© 2015 Dave Holt
© 2015 The Urantia Book Fellowship
| Effective Study Group Leadership | Volume 15, Number 1, 2015 (Summer) — Index | Destiny of the Master Michaels? |
People are throwing rocks at our shining city on the hill. Do we too, carrying our heavy stones, prepare to meet them on a battle ground? Most observers agree that moral differences and disagreements lie behind the enmity raging between Islam and the West. Polls that measure public opinion back them up.
Some think this is not publicly acknowledged in the political arena as it should be. Perhaps politicians are afraid to speak about morality, a social or political morality, preferring to leave it underneath religion’s umbrella. The governing systems favored in Islamic countries do not separate politics and morality, the separation of church and state that we attempt to implement.
My interest in moral codes, systems of behavior regarding standards of right and wrong, was piqued when I read in a magazine, “Canadians are still Victorians.” The observation echoed my own thoughts about Canada, where I was born and grew up, in what was known as the British Commonwealth. I recognized what I inherited, the old British morality in myself, even though I was a sixties child, one who rebelled against Victorianism. I knew I was still a Victorian because I get squeamish over public references to sex and the body, whereas Americans seem quite comfortable with such things. Secret references are okay to Victorians, though usually more lurid.
The British Empire, and its colonies, was built on the repressed and sublimated industrial energy of the Victorian era. The Empire’s Victorianism began to be undone, unzipped, uncorseted if you will, first by two world wars, and then by the counterculture movement of the 1960s.
I asked my American-born wife about her moral influences. Her childhood was shaped by fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity, a moral system she described as Calvinist. Most would probably say that Puritan morality shaped the American moral code. Puritans inherited the Calvinist tradition (John Calvin 1509-1564). Today, this moral system expresses itself politically by espousing traditional “family” values. These have become associated with “Christian values,” in our era. These Calvinist heirs despise socialism in any form decrying it as Communist, “the nanny state,” etc. Through “right wing” Christianity, the modern version of social conservatism motivates the forces that try to roll back the country’s cultural orientation left over from the influence of Counterculture or liberal morality, portrayed as having a non-religious basis.
The continuing strong influence that the old moral codes exert on our politics and economics can easily be observed. The traditional moralities that persist today were created and evolved within religious or church communities, the same way Islam created theirs.
Religion has handicapped social development in many ways, but without religion there would have been no enduring morality nor ethics, no worth-while civilization. [UB 92:3.6]
Our current system of morality gradually evolved during an era of secularism, which excluded religious considerations from public life. We have a code of conduct that is more ethically relativistic, culturally conditioned, and thus not derived from everyone’s human experience.
None of the codes of conduct mentioned here live up to the philosophical definition found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/), a “universal normative code of conduct that under any plausible conditions would be endorsed by all rational persons, often independently of their religious beliefs.”
Born out of the secular age, the counterculture of the 60’s and 70’s was a breakaway movement, differing from other traditions in that a lack of religious affiliation became more common. This new anti-authoritarian movement included an inclination to dismiss the necessity or value of family life and conventional marriage; a support for sexual freedoms; stronger advocacy for gay and women’s rights, and also advocated for civil rights, minorities, the environment, etc. The counterculture influence, in association with other circumstances, has created the increasingly secular state we have in the United States today.
This localized clash of differing moralities is often called the Culture Wars. Worse perhaps than this ongoing American quarrel is the discomforting feeling that the country, with the advance of secularism, no longer has a moral philosophy. Or that which we had is being swamped by materialism, acquisitiveness, the lust for power, and greed. More accurately, we do not have a moral philosophy that unifies us. An intriguing irony here is that both groups, social conservatives and the counter culture, have offended the Islamic moral sensibility in different ways, the “right” insisting that Jesus is the way, and the “left” with its sex, drugs and rock and roll. The clash of the Middle East with America, who Ayatollah Khomeini named, “the Great Satan,” now occupies the world stage.
Looking over the U.S. cultural landscape, none of the moral systems mentioned, Puritan, Calvinist, CounterCulture, Victorian, or Muslim can win over the hearts and minds of all, or even most people in a diverse society such as ours; thus the current climate of confusion, conflict, and social dysfunction. Our shining city on the hill struggles to keep its lights burning bright for the world.
How can we establish a universal moral code in such a pluralistic society as the United States? It is near impossible to adapt a socially constructed moral code based on a religious tradition to meet the needs of all. Yet the country is clearly in need of some unifying vision or value system, as is the planet, with Islamists and Westerners hurling judgments of fanaticism and immorality at each other. People quote the Bible’s famous proverb, Proverbs 29:18 with its dark intimations, “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” sometimes without adding the reminder, “but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.”
The Urantia Book warns, “A lasting social system without a morality predicated on spiritual realities can no more be maintained than could the solar system without gravity.” [UB 195:5.9]
The Urantia Book teaches that we will achieve equality of the sexes on our way to an age of light and life, “Sex equality prevails on all advanced worlds.” [UB 49:4.4] “The apostles were at first shocked by…Jesus’ treatment of women; he made it very clear to them that women were to be accorded equal rights with men in the kingdom.” [UB 138:8.11]
The West likes to castigate Islam on this issue, decrying the burka, the repression, the unjust and unequal applications of Shariah law, the punitive sentences, etc., and counters the charge of immorality in one way by defending our country’s record on women’s rights. But we must look at the violence we commit against women in Western Christian culture. The industries of sex workers and pornography created by our free market economy have led to the debasement of women and trampled those very rights in our own land, making it difficult to cast judgment on Islamist societies. We don’t see how we ourselves demean women in our thoughts, regarding them as sex objects. The hardly acknowledged impact of these sex and pornography industries on our society is vast. This invites Islam’s disdain of our values and culture, a not undeserved outcome.
The thought/question: how to find and establish a basis for interaction by appealing to a common morality? has interested me ever since I published my interfaith project statement on the social media site, LinkedIn. “The task that lies ahead for us is to bring about religious unity, not to seek a comfort zone in uniformity of thinking. Interfaith workers seek to discover the unity in each other’s spiritual traditions and shared goals.”
Where do we look to establish a universal moral code around which we may unify? Efforts in the past included Immanuel Kant’s famous categorical imperative, “an unconditional moral law that applies to all, and is independent of any personal motive and desire.” He recognized “the moral law within,” a natural altruism, an urge to choose to act in the world such that our actions will improve the world. His approach to a universal code of conduct was made from the basis of philosophic reason rather than religion.
The Golden Rule naturally comes to mind because of its near-universal appearance in many wisdom traditions, with sources as ancient as the Egyptian and Indian civilizations. The principle of reciprocity we know as the Golden Rule preceded Kant and comes closest to fulfilling the requirement of a universal moral guide. This Ethic of Reciprocity, as it’s also known, appears in Islam as well. “Not one of you truly believes until he wishes for others what he wishes for himself,” said the Prophet Muhammed, (Hadith).
The negative form of the rule appears in some traditions. Confucius summed up his teaching as: “Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.” (Analects 15:23)
The Urantia Book confirms that Jesus based his “system” of morality on the child-parent Father-son relationship as the gospel accounts had inferred. As long as families are universally revered in our world, this model could help repair our fractured vision, and provide the basis of a shared morality, but it has not been put into practice. Secularism and the counter culture have become unintentional obstacles to this ideal.
Without God, without religion, scientific secularism can never co-ordinate its forces, harmonize its divergent and rivalrous interests, races, and nationalisms. This secularistic human society, notwithstanding its unparalleled materialistic achievement, is slowly disintegrating. The chief cohesive force resisting this disintegration of antagonism is nationalism. And nationalism is the chief barrier to world peace. [UB 195:8.10]
Nationalism is also a barrier to the discovery of a universal basis for a unifying moral code.
Many who are not part of a church or religious group’s condoned moral system still carry a collection of moral sets of principles that include the Golden Rule. “Some persons discern and interpret the golden rule as a purely intellectual affirmation of human fraternity. Others experience this expression of human relationship as an emotional gratification of the tender feelings of the human personality. Another mortal recognizes this same golden rule as the yardstick for measuring all social relations, the standard of social conduct. Still others look upon it as being the positive injunction of a great moral teacher who embodied in this statement the highest concept of moral obligation as regards all fraternal relationships. In the lives of such moral beings the golden rule becomes the wise center and circumference of all their philosophy.” [UB 180:5.6]
The “great moral teacher,” Jesus in our culture, taught a morality based on the model of parental devotion on a cosmic level, as well as one mirrored in ideal family relationships on Urantia. “If a son shall ask for bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?” (Luke 11:11) He taught four steps, by way of a personal religious experience, to discernment of the universal morality of the Golden Rule, including that we must learn to accept forgiveness to actually practice the Golden Rule.
The forgiveness does not have to be sought, only received as the consciousness of re-establishment of loyalty relations between the creature and the Creator. [UB 89:10.6]P.
Faith is the price you pay for entrance into the family of God; bur forgiveness is the act of God which accepts your faith as the price of admission. And the reception of the forgiveness of God by a kingdom believer involves a definite and actual experience and exists in the following four steps…
1. God’s forgiveness is made actually available and is personally experienced by man just in so far as he forgives his fellows.
2. Man will not truly forgive his fellows unless he loves them as himself.
3. To thus love your neighbor as yourself is the highest ethics.
4. Moral conduct, true righteousness, becomes, then, the natural result of such love. (UB 170:3.3-7)
Though presented here as the necessary foundation of moral conduct, the idea of forgiveness is lamentably absent from the discussion in our current climate. “Today the nations of the world are directed by men who have a superabundance of ideas, but they are poverty-stricken in ideals. That is the explanation of poverty, divorce, war, and racial hatreds.” [UB 111:4.10]
It does not appear that much has changed since The Urantia Book published this remark in 1955. The idea of national political leaders forgiving each other looks as hopeless as ever, and implementing the Golden Rule in political negotiations laughably impossible.
There are strong objections to Jesus emphasis on forgiveness, his “turn the other cheek philosophy,” feelings that the generosity to enemies he advocated is just not possible in our world. Although we cannot achieve a universally agreed on moral code, “Neither can environmental limitations, even on an isolated world, thwart the personal attainment of the individual mortal; Jesus of Nazareth, as a man among men, personally achieved the status of light and life over nineteen hundred years ago on Urantia.” [UB 55:11.7]
The development of ethics is an evolutionary one. We begin with an inborn, innate sense of duty that responds instinctually. “Ethical obligations are innate, divine and universal…” [UB 54:4.4]
As morality continues to evolve, we progress from the level of mind that recognizes its duty, “by a cosmic technique of self-revelation…mind-reason intuitively knows its moral duty,” [UB 16:6.10] to the level of heart and mind knowing and experiencing love. The desire to do good to others is born in our consciousness.
We learn to develop a “moral will,” as we choose to use the human instinct for morality to make ethical decisions, choosing good over evil. “Goodness is always growing toward new levels of the increasing liberty of moral self-realization and spiritual personality attainment—the discovery of, and identification with, the indwelling Adjuster.” [UB 132:2.5]
We move beyond mere tolerance of the other to valuing the other, learning to love others as the Father himself loves us (1 John, 4:7). We advance to spiritually moral actions, spending ourselves in service to humanity. Finally we attain that spiritual level where brotherhood is founded not on duty alone, along with the proper choosing of good over evil; but upon the love of humanity’s common father, the Universal Father as revealed in The Urantia Book; “. . . the compelling presence of that new and all-dominating love of your fellows… will so soon fill your soul to overflowing because of the consciousness which has been born in your heart that you are a child of God.” [UB 130:6.3]
Morality is elevated by revelations such as that which Jesus proclaimed to the frightened young man named Fortune on the Island of Crete. “Evolutionary religion may become ethical, but only revealed religion becomes truly and spiritually moral.” [UB 2:6.2]
Jesus taught us that the personal journey beginning with the “four steps” mentioned above will result in a new societal direction, one of service to the spiritual brotherhood. The development of a universal morality has to originate with individuals in their worshipful communion with the divine First Source, God the Father.
In The Urantia Book, “The one characteristic of Jesus’ teaching was that the morality of his philosophy originated in the personal relation of the individual to God—this very child-father relationship. . . . The golden rule as restated by Jesus demands active social contact; the older negative rule could be obeyed in isolation.” [UB 140:10.5] By spiritualizing the concept of duty, choosing to partner with God and to do his will, we gradually upstep our moral code to one that unifies all who personally experience God’s presence in their lives.
