© 2004 Antonio Moya, traducción
© 2004 Urantia Association of Spain
A Book of Love.- This book reveals to us, among other things, that the only reality that can ever unite all peoples and all religions of the earth is the brotherhood of men based on the fatherhood of God. God the Father divinely loves his children, without exception. If we have the same Father, then we are all brothers and sisters.
When the different religions recognize the spiritual sovereignty of God the Father, then all these religions will live in peace. There is no chosen people. There are only sons and daughters of God. Only when God the Father is recognized by his children will men become brothers and live together in peace on earth. The great religions of our planet are good to the extent that they lead man to God. All religions would benefit from studying and assimilating the best of the truths contained in the others. Religious people would do better to embrace the best of the living spiritual faith of their neighbors, rather than denouncing the worst of their remnant superstitions and outdated rituals.
True religion is exclusively a personal spiritual experience, which consists in knowing God as Father and knowing man as brother. This is what produces the adjustment of the “I” to other “I’s,” and it involves the social or collective aspect of life. The fruits of true religion therefore also encompass social service. “Love one another…”
Institutionalized religions must abandon all hope of achieving uniformity of creeds, dogmas, and rites, which are intellectual. But they can achieve (and will one day achieve) unity in the sincere worship of the Father of all, which is indeed spiritual. True religion does not consist in slavishly believing in threats of punishment or magical promises of future mystical rewards. Religions of authority will never achieve unification. The religion of the spirit will progressively attract some people to others and provoke a sympathetic understanding between them. Religions of authority demand a uniform belief from men, something that is never possible. Religions of authority can only divide men and set consciences against one another. The religion of the spirit does not demand uniformity of intellectual points of view, but only unity of spiritual feeling. Religions of authority crystallize into inert creeds. The religion of the spirit becomes the increasing joy and freedom due to ennoblement through acts of loving service and merciful care.
A Book of Hope.- There is survival after death. And death is only the beginning of a lifelong journey of exciting adventures and endless wonders.
Indeed, those natural impulses that God has placed in us and that we call the attraction of adventure, the hunger for discovery, the innate dream of travel, the hunger for beauty, for love, and for truth—all these aspirations have not been given to us in vain. These higher hopes are destined to be fully realized during the long ages to come, because God cannot deceive us. As Victor Hugo said: “If man is not immortal, God is not honorable.” Death is no longer despairing, since it is the means invented by God to bring us from the material world to the spiritual world. The scenes of weeping and lamentation, characteristic of the primitive periods of human evolution, will one day be replaced by profound peace and certain hope. It would certainly be advantageous if the less evolved humans in a disordered and backward world like our planet would learn to regard natural death with the serenity, if not the joyful certainty, that living faith provides.
Readers of The Urantia Book acknowledge that they have virtually never read the same work in its entirety multiple times. Yet they have reread the two thousand pages of The Urantia Book more than five times, ten times, fifteen times… and always with admiration, with a growing passion. There is only one explanation for this incomprehensible behavior: one holds in one’s hands a revelation of the facts and truths that scientists, historians, philosophers, and men intrigued by God and the churches have long sought. That this Book is a revelation may be surprising, but who are we to dare impose silence on God Himself forever? How can we resign ourselves to believing that revelation ended with the coming of Jesus?
THE FIRST PART pays all due respect to the Lord. They finally reveal God to us, never contradicting the most rigorous logic and in a manner distinct from cold symbolism. They speak to us with the only authority that knowledge confers. These revelators know what and who they are speaking of. When they present God to us as Infinite Truth, Infinite Beauty, and Infinite Goodness, we are immediately enchanted and filled with enthusiasm. This God, our Father, since He is love, and since love is creative, has projected into space the colossal universe whose unimaginable structure is finally explained to us: seven superuniverses, each containing a trillion planets, inhabited or one day habitable. Why persist in declaring that we are the only intelligences in the universe?
