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Urantia Book Paper 101 The Real Nature Of Religion
SPIRITWEB ORG, PROMOTING SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS ON THE INTERNET.
Subjects Archive The Urantia Book Urantia Book PART III: The History of Urantia
: The Origin Of Urantia Life Establishment On Urantia The Marine-life Era On
Urantia Urantia During The Early Land-life Era The Mammalian Era On Urantia The
Dawn Races Of Early Man The First Human Family The Evolutionary Races Of Color
The Overcontrol Of Evolution The Planetary Prince Of Urantia The Planetary
Rebellion The Dawn Of Civilization Primitive Human Institutions The Evolution
Of Human Government Development Of The State Government On A Neighboring Planet
The Garden Of Eden Adam And Eve The Default Of Adam And Eve The Second Garden
The Midway Creatures The Violet Race After The Days Of Adam Andite Expansion In
The Orient Andite Expansion In The Occident Development Of Modern Civilization
The Evolution Of Marriage The Marriage Institution Marriage And Family Life The
Origins Of Worship Early Evolution Of Religion The Ghost Cults Fetishes,
Charms, And Magic Sin, Sacrifice, And Atonement Shamanism--medicine Men And
Priests The Evolution Of Prayer The Later Evolution Of Religion Machiventa
Melchizedek The Melchizedek Teachings In The Orient The Melchizedek Teachings
In The Levant Yahweh--god Of The Hebrews Evolution Of The God Concept Among The
Hebrews The Melchizedek Teachings In The Occident The Social Problems Of
Religion Religion In Human Experience The Real Nature Of Religion The
Foundations Of Religious Faith The Reality Of Religious Experience Growth Of
The Trinity Concept Deity And Reality Universe Levels Of Reality Origin And
Nature Of Thought Adjusters Mission And Ministry Of Thought Adjusters Relation
Of Adjusters To Universe Creatures Relation Of Adjusters To Individual Mortals
...
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Paper 101 The Real Nature Of Religion
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Introduction
RELIGION, as a human experience, ranges from the primitive fear slavery of the
evolving savage up to the sublime and magnificent faith liberty of those
civilized mortals who are superbly conscious of sonship with the eternal God.
Religion is the ancestor of the advanced ethics and morals of progressive
social evolution. But religion, as such, is not merely a moral movement, albeit
the outward and social manifestations of religion are mightily influenced by
the ethical and moral momentum of human society. Always is religion the
inspiration of man's evolving nature, but it is not the secret of that
evolution.
Religion, the conviction-faith of the personality, can always triumph over the
superficially contradictory logic of despair born in the unbelieving material
mind. There really is a true and genuine inner voice, that "true light which
lights every man who comes into the world." And this spirit leading is distinct
from the ethical prompting of human conscience. The feeling of religious
assurance is more than an emotional feeling. The assurance of religion
transcends the reason of the mind, even the logic of philosophy. Religion is
faith, trust, and assurance.
1. TRUE RELIGION
True religion is not a system of philosophic belief which can be reasoned out
and substantiated by natural proofs, neither is it a fantastic and mystic
experience of indescribable feelings of ecstasy which can be enjoyed only by
the romantic devotees of mysticism. Religion is not the product of reason, but
viewed from within, it is altogether reasonable. Religion is not derived from
the logic of human philosophy, but as a mortal experience it is altogether
logical. Religion is the experiencing of divinity in the consciousness of a
moral being of evolutionary origin; it represents true experience with eternal
realities in time, the realization of spiritual satisfactions while yet in the
flesh.
The Thought Adjuster has no special mechanism through which to gain
self-expression; there is no mystic religious faculty for the reception or
expression of religious emotions. These experiences are made available through
the naturally ordained mechanism of mortal mind. And therein lies one
explanation of the Adjuster's difficulty in engaging in direct communication
with the material mind of its constant indwelling.
The divine spirit makes contact with mortal man, not by feelings or emotions,
but in the realm of the highest and most spiritualized thinking. It is your
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, not your feelings, that lead you Godward. The divine nature may be perceived
only with the eyes of the mind. But the mind that really discerns God, hears
the indwelling Adjuster, is the pure mind. "Without holiness no man may see the
Lord." All such inner and spiritual communion is termed spiritual insight. Such
religious experiences result from the impress made upon the mind of man by the
combined operations of the Adjuster and the Spirit of Truth as they function
amid and upon the ideas, ideals, insights, and spirit strivings of the evolving
sons of God.
Religion lives and prospers, then, not by sight and feeling, but rather by
faith and insight. It consists not in the discovery of new facts or in the
finding of a unique experience, but rather in the discovery of new and
spiritual meanings in facts already well known to mankind. The highest
religious experience is not dependent on prior acts of belief, tradition, and
authority; neither is religion the offspring of sublime feelings and purely
mystical emotions. It is, rather, a profoundly deep and actual experience of
spiritual communion with the spirit influences resident within the human mind,
and as far as such an experience is definable in terms of psychology, it is
simply the experience of experiencing the reality of believing in God as the
reality of such a purely personal experience.
While religion is not the product of the rationalistic speculations of a
material cosmology, it is, nonetheless, the creation of a wholly rational
insight which originates in man's mind-experience. Religion is born neither of
mystic meditations nor of isolated contemplations, albeit it is ever more or
less mysterious and always indefinable and inexplicable in terms of purely
intellectual reason and philosophic logic. The germs of true religion originate
in the domain of man's moral consciousness, and they are revealed in the growth
of man's spiritual insight, that faculty of human personality which accrues as
a consequence of the presence of the God-revealing Thought Adjuster in the
God-hungry mortal mind.
Faith unites moral insight with conscientious discriminations of values, and
the pre-existent evolutionary sense of duty completes the ancestry of true
religion. The experience of religion eventually results in the certain
consciousness of God and in the undoubted assurance of the survival of the
believing personality.
Thus it may be seen that religious longings and spiritual urges are not of such
a nature as would merely lead men to want to believe in God, but rather are
they of such nature and power that men are profoundly impressed with the
conviction that they ought to believe in God. The sense of evolutionary duty
and the obligations consequent upon the illumination of revelation make such a
profound impression upon man's moral nature that he finally reaches that
position of mind and that attitude of soul where he concludes that he has no
right not to believe in God. The higher and superphilosophic wisdom of such
enlightened and disciplined individuals ultimately instructs them that to doubt
God or distrust his goodness would be to prove untrue to the realest and
deepest thing within the human mind and soul--the divine Adjuster.
2. THE FACT OF RELIGION
The fact of religion consists wholly in the religious experience of rational
and average human beings. And this is the only sense in which religion can ever
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be regarded as scientific or even psychological. The proof that revelation is
revelation is this same fact of human experience: the fact that revelation does
synthesize the apparently divergent sciences of nature and the theology of
religion into a consistent and logical universe philosophy, a co-ordinated and
unbroken explanation of both science and religion, thus creating a harmony of
mind and satisfaction of spirit which answers in human experience those
questionings of the mortal mind which craves to know how the Infinite works out
his will and plans in matter, with minds, and on spirit.
Reason is the method of science; faith is the method of religion; logic is the
attempted technique of philosophy. Revelation compensates for the absence of
the morontia viewpoint by providing a technique for achieving unity in the
comprehension of the reality and relationships of matter and spirit by the
mediation of mind. And true revelation never renders science unnatural,
religion unreasonable, or philosophy illogical.
Reason, through the study of science, may lead back through nature to a First
Cause, but it requires religious faith to transform the First Cause of science
into a God of salvation; and revelation is further required for the validation
of such a faith, such spiritual insight.
There are two basic reasons for believing in a God who fosters human survival:
1. Human experience, personal assurance, the somehow registered hope and trust
initiated by the indwelling Thought Adjuster.
2. The revelation of truth, whether by direct personal ministry of the Spirit
of Truth, by the world bestowal of divine Sons, or through the revelations of
the written word.
Science ends its reason-search in the hypothesis of a First Cause. Religion
does not stop in its flight of faith until it is sure of a God of salvation.
The discriminating study of science logically suggests the reality and
existence of an Absolute. Religion believes unreservedly in the existence and
reality of a God who fosters personality survival. What metaphysics fails
utterly in doing, and what even philosophy fails partially in doing, revelation
does; that is, affirms that this First Cause of science and religion's God of
salvation are one and the same Deity.
Reason is the proof of science, faith the proof of religion, logic the proof of
philosophy, but revelation is validated only by human experience. Science
yields knowledge; religion yields happiness; philosophy yields unity;
revelation confirms the experiential harmony of this triune approach to
universal reality.
The contemplation of nature can only reveal a God of nature, a God of motion.
Nature exhibits only matter, motion, and animation--life. Matter plus energy,
under certain conditions, is manifested in living forms, but while natural life
is thus relatively continuous as a phenomenon, it is wholly transient as to
individualities. Nature does not afford ground for logical belief in
human-personality survival. The religious man who finds God in nature has
already and first found this same personal God in his own soul.
Faith reveals God in the soul. Revelation, the substitute for morontia insight
on an evolutionary world, enables man to see the same God in nature that faith
exhibits in his soul. Thus does revelation successfully bridge the gulf between
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the material and the spiritual, even between the creature and the Creator,
between man and God.
The contemplation of nature does logically point in the direction of
intelligent guidance, even living supervision, but it does not in any
satisfactory manner reveal a personal God. On the other hand, nature discloses
nothing which would preclude the universe from being looked upon as the
handiwork of the God of religion. God cannot be found through nature alone, but
man having otherwise found him, the study of nature becomes wholly consistent
with a higher and more spiritual interpretation of the universe.
Revelation as an epochal phenomenon is periodic; as a personal human experience
it is continuous. Divinity functions in mortal personality as the Adjuster gift
of the Father, as the Spirit of Truth of the Son, and as the Holy Spirit of the
Universe Spirit, while these three supermortal endowments are unified in human
experiential evolution as the ministry of the Supreme.
True religion is an insight into reality, the faith-child of the moral
consciousness, and not a mere intellectual assent to any body of dogmatic
doctrines. True religion consists in the experience that "the Spirit itself
bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God." Religion
consists not in theologic propositions but in spiritual insight and the
sublimity of the soul's trust.
Your deepest nature--the divine Adjuster--creates within you a hunger and
thirst for righteousness, a certain craving for divine perfection. Religion is
the faith act of the recognition of this inner urge to divine attainment; and
thus is brought about that soul trust and assurance of which you become
conscious as the way of salvation, the technique of the survival of personality
and all those values which you have come to look upon as being true and good.
The realization of religion never has been, and never will be, dependent on
great learning or clever logic. It is spiritual insight, and that is just the
reason why some of the world's greatest religious teachers, even the prophets,
have sometimes possessed so little of the wisdom of the world. Religious faith
is available alike to the learned and the unlearned.
Religion must ever be its own critic and judge; it can never be observed, much
less understood, from the outside. Your only assurance of a personal God
consists in your own insight as to your belief in, and experience with, things
spiritual. To all of your fellows who have had a similar experience, no
argument about the personality or reality of God is necessary, while to all
other men who are not thus sure of God no possible argument could ever be truly
convincing.
Psychology may indeed attempt to study the phenomena of religious reactions to
the social environment, but never can it hope to penetrate to the real and
inner motives and workings of religion. Only theology, the province of faith
and the technique of revelation, can afford any sort of intelligent account of
the nature and content of religious experience.
3. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF RELIGION
Religion is so vital that it persists in the absence of learning. It lives in
spite of its contamination with erroneous cosmologies and false philosophies;
it survives even the confusion of metaphysics. In and through all the historic
vicissitudes of religion there ever persists that which is indispensable to
human progress and survival: the ethical conscience and the moral
consciousness.
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Faith-insight, or spiritual intuition, is the endowment of the cosmic mind in
association with the Thought Adjuster, which is the Father's gift to man.
Spiritual reason, soul intelligence, is the endowment of the Holy Spirit, the
Creative Spirit's gift to man. Spiritual philosophy, the wisdom of spirit
realities, is the endowment of the Spirit of Truth, the combined gift of the
bestowal Sons to the children of men. And the co-ordination and
interassociation of these spirit endowments constitute man a spirit personality
in potential destiny.
It is this same spirit personality, in primitive and embryonic form, the
Adjuster possession of which survives the natural death in the flesh. This
composite entity of spirit origin in association with human experience is
enabled, by means of the living way provided by the divine Sons, to survive (in
Adjuster custody) the dissolution of the material self of mind and matter when
such a transient partnership of the material and the spiritual is divorced by
the cessation of vital motion.
Through religious faith the soul of man reveals itself and demonstrates the
potential divinity of its emerging nature by the characteristic manner in which
it induces the mortal personality to react to certain trying intellectual and
testing social situations. Genuine spiritual faith (true moral consciousness)
is revealed in that it:
1. Causes ethics and morals to progress despite inherent and adverse
animalistic tendencies.
2. Produces a sublime trust in the goodness of God even in the face of bitter
disappointment and crushing defeat.
3. Generates profound courage and confidence despite natural adversity and
physical calamity.
4. Exhibits inexplicable poise and sustaining tranquillity notwithstanding
baffling diseases and even acute physical suffering.
5. Maintains a mysterious poise and composure of personality in the face of
maltreatment and the rankest injustice.
6. Maintains a divine trust in ultimate victory in spite of the cruelties of
seemingly blind fate and the apparent utter indifference of natural forces to
human welfare.
7. Persists in the unswerving belief in God despite all contrary demonstrations
of logic and successfully withstands all other intellectual sophistries.
8. Continues to exhibit undaunted faith in the soul's survival regardless of
the deceptive teachings of false science and the persuasive delusions of
unsound philosophy.
9. Lives and triumphs irrespective of the crushing overload of the complex and
partial civilizations of modern times.
10. Contributes to the continued survival of altruism in spite of human
selfishness, social antagonisms, industrial greeds, and political
maladjustments.
11. Steadfastly adheres to a sublime belief in universe unity and divine
guidance regardless of the perplexing presence of evil and sin.
12. Goes right on worshiping God in spite of anything and everything. Dares to
declare, "Even though he slay me, yet will I serve him."
We know, then, by three phenomena, that man has a divine spirit or spirits
dwelling within him: first, by personal experience--religious faith; second, by
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revelation--personal and racial; and third, by the amazing exhibition of such
extraordinary and unnatural reactions to his material environment as are
illustrated by the foregoing recital of twelve spiritlike performances in the
presence of the actual and trying situations of real human existence. And there
are still others.
And it is just such a vital and vigorous performance of faith in the domain of
religion that entitles mortal man to affirm the personal possession and
spiritual reality of that crowning endowment of human nature, religious
experience.
4. THE LIMITATIONS OF REVELATION
Because your world is generally ignorant of origins, even of physical origins,
it has appeared to be wise from time to time to provide instruction in
cosmology. And always has this made trouble for the future. The laws of
revelation hamper us greatly by their proscription of the impartation of
unearned or premature knowledge. Any cosmology presented as a part of revealed
religion is destined to be outgrown in a very short time. Accordingly, future
students of such a revelation are tempted to discard any element of genuine
religious truth it may contain because they discover errors on the face of the
associated cosmologies therein presented.
Mankind should understand that we who participate in the revelation of truth
are very rigorously limited by the instructions of our superiors. We are not at
liberty to anticipate the scientific discoveries of a thousand years.
Revelators must act in accordance with the instructions which form a part of
the revelation mandate. We see no way of overcoming this difficulty, either now
or at any future time. We full well know that, while the historic facts and
religious truths of this series of revelatory presentations will stand on the
records of the ages to come, within a few short years many of our statements
regarding the physical sciences will stand in need of revision in consequence
of additional scientific developments and new discoveries. These new
developments we even now foresee, but we are forbidden to include such humanly
undiscovered facts in the revelatory records. Let it be made clear that
revelations are not necessarily inspired. The cosmology of these revelations is
not inspired. It is limited by our permission for the co-ordination and sorting
of present-day knowledge. While divine or spiritual insight is a gift, human
wisdom must evolve.
Truth is always a revelation: autorevelation when it emerges as a result of the
work of the indwelling Adjuster; epochal revelation when it is presented by the
function of some other celestial agency, group, or personality.
In the last analysis, religion is to be judged by its fruits, according to the
manner and the extent to which it exhibits its own inherent and divine
excellence.
Truth may be but relatively inspired, even though revelation is invariably a
spiritual phenomenon. While statements with reference to cosmology are never
inspired, such revelations are of immense value in that they at least
transiently clarify knowledge by:
1. The reduction of confusion by the authoritative elimination of error.
2. The co-ordination of known or about-to-be-known facts and observations.
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3. The restoration of important bits of lost knowledge concerning epochal
transactions in the distant past.
4. The supplying of information which will fill in vital missing gaps in
otherwise earned knowledge.
5. Presenting cosmic data in such a manner as to illuminate the spiritual
teachings contained in the accompanying revelation.
5. RELIGION EXPANDED BY REVELATION
Revelation is a technique whereby ages upon ages of time are saved in the
necessary work of sorting and sifting the errors of evolution from the truths
of spirit acquirement.
Science deals with facts; religion is concerned only with values. Through
enlightened philosophy the mind endeavors to unite the meanings of both facts
and values, thereby arriving at a concept of complete reality. Remember that
science is the domain of knowledge, philosophy the realm of wisdom, and
religion the sphere of the faith experience. But religion, nonetheless,
presents two phases of manifestation:
1. Evolutionary religion. The experience of primitive worship, the religion
which is a mind derivative.
2. Revealed religion. The universe attitude which is a spirit derivative; the
assurance of, and belief in, the conservation of eternal realities, the
survival of personality, and the eventual attainment of the cosmic Deity, whose
purpose has made all this possible. It is a part of the plan of the universe
that, sooner or later, evolutionary religion is destined to receive the
spiritual expansion of revelation.
Both science and religion start out with the assumption of certain generally
accepted bases for logical deductions. So, also, must philosophy start its
career upon the assumption of the reality of three things:
1. The material body.
2. The supermaterial phase of the human being, the soul or even the indwelling
spirit.
3. The human mind, the mechanism for intercommunication and interassociation
between spirit and matter, between the material and the spiritual.
Scientists assemble facts, philosophers co-ordinate ideas, while prophets exalt
ideals. Feeling and emotion are invariable concomitants of religion, but they
are not religion. Religion may be the feeling of experience, but it is hardly
the experience of feeling. Neither logic (rationalization) nor emotion
(feeling) is essentially a part of religious experience, although both may
variously be associated with the exercise of faith in the furtherance of
spiritual insight into reality, all according to the status and temperamental
tendency of the individual mind.
Evolutionary religion is the outworking of the endowment of the local universe
mind adjutant charged with the creation and fostering of the worship trait in
evolving man. Such primitive religions are directly concerned with ethics and
morals, the sense of human duty. Such religions are predicated on the assurance
of conscience and result in the stabilization of relatively ethical
civilizations.
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Personally revealed religions are sponsored by the bestowal spirits
representing the three persons of the Paradise Trinity and are especially
concerned with the expansion of truth. Evolutionary religion drives home to the
individual the idea of personal duty; revealed religion lays increasing
emphasis on loving, the golden rule.
Evolved religion rests wholly on faith. Revelation has the additional assurance
of its expanded presentation of the truths of divinity and reality and the
still more valuable testimony of the actual experience which accumulates in
consequence of the practical working union of the faith of evolution and the
truth of revelation. Such a working union of human faith and divine truth
constitutes the possession of a character well on the road to the actual
acquirement of a morontial personality.
Evolutionary religion provides only the assurance of faith and the confirmation
of conscience; revelatory religion provides the assurance of faith plus the
truth of a living experience in the realities of revelation. The third step in
religion, or the third phase of the experience of religion, has to do with the
morontia state, the firmer grasp of mota. Increasingly in the morontia
progression the truths of revealed religion are expanded; more and more you
will know the truth of supreme values, divine goodnesses, universal
relationships, eternal realities, and ultimate destinies.
Increasingly throughout the morontia progression the assurance of truth
replaces the assurance of faith. When you are finally mustered into the actual
spirit world, then will the assurances of pure spirit insight operate in the
place of faith and truth or, rather, in conjunction with, and superimposed
upon, these former techniques of personality assurance.
6. PROGRESSIVE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
The morontia phase of revealed religion has to do with the experience of
survival, and its great urge is the attainment of spirit perfection. There also
is present the higher urge of worship, associated with an impelling call to
increased ethical service. Morontia insight entails an ever-expanding
consciousness of the Sevenfold, the Supreme, and even the Ultimate.
Throughout all religious experience, from its earliest inception on the
material level up to the time of the attainment of full spirit status, the
Adjuster is the secret of the personal realization of the reality of the
existence of the Supreme; and this same Adjuster also holds the secrets of your
faith in the transcendental attainment of the Ultimate. The experiential
personality of evolving man, united to the Adjuster essence of the existential
God, constitutes the potential completion of supreme existence and is
inherently the basis for the superfinite eventuation of transcendental
personality.
Moral will embraces decisions based on reasoned knowledge, augmented by wisdom,
and sanctioned by religious faith. Such choices are acts of moral nature and
evidence the existence of moral personality, the forerunner of morontia
personality and eventually of true spirit status.
The evolutionary type of knowledge is but the accumulation of protoplasmic
memory material; this is the most primitive form of creature consciousness.
Wisdom embraces the ideas formulated from protoplasmic memory in process of
association and recombination, and such phenomena differentiate human
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mind from mere animal mind. Animals have knowledge, but only man possesses
wisdom capacity. Truth is made accessible to the wisdom-endowed individual by
the bestowal on such a mind of the spirits of the Father and the Sons, the
Thought Adjuster and the Spirit of Truth.
Christ Michael, when bestowed on Urantia, lived under the reign of evolutionary
religion up to the time of his baptism. From that moment up to and including
the event of his crucifixion he carried forward his work by the combined
guidance of evolutionary and revealed religion. From the morning of his
resurrection until his ascension he traversed the manifold phases of the
morontia life of mortal transition from the world of matter to that of spirit.
After his ascension Michael became master of the experience of Supremacy, the
realization of the Supreme; and being the one person in Nebadon possessed of
unlimited capacity to experience the reality of the Supreme, he forthwith
attained to the status of the sovereignty of supremacy in and to his local
universe.
With man, the eventual fusion and resultant oneness with the indwelling
Adjuster--the personality synthesis of man and the essence of God--constitute
him, in potential, a living part of the Supreme and insure for such a onetime
mortal being the eternal birthright of the endless pursuit of finality of
universe service for and with the Supreme.
Revelation teaches mortal man that, to start such a magnificent and intriguing
adventure through space by means of the progression of time, he should begin by
the organization of knowledge into idea-decisions; next, mandate wisdom to
labor unremittingly at its noble task of transforming self-possessed ideas into
increasingly practical but nonetheless supernal ideals, even those concepts
which are so reasonable as ideas and so logical as ideals that the Adjuster
dares so to combine and spiritize them as to render them available for such
association in the finite mind as will constitute them the actual human
complement thus made ready for the action of the Truth Spirit of the Sons, the
time-space manifestations of Paradise truth--universal truth. The co-ordination
of idea-decisions, logical ideals, and divine truth constitutes the possession
of a righteous character, the prerequisite for mortal admission to the
ever-expanding and increasingly spiritual realities of the morontia worlds.
The teachings of Jesus constituted the first Urantian religion which so fully
embraced a harmonious co-ordination of knowledge, wisdom, faith, truth, and
love as completely and simultaneously to provide temporal tranquillity,
intellectual certainty, moral enlightenment, philosophic stability, ethical
sensitivity, God-consciousness, and the positive assurance of personal
survival. The faith of Jesus pointed the way to finality of human salvation, to
the ultimate of mortal universe attainment, since it provided for:
1. Salvation from material fetters in the personal realization of sonship with
God, who is spirit.
2. Salvation from intellectual bondage: man shall know the truth, and the truth
shall set him free.