In his latest book, The Future of God, Deepak Chopra points out, “Reality can’t be defined by rules and laws. It is dynamic, unbound, creative, all-embracing and eternal.” (pg. 240)
In the same way, Jesus eschewed rules of living. It is by way of personal religious experience that we discover the universal morality of the golden rule. “Jesus stripped morality of all rules and ceremonies and elevated it to majestic levels of spiritual thinking and truly righteous living.” [UB 140:10.5]
The universal morality we seek is destined to unfold as our knowledge evolves further to meet a new obligation to God the Supreme, the god of action, the finite god. [UB 117:4.2] who is missing from traditional teachings such as the Bible. We will grow in our acceptance of God as Father. But we also come to learn our duty to the evolving Supreme Being, although it challenges the Christian concept of God, the biblical God that is absolute and unchanging. To help manifest the Supreme, we must act, serve, complete our decisions, blaze our trail “of actualized reality,” and realize our potential to aid the evolving Supreme. We reveal this experiential God in our choices, “action, completion of decisions, is essential to the evolutionary attainment of…progressive kinship with…the Supreme Being.” [UB 110:6.17]
We don’t so much hear instructions about the will of God in our lives and then act on them; that was the old viewpoint we grew up with. Rather, we point ourselves in a direction, and are supported in our growth and development through a harmonization of our direction with the Supreme, a god that nurtures all possibilities. In the Supreme is our assurance of the fulfillment of our potential and promise, a ladder to the dreams we have a “duty” to fulfill.
The temporal relation of man to the Supreme is the foundation for cosmic morality, the universal sensitivity to, and acceptance of, duty. This is a morality which transcends the temporal sense of relative right and wrong; it is a morality directly predicated on the self-conscious creature’s appreciation of experiential obligation to experiential Deity. [UB 117:4.8]
It includes an obligation to our community to “let our light so shine” as to reveal the Supreme in our lives. This is a ways off in the future for many of our fellow citizens on the path of truth, but The Urantia Book has seen fit to reveal it now.
Against all odds, I prefer to hold high the viewpoint that every nation, tribe, race, age group, ethnicity, man, and woman, speaking every language, longs for the same things: love, peace, family, and personal fulfillment. In spite of appearances to the contrary, we are all moving towards the same goal, a world establishment of a human community where peace reigns, wars have been brought to an end, and our dreams have a chance to be realized.
How do we do it? Not many, at this point, seek a personal experience of the divine Father and Mother God, the true religion that Jesus revealed here on Urantia. A modern day prophet of the twentieth century, Reverend Martin Luther King, understood the need. Back in 1966, he preached:
“The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood … This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink . . . dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives . . . and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. . . . The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.” www.thevalueofsparrows.com/2014/07/13/sermon-transformed-non-conformist-by-martin-luther-king-jr/
Encourage, and join, gatherings of small groups of individuals who share the same personal journey, those who are learning and practicing forgiveness of the other. Though the numbers might be small, we can implement the results, manifest a fuller understanding of the golden rule, and reveal it in our lives, as the love of the emerging Supreme, to the world.
Dave Holt, born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, of English, Irish, and Ojibway Indian ancestry, relocated to the San Francisco Bay area in 1970. He graduated from S.F. State University’s Writing program in 1995 (B.A. & M.A.), and has won several poetry prizes including the Thomas Merton Foundation’s Poetry of the Sacred Prize, the Ina Coolbrith Prize (Nature category), the Maggie H. Meyer prize (2x) and is published in several literary magazines. His prose/poems collection, Voyages in Ancestral Islands won a Literary Cultural Arts award in 2013. During his time with the Fellowship’s Education Committee, he presented workshops and worship programs at several International Conferences and Summer Study conferences from 1996 to
Wattles, Jeff. The Golden Rule. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h573.html, a discussion about morality as perceived in the Muslim world
https://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2010/06/30-muslim-world-skerry American Culture and the Muslim World by Peter Skerry
https://www.college.cengage.com/english/chaffee/thinking_critically/9e/assets/ students/chaffee_chs9to12_pp2.pdf Thinking critically about moral issues
https://www.islamicawakening.com/viewarticle.php?articleID=872 Islam site on secularism
https://www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=28 for Dallas Willard (1935 – 2013) on Jesus’s morality, the need for forgiveness.
https://www.harryhiker.com/chronology.htm for Confucius golden rule, negative form.
https://www.sites.google.com/a/kent.edu/jwattles/home/golden-rule-home online links to Jeff
https://www.universalmoralcode.com/ addresses the topic without mentioning God
| Effective Study Group Leadership | Volume 15, Number 1, 2015 (Summer) — Index | Destiny of the Master Michaels? |