PART TWO tells the story of a fraction of one of these seven superuniverses. This fragment represents one hundred thousandth of that superuniverse. It is called the Local Universe and is composed of ten million planets, inhabited or someday habitable, for the entire universe is evolving and progressing. And it is of this myriad that our little planet Earth, christened Urantia, is a part. They tell us abundantly and magnificently about this part of the universe—its Creator, its organization, its administration, its physical structure, its history, and its extraordinary dwelling places that will be ours after death. What marvelous adventures the afterlife holds for us! Life finally has a meaning!
THE THIRD PART interests us greatly. It is the history of Urantia, our planet among the millions in our Local Universe, but which saw its gilding restored thanks to the incarnation of Jesus, its creator. Here is where our scientists can expunge their discoveries and hypotheses and find several “missing links.” And the secrets continue in sublime pages about the origin, implantation, and evolution of life until the birth of man. The revelators are precise: the first human couple, arising through evolution and mutation, appeared on Earth 993,483 years ago (in 1997). They confirm that we are not descended from apes. On the contrary, apes and humans have a common ancestor. In short, they sketch a superhuman picture of the evolution of races, political, economic, and familial institutions, as well as religion.
THE LAST PART (more than 700 pages) is devoted to the life and teachings of Jesus, year after year, if not day after day. Here is something unprecedented and sublime, most moving! Alongside these revealed pages, the four Gospels, otherwise instructive and motivating, appear from now on as a preliminary outline of this invigorating, electrifying, and galvanizing account.
This revelation arrives in time. It lands at a time when people are increasingly forgetting the reality of God and abandoning churches and temples, which no longer respond to their expectations because they do not transmit Jesus’ message of integral love. Jesus came to reveal to us the spiritual brotherhood of humanity, based on the spiritual fatherhood of a God of love. This is the true religion! Throughout the ages of a planet, revelation is periodic and always progressive. This is the universal plan. The Urantia Book is the fifth epochal or historical revelation. It is therefore addressed to every human being on the entire planet. The fourth revelation was brought to us by Jesus 2,000 years ago. Today we have evolved somewhat. Scripture has spread universally. We are therefore ripe to receive, in written form, a broader truth.
In the age of the present revelation, the prevailing intellectual and philosophical climate in the world is distinctly secular and humanistic. It has taken great power, a powerful influence, to free the minds and lives of certain peoples from the drying influence of totalitarian religious domination. Secularism has broken the shackles of church control; this same secularism now threatens to establish a new kind of atheistic dominion over the hearts and minds of modern men. Materialism denies God; secularism merely ignores Him. Twentieth-century materialism tends to affirm that man has no need of God. But beware! An atheistic philosophy of human society will only produce unrest and can never bring peace to humanity. It is simply impossible to establish the brotherhood of men by denying or ignoring the Fatherhood of God. Secular optimism in social and political matters is an illusion. Without God, neither liberation nor freedom, nor goods nor riches will bring peace or happiness. Man is a religious animal. Religions as institutions may disappear, but the religious instinct remains. The Russia of yesterday screams this at us today. You can’t kill an instinct. Not this one, of course.
The time is ripe for the resurrection of the human Jesus, who emerges from the tomb of theological traditions and religious dogmas accumulated over two thousand years. Jesus was admired by all who encountered him. He exerted a great fascination and a strong influence on his friends as well as his enemies. Crowds would follow him for weeks at a time to hear his condescending words and observe the simplicity of his life. Dedicated men and women loved Jesus with an almost superhuman affection. And the more they knew him, the more they loved him. Even today and in all future ages, the more a person knows this man-God, the more they will love him and want to follow him. What a transcendent service the present revelation would render if, through it, the Son of Man could be presented, as the very living Jesus, to the Christian churches, to all other religions, to all the peoples of planet Earth!
The Urantia Book allows us to discover a new and better path. This Book answers our most serious, most agonizing, and most intelligent questions. And it answers in detail, always with implacable logic, which gives it superhuman credibility. So, who is this book intended for?
To you, who seek happiness.
To you, who would like to find the true meaning of life, of your life.
To you, who dare to think for yourself.
To you, to whom religions have not always been able to show the true face of God, our Father.
Translated from French by Antonio Moya.