© 2011 L. Coll
© 2011 Urantia Association of Spain
| Facts, meanings, values and other trilogies | Luz y Vida — No. 27 — December 2011 — Index | Convergences and divergences: Human chromosomes |
What this world needs is a much higher concept of what God is, and to know that religion always is and always has been a matter of the individual’s personal experience with God, without intermediaries, or any other obstacle that prevents man from choose by their own free will to try to follow the will of the Father in heaven.
The eternal struggle between laymen and believers almost always ends in disastrous fanaticism on the part of the religious, and in violence and confrontations on the part of the laity, the non-believers.
And these two positions have almost always been wrong.
When will the human being learn that religion is a matter of personal experience, and that the whole matter is based on inner personal and spiritual growth?
The great dilemma of modern society is the following:
Why do the vast majority of people rebel against authoritative, institutional and established religions?
Ecclesiasticism is at once and forever incompatible with that living faith, growing spirit, and firsthand experience of the faith-comrades of Jesus in the brotherhood of man in the spiritual association of the kingdom of heaven. The praiseworthy desire to preserve traditions of past achievement often leads to the defense of outgrown systems of worship. The well-meant desire to foster ancient thought systems effectually prevents the sponsoring of new and adequate means and methods designed to satisfy the spiritual longings of the expanding and advancing minds of modern men. Likewise, the Christian churches of the twentieth century stand as great, but wholly unconscious, obstacles to the immediate advance of the real gospel—the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. (UB 195:10.8)
. . .Until the human race progresses to the level of a higher and more general recognition of the realities of spiritual experience, large numbers of men and women will continue to show a personal preference for those religions of authority which require only intellectual assent, in contrast to the religion of the spirit, which entails active participation of mind and soul in the faith adventure of grappling with the rigorous realities of progressive human experience. (UB 155:5.8)
The religions of authority can only divide men and set them in conscientious array against each other; the religion of the spirit will progressively draw men together and cause them to become understandingly sympathetic with one another. The religions of authority require of men uniformity in belief, but this is impossible of realization in the present state of the world. The religion of the spirit requires only unity of experience—uniformity of destiny—making full allowance for diversity of belief. The religion of the spirit requires only uniformity of insight, not uniformity of viewpoint and outlook. The religion of the spirit does not demand uniformity of intellectual views, only unity of spirit feