© 1994 Byron Belitsos
© 1994 The Brotherhood of Man Library
For anyone interested in the future of religion, the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions, held in Chicago last September, was a central event of our times, a jubilee for inter-religious dialogue. It also marked the centennial of the world-historic 1893 Parliament of World Religion, now recognized as the founding event in the interfaith movement. The 1993 Parliament heralded a new beginning for the movement for religious unity in a postmodern world.
I attended the Parliament as a member of the press corps, but I was gladly swept up in the spontaneous religious fervor of the event. It was indeed a watershed in my own religious growth. My concepts of unity were so deepened, my inspiration from the event was so powerful, that in certain moments the ground on which we stood became sacred, became for me a mythic world center, an axis mundi. Through this place—the mundane Palmer House Hotel in downtown Chicago—was poured a unifying spirit manifesting itself in a dazzling array of forms of human expression of the divine.
Beauty is a matter of “the harmonic unification of contrasts”, and “variety is essential to the concept of beauty” (UB 56:10.3). Because 125 faiths were united there, the Parliament was an epiphany of the beauty of religious unity—albeit a brief experience of sharing crowded into a week in September.
In actuality, religious unity is a distant dream for Urantia. We have not even achieved peace and non-violence between the religions; it is depressing to realize that many of the 40 or so wars and conflicts in the world today are religiously-motivated. The war in Bosnia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the conflict in Northern Ireland are sad examples of the breakdowns that occur when diverse religions are not in dialogue. But the eight days of the Parliament last September were an inspiring model of where we are headed. With a few exceptions, it was marked by unity, tolerance, and loving dialogue between the myriad of faiths represented.
To adequately summarize the events of this historic week is nearly an impossible task. Consider that each day, the 6000 attendees had a choice among: morning and evening interfaith meditation sessions; two plenary sessions; dozens of major presentations in large ballrooms by some of the world’s leading religious figures; more than 100 seminars and lectures on every conceivable topic; an extensive video/film festival; special symposiums on religious pluralism, science, business ethics, and media; and numerous artistic events.
Choosing from this rich menu of options was in itself a religious experience!
It is unfortunate indeed that no organization representing The Urantia Book participated in any of these interfaith activities. Only one lecture by a Urantia Book reader-believer was given, an impromptu event attended by less than ten people. This lecture was not listed in the 151-page program booklet for the Parliament, which included over 600 lectures, seminars, and workshops of amazing variety. Why? The Fellowship of Urantia Book Readers had voted not to join the 125 sponsoring organizations. It did reverse itself just a few weeks before—but too late to be visible in the Parliament program. As an afterthought, a committee of the Fellowship did sponsor a strictly promotional booth. The Urantia Foundation, headquartered in Chicago , was completely absent, not even sending an observer of the proceedings. This is shocking when you consider that several thousand representatives of overseas religions flew into Chicago at great expense.
All this is especially puzzling in view of the Book’s progressive teachings on religious unity and interfaith dialogue. On page UB 92:7.3 we read, “There is not a Urantia religion that could not profitably study and assimilate the best of the truths in every other faith, for they all contain truth.” Might this not also apply to believers in the Urantia revelation?
In the Urmia lectures, Jesus himself advocates that all religions “. . . completely divest themselves of all ecclesiastical authority and fully surrender all concept of spiritual sovereignty. . . ” (UB 134:4.4) I would therefore ask, do believers in the fifth epochal revelation lay claim to such authority? If not in theory, then in action?
Most of the religions represented at the Parliament evolved from what their adherents believe is a textual revelation of some kind of revelatory event. Think of The Koran, the Vedas, the tablets of Baha’ulla that created the Baha’i religion, The Hebrew Bible, The Book of Mormon, or the scriptures resulting from the revelatory event of Jesus, or Buddha’s, or Zoroaster’s life and teachings. Believers in all these revelations of truth participated at the Parliament. What keeps us from dialogue with so many others with whom we share a claim to revelation?
Our absence from the Parliament shows once again how urgent it has become for reader-believers of The Urantia Book to constitute themselves as a bona fide religious movement, a spiritual movement that embodies a mixture of evolutionary and revelatory religion—just like any other religion on Urantia. Anything less is intellectually dishonest and arrogant. To stand aside from the stream of religious life on this planet, convinced that we possess The Truth is a delusion of grandeur. It is a tragic fallacy to believe that we have a pure revelation needing protection from contamination through contact with the evolutionary religions of our world. Only fundamentalist or markedly ecclesiocentric organizations did not participate actively in the Parliament.
In The Urantia Book, revelation is conceived of as a process, not a static product etched in ink and paper. In much of the text, the revelators resort to pure revelation. But the text is also studded with more than a thousand of the highest existing human concepts gathered from the early part of this century—a ratio of one concept to every two pages. These concepts are destined to become outdated. Such is the wisdom of the revelators; the book itself is a mixed evolutionary/revelatory deposit in the evolutionary stream of planetary history.