3. Salvation from spiritual blindness, the human realization of the fraternity
of mortal beings and the morontian awareness of the brotherhood of all universe
creatures; the service-discovery of spiritual reality and the
ministry-revelation of the goodness of spirit values.
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4. Salvation from incompleteness of self through the attainment of the spirit
levels of the universe and through the eventual realization of the harmony of
Havona and the perfection of Paradise.
5. Salvation from self, deliverance from the limitations of self-consciousness
through the attainment of the cosmic levels of the Supreme mind and by
co-ordination with the attainments of all other self-conscious beings.
6. Salvation from time, the achievement of an eternal life of unending
progression in God-recognition and God-service.
7. Salvation from the finite, the perfected oneness with Deity in and through
the Supreme by which the creature attempts the transcendental discovery of the
Ultimate on the postfinaliter levels of the absonite.
Such a sevenfold salvation is the equivalent of the completeness and perfection
of the realization of the ultimate experience of the Universal Father. And all
this, in potential, is contained within the reality of the faith of the human
experience of religion. And it can be so contained since the faith of Jesus was
nourished by, and was revelatory of, even realities beyond the ultimate; the
faith of Jesus approached the status of a universe absolute in so far as such
is possible of manifestation in the evolving cosmos of time and space.
Through the appropriation of the faith of Jesus, mortal man can foretaste in
time the realities of eternity. Jesus made the discovery, in human experience,
of the Final Father, and his brothers in the flesh of mortal life can follow
him along this same experience of Father discovery. They can even attain, as
they are, the same satisfaction in this experience with the Father as did Jesus
as he was. New potentials were actualized in the universe of Nebadon consequent
upon the terminal bestowal of Michael, and one of these was the new
illumination of the path of eternity that leads to the Father of all, and which
can be traversed even by the mortals of material flesh and blood in the initial
life on the planets of space. Jesus was and is the new and living way whereby
man can come into the divine inheritance which the Father has decreed shall be
his for but the asking. In Jesus there is abundantly demonstrated both the
beginnings and endings of the faith experience of humanity, even of divine
humanity.
7. A PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
An idea is only a theoretical plan for action, while a positive decision is a
validated plan of action. A stereotype is a plan of action accepted without
validation. The materials out of which to build a personal philosophy of
religion are derived from both the inner and the environmental experience of
the individual. The social status, economic conditions, educational
opportunities, moral trends, institutional influences, political developments,
racial tendencies, and the religious teachings of one's time and place all
become factors in the formulation of a personal philosophy of religion. Even
the inherent temperament and intellectual bent markedly determine the pattern
of religious philosophy. Vocation, marriage, and kindred all influence the
evolution of one's personal standards of life.
A philosophy of religion evolves out of a basic growth of ideas plus
experimental living as both are modified by the tendency to imitate associates.
The soundness of philosophic conclusions depends on keen, honest, and
discriminating thinking in connection with sensitivity to meanings and accuracy
of evalua-
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tion. Moral cowards never achieve high planes of philosophic thinking; it
requires courage to invade new levels of experience and to attempt the
exploration of unknown realms of intellectual living.
Presently new systems of values come into existence; new formulations of
principles and standards are achieved; habits and ideals are reshaped; some
idea of a personal God is attained, followed by enlarging concepts of
relationship thereto.
The great difference between a religious and a nonreligious philosophy of
living consists in the nature and level of recognized values and in the object
of loyalties. There are four phases in the evolution of religious philosophy:
Such an experience may become merely conformative, resigned to submission to
tradition and authority. Or it may be satisfied with slight attainments, just
enough to stabilize the daily living, and therefore becomes early arrested on
such an adventitious level. Such mortals believe in letting well enough alone.
A third group progress to the level of logical intellectuality but there
stagnate in consequence of cultural slavery. It is indeed pitiful to behold
giant intellects held so securely within the cruel grasp of cultural bondage.
It is equally pathetic to observe those who trade their cultural bondage for
the materialistic fetters of a science, falsely so called. The fourth level of
philosophy attains freedom from all conventional and traditional handicaps and
dares to think, act, and live honestly, loyally, fearlessly, and truthfully.
The acid test for any religious philosophy consists in whether or not it
distinguishes between the realities of the material and the spiritual worlds
while at the same moment recognizing their unification in intellectual striving
and in social serving. A sound religious philosophy does not confound the
things of God with the things of Caesar. Neither does it recognize the
aesthetic cult of pure wonder as a substitute for religion.
Philosophy transforms that primitive religion which was largely a fairy tale of
conscience into a living experience in the ascending values of cosmic reality.
8. FAITH AND BELIEF
Belief has attained the level of faith when it motivates life and shapes the
mode of living. The acceptance of a teaching as true is not faith; that is mere
belief. Neither is certainty nor conviction faith. A state of mind attains to
faith levels only when it actually dominates the mode of living. Faith is a
living attribute of genuine personal religious experience. One believes truth,
admires beauty, and reverences goodness, but does not worship them; such an
attitude of saving faith is centered on God alone, who is all of these
personified and infinitely more.
Belief is always limiting and binding; faith is expanding and releasing. Belief
fixates, faith liberates. But living religious faith is more than the
association of noble beliefs; it is more than an exalted system of philosophy;
it is a living experience concerned with spiritual meanings, divine ideals, and
supreme values; it is God-knowing and man-serving. Beliefs may become group
possessions, but faith must be personal. Theologic beliefs can be suggested to
a group, but faith can rise up only in the heart of the individual religionist.
Faith has falsified its trust when it presumes to deny realities and to confer
upon its devotees assumed knowledge. Faith is a traitor when it fosters
betrayal
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of intellectual integrity and belittles loyalty to supreme values and divine
ideals. Faith never shuns the problem-solving duty of mortal living. Living
faith does not foster bigotry, persecution, or intolerance.
Faith does not shackle the creative imagination, neither does it maintain an
unreasoning prejudice toward the discoveries of scientific investigation. Faith
vitalizes religion and constrains the religionist heroically to live the golden
rule. The zeal of faith is according to knowledge, and its strivings are the
preludes to sublime peace.
9. RELIGION AND MORALITY
No professed revelation of religion could be regarded as authentic if it failed
to recognize the duty demands of ethical obligation which had been created and
fostered by preceding evolutionary religion. Revelation unfailingly enlarges
the ethical horizon of evolved religion while it simultaneously and unfailingly
expands the moral obligations of all prior revelations.
When you presume to sit in critical judgment on the primitive religion of man
(or on the religion of primitive man), you should remember to judge such
savages and to evaluate their religious experience in accordance with their
enlightenment and status of conscience. Do not make the mistake of judging
another's religion by your own standards of knowledge and truth.
True religion is that sublime and profound conviction within the soul which
compellingly admonishes man that it would be wrong for him not to believe in
those morontial realities which constitute his highest ethical and moral
concepts, his highest interpretation of life's greatest values and the
universe's deepest realities. And such a religion is simply the experience of
yielding intellectual loyalty to the highest dictates of spiritual
consciousness.
The search for beauty is a part of religion only in so far as it is ethical and
to the extent that it enriches the concept of the moral. Art is only religious
when it becomes diffused with purpose which has been derived from high
spiritual motivation.
The enlightened spiritual consciousness of civilized man is not concerned so
much with some specific intellectual belief or with any one particular mode of
living as with discovering the truth of living, the good and right technique of
reacting to the ever-recurring situations of mortal existence. Moral
consciousness is just a name applied to the human recognition and awareness of
those ethical and emerging morontial values which duty demands that man shall
abide by in the day-by-day control and guidance of conduct.
Though recognizing that religion is imperfect, there are at least two practical
manifestations of its nature and function:
1. The spiritual urge and philosophic pressure of religion tend to cause man to
project his estimation of moral values directly outward into the affairs of his
fellows--the ethical reaction of religion.
2. Religion creates for the human mind a spiritualized consciousness of divine
reality based on, and by faith derived from, antecedent concepts of moral
values and co-ordinated with superimposed concepts of spiritual values.
Religion thereby becomes a censor of mortal affairs, a form of glorified moral
trust and confidence in reality, the enhanced realities of time and the more
enduring realities of eternity.
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Faith becomes the connection between moral consciousness and the spiritual
concept of enduring reality. Religion becomes the avenue of man's escape from
the material limitations of the temporal and natural world to the supernal
realities of the eternal and spiritual world by and through the technique of
salvation, the progressive morontia transformation.
10. RELIGION AS MAN'S LIBERATOR
Intelligent man knows that he is a child of nature, a part of the material
universe; he likewise discerns no survival of individual personality in the
motions and tensions of the mathematical level of the energy universe. Nor can
man ever discern spiritual reality through the examination of physical causes
and effects.
A human being is also aware that he is a part of the ideational cosmos, but
though concept may endure beyond a mortal life span, there is nothing inherent
in concept which indicates the personal survival of the conceiving personality.
Nor will the exhaustion of the possibilities of logic and reason ever reveal to
the logician or to the reasoner the eternal truth of the survival of
personality.
The material level of law provides for causality continuity, the unending
response of effect to antecedent action; the mind level suggests the
perpetuation of ideational continuity, the unceasing flow of conceptual
potentiality from pre-existent conceptions. But neither of these levels of the
universe discloses to the inquiring mortal an avenue of escape from partiality
of status and from the intolerable suspense of being a transient reality in the
universe, a temporal personality doomed to be extinguished upon the exhaustion
of the limited life energies.
It is only through the morontial avenue leading to spiritual insight that man
can ever break the fetters inherent in his mortal status in the universe.
Energy and mind do lead back to Paradise and Deity, but neither the energy
endowment nor the mind endowment of man proceeds directly from such Paradise
Deity. Only in the spiritual sense is man a child of God. And this is true
because it is only in the spiritual sense that man is at present endowed and
indwelt by the Paradise Father. Mankind can never discover divinity except
through the avenue of religious experience and by the exercise of true faith.
