn't fit properly into the system I was trying to devise. I didn't want to get rid of any part of the 7 principles as originally stated, but I also didn't want to turn any one of the principles into two and thereby expand the number of principles to more than seven (seven is a good number for numerical [look up the number 7 in religion, mythology, etc.] and poetic reasons [doesn't "Our 7 principles" just simply sound better than "Our 8 principles" or "Our 9 principles"?].) So what I did was combine the part of the principle that was causing problems with another principle that it fit with better (in my system). So with "Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth..." I moved the "Acceptance" part into the "Justice" principle. And with "The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process", I moved "The right of conscience" into the "Responsible search" principle.