The book has not yet entered into the evolutionary stream of this planet, but many of its “concepts representing the highest and most advanced planetary knowledge” (UB 0:12.12) are no longer so advanced. Some—certainly most of the science—are entirely outdated. Evolving religious experience and theology (not to mention advances in science and philosophy) have left many of these notions behind in dusty shelves in used bookstores. Other features of our “revelation,” such as the Book’s use of sexist language are, in my view, completely outdated.
For this and other reasons, I believe that Urantia Book readers can profit from dialogue with contemporary religions and theologies, as much as they can from us. I have personally benefited from study and dialogue with such late-20th century developments as feminist and liberation theology, current discoveries in Christology, new truths emerging from four decades of Buddhist-Christian dialogue, progressive new auto-revelations such as the Baha’i religion, theological reflections on the new physics and biology, and the rapidly emerging methodologies of interfaith dialogue and “global theology.”
It is true, of course, that many readers did participate in the Parliament as individuals. Most could be found helping at an advertising booth sponsored by the Urantia Fellowship. More than 70 exhibits were available, manned by a great swirl of traditional religions, modern sects, new religious movements, religious foundations, and publishers.
It is notable that long-time Book reader, Peter Lawrence, executive director of the New York-based interfaith organization known as the Temple of Understanding, represented his organization in the formal meetings of the Assembly of Religious and Spiritual Leaders. A committee of the Fellowship, but not the Fellowship itself, is also a member of the North American Interfaith Network, which met at the Parliament.
The plenary sessions were the major events of the week. These covered such topics as “Interfaith Understanding”, “What Shall We Do?”, “Visions of Paradise”, “Voices of the Dispossessed”, “The Inner Life”, and “The Inner Life in the Community.” Deep exchanges of religious thought and feeling occurred in these large forums, and scores of smaller sessions and panels. Many sessions, such as “What Shall We Do?” and “Voices of the Dispossessed”, also provided an unprecedented encounter of the world’s religious leaders with the political and ethical issues raised by science and technology, the global environment, and problems of overpopulation, war (including religiously-motivated violence), politics, media, and economics.
An innovative forum called “The Parliament of the People” provided a vehicle for lay religionists to communicate their concerns about critical global and religious issues to the formal “Assembly of Religious and Spiritual Leaders.” The Assembly was comprised of 150 of the most important religious and spiritual leaders in the world. It met for the last three days of the week at the Art Institute of Chicago, site of the original Parliament.
A “Concert for the 21st Century” was held in Grant Park on the final day. The closing ceremony (held on the same stage) was keynoted in a speech by the Dalai Lama of Tibet, with 20,000 in attendance.
The Parliament of World Religions was more than an opportunity for interfaith sharing. It also produced some concrete results: foremost was probably the adoption by the Assembly of a common statement, the Declaration of a Global Ethic. It also produced an unprecedented challenge to the religionists of the world in the form of the report to the Parliament of World Religions from the secular/scientific community, the Global 2000 Report Revisited: What Shall We Do? In addition, it witnessed an encounter among specialists and theologians in the “Conference on Pluralism”.
Throughout the week, lay people, theologians, and religious leaders grappled with various approaches to interfaith dialogue. All of us, even the proselytizers, were swept up into a vast experience in sharing and listening.
Speaker after speaker advocated that each of us listen openly and graciously to the beliefs of all others, no matter how different or strange. We were urged to allow the other to share, and allow the other to listen. This reigning philosophy goaded those of us who are used to disguising our religious affiliation—notably Urantia Book readers—to come out of the closet. After 19 years of reading the Book, this was the first religious gathering I have attended where I felt quite uninhibited about sharing my belief in The Urantia Book.
The spirit of the Parliament was one of general openness, but I was able to identify at least four distinct models for interreligious dialogue that seemed to animate the participants: exclusivist, inclusivist, pluralist, and functionalist.
We all know that many religions have spawned fundamentalist movements which find intolerable the relativism implied in interfaith dialogue. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention sent no representatives to the Parliament, nor did any of the strains of Islamic fundamentalism. My own mother church, the Eastern Orthodox, surprised many by withdrawing on the third day of the Parliament, on orders from the Patriarch in Istanbul, Turkey. The Orthodox were offended by the presence of several small “neo-pagan”, notably WICCA and the eco-feminist group called Covenant of the Goddess.
It was an embarrassment for me to realize that my two religious affiliations, the Greek Orthodox and the Urantian, were not represented at the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions.
Others of the exclusivist strain were more pragmatic. There was no shortage of proselytizing organizations who used the Parliament as a platform to promulgate “truth.” I personally met many attendees who held forth on the superiority of their tradition over others, or who had considerable difficulty allowing me to share my own peculiar faith.