The faith acceptance of the truth of God enables man to escape from the
circumscribed confines of material limitations and affords him a rational hope
of achieving safe conduct from the material realm, whereon is death, to the
spiritual realm, wherein is life eternal.
The purpose of religion is not to satisfy curiosity about God but rather to
afford intellectual constancy and philosophic security, to stabilize and enrich
human living by blending the mortal with the divine, the partial with the
perfect, man and God. It is through religious experience that man's concepts of
ideality are endowed with reality.
Never can there be either scientific or logical proofs of divinity. Reason
alone can never validate the values and goodnesses of religious experience. But
it will always remain true: Whosoever wills to do the will of God shall
comprehend the validity of spiritual values. This is the nearest approach that
can be made on the mortal level to offering proofs of the reality of religious
experience. Such faith affords the only escape from the mechanical clutch of
the material
top of page - 1117
world and from the error distortion of the incompleteness of the intellectual
world; it is the only discovered solution to the impasse in mortal thinking
regarding the continuing survival of the individual personality. It is the only
passport to completion of reality and to eternity of life in a universal
creation of love, law, unity, and progressive Deity attainment.
Religion effectually cures man's sense of idealistic isolation or spiritual
loneliness; it enfranchises the believer as a son of God, a citizen of a new
and meaningful universe. Religion assures man that, in following the gleam of
righteousness discernible in his soul, he is thereby identifying himself with
the plan of the Infinite and the purpose of the Eternal. Such a liberated soul
immediately begins to feel at home in this new universe, his universe.
When you experience such a transformation of faith, you are no longer a slavish
part of the mathematical cosmos but rather a liberated volitional son of the
Universal Father. No longer is such a liberated son fighting alone against the
inexorable doom of the termination of temporal existence; no longer does he
combat all nature, with the odds hopelessly against him; no longer is he
staggered by the paralyzing fear that, perchance, he has put his trust in a
hopeless phantasm or pinned his faith to a fanciful error.
Now, rather, are the sons of God enlisted together in fighting the battle of
reality's triumph over the partial shadows of existence. At last all creatures
become conscious of the fact that God and all the divine hosts of a well-nigh
limitless universe are on their side in the supernal struggle to attain
eternity of life and divinity of status. Such faith-liberated sons have
certainly enlisted in the struggles of time on the side of the supreme forces
and divine personalities of eternity; even the stars in their courses are now
doing battle for them; at last they gaze upon the universe from within, from
God's viewpoint, and all is transformed from the uncertainties of material
isolation to the sureties of eternal spiritual progression. Even time itself
becomes but the shadow of eternity cast by Paradise realities upon the moving
panoply of space.
[Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]
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Subjects Archive The Urantia Book Urantia Book PART III: The History of Urantia
: The Origin Of Urantia Life Establishment On Urantia The Marine-life Era On
Urantia Urantia During The Early Land-life Era The Mammalian Era On Urantia The
Dawn Races Of Early Man The First Human Family The Evolutionary Races Of Color
The Overcontrol Of Evolution The Planetary Prince Of Urantia The Planetary
Rebellion The Dawn Of Civilization Primitive Human Institutions The Evolution
Of Human Government Development Of The State Government On A Neighboring Planet
The Garden Of Eden Adam And Eve The Default Of Adam And Eve The Second Garden
The Midway Creatures The Violet Race After The Days Of Adam Andite Expansion In
The Orient Andite Expansion In The Occident Development Of Modern Civilization
The Evolution Of Marriage The Marriage Institution Marriage And Family Life The
Origins Of Worship Early Evolution Of Religion The Ghost Cults Fetishes,
Charms, And Magic Sin, Sacrifice, And Atonement Shamanism--medicine Men And
Priests The Evolution Of Prayer The Later Evolution Of Religion Machiventa
Melchizedek The Melchizedek Teachings In The Orient The Melchizedek Teachings
In The Levant Yahweh--god Of The Hebrews Evolution Of The God Concept Among The
Hebrews The Melchizedek Teachings In The Occident The Social Problems Of
Religion Religion In Human Experience The Real Nature Of Religion The
Foundations Of Religious Faith The Reality Of Religious Experience Growth Of
The Trinity Concept Deity And Reality Universe Levels Of Reality Origin And
Nature Of Thought Adjusters Mission And Ministry Of Thought Adjusters Relation
Of Adjusters To Universe Creatures Relation Of Adjusters To Individual Mortals
The Adjuster And The Soul Personality Survival Seraphic Guardians Of Destiny
Seraphic Planetary Government The Supreme Being The Almighty Supreme God The
Supreme Supreme And Ultimate--time And Space The Bestowals Of Christ Michael
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? // ? ? ? ? ?
? Religion In ? The ? Urantia Book ? Search ? SiteMap! ?
? Hum... ? Foundations... ? PA... ? ? ?
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