The exclusivist approach might be described as “exoteric”, as opposed to the “esoteric” tendencies that exist within these same traditions. Generally, exoteric religionists identify as “absolute” some feature of the external form of their religion. A revealed text, a ritualistic practice, or some definition or symbol of God, is seen as superior to all others, in some sense. To permit relativism would cause an unacceptable insecurity in the faith.
By contrast with the exoteric, the esoteric’s faith is based on a direct mystical or personal experience of the Ultimate. Symbols and beliefs are experienced as transparent—an expedient way to mediate the encounter with God. “The esoteric finds the Absolute within traditions, as poets find poetry in poems,” says Frithjof Schuon, who has elaborated the distinction between exoteric and esoteric in The Transcendental Unity of Religions and elsewhere.
Esoteric believers in any tradition have an obvious basis for dialogue that is grounded in their common mystical experience. This would imply that there are only two types of religions: the exoteric and the esoteric, and these divergent approaches are to be found in each tradition. Schuon says the real divisions in world religion are not between the many religions, but these two very different types of religious persons.
I suppose I am an inclusivist. The Urantia Book seems to endorse this position in the “Second Discourse On Religion,” (UB 155:6.9), where we read that “the religion of the spirit requires only unity of experience. . . only unity of spirit feeling.”
The ultimate meaning of the Parliament for me was in the growing sense of the unity of religious experience as the ground for inter-religious dialogue. A unity of religious feeling was always palpable at the interfaith meditation sessions held each morning and evening. This sense of unity was especially true of the plenary sessions—grand events with several thousand people often in attendance, some watching by closed-circuit TV in adjoining ballrooms.
The culminating experience of spirit unity for me was the plenary on “The Inner Life,” held on the fourth night. Representatives of the major religions spoke—each one a master of the esoteric path within their tradition. As each intoned his or her experience of transcendent realities, the audience seemed to become more still. An unspoken consensus of the unity of spiritual experience hung in the air. I felt this especially in the poignant silences between their presentations, in the dignified demeanor of each representative, and in the ardor of the listening audience.
The meetings of the academics and theologians were concurrent with the popular workshops and lectures. They were open to any lay observers who could fit into the crowded ballrooms.
The academics wrestled with more exacting models for creation of a legitimate basis for interfaith dialogue. A dominant model among today’s theologians is “pluralism.” Raimundo Panikkar, a keynote speaker in the Conference on Pluralism, warned that we must be skeptical in our search for a “universal theory” of even that of a common essence of religion. He and others made clear the danger of a rush to find a “common essence” for, in the process, we might miss what is genuinely different, and therefore what is genuinely challenging in other religions. Stating in advance what is common may inhibit our ability to really listen, to be simply open. While rejecting the need to always find common ground, the theologians of pluralism paradoxically hold fast to the value of dialogue, while warning always against the pitfalls of a “radical skepticism.” They try to walk the difficult path between “inclusivism” and total relativism.
I define the functionalist model of interfaith dialogue as the search for broadly common goals and purposes, especially that of uniting all humankind—even non-believer—for the sake of the survival of the planet. Functionalists are pragmatic. They realize how difficult it would be to unite “. . . the follower of the differing intellectual theologies which so characterize Urantia.” (UB 92:5.16)
Functionalists can find considerable support for their approach in The Urantia Book, which preaches that “. . . Someday religionists will get together and actually effect cooperation on the basis of unity of ideals and purposes rather than attempting to do so on the basis of psychological opinions and theological beliefs.” (UB 99:5.7)
This Urantia Book statement is a fair description of the Parliament! The Assembly of Religious and Spiritual Leaders did succeed in unifying around the Declaration of a Global Ethic, which was issued on the final day of the Parliament. Meeting for three days in the auditorium of the Art Institute of Chicago, the site of the 1893 Parliament, the delegates debated this and many other proposals and, with a few abstentions, approved the document.
The Declaration bases unity on shared ethical principles, not theology. It affirms a broad and common understanding for ethical behavior for all peoples, for norms and standards describing what is acceptable, and unacceptable, across all religious and spiritual traditions. This includes commitments to non-violence, just economics, tolerance, equal rights, and respect for life. It also condemns inequities in the world economy, environmental abuses, media manipulation, sex discrimination, and religious violence. The Assembly also affirmed a process by which the Declaration could take root in the world community, through an ongoing process of debate and discussion in the religious community, aided by scholarly input and critique.
The Declaration was drafted by the noted Swiss theologian Hans Kung, by invitation of the Council of the Parliament. An extended argument for such a world ethic appears in his most recent book, Global Responsibility: In Search of a New Ethic, reviewed in a recent issue of The Spiritual Fellowship Journal.
Let us hope that the many lessons from the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions come home for Urantia Book readers. Can we envision a day when reader-believers in the fifth epochal revelation lead the way into a new epoch of religious tolerance and interfaith understanding—even world religious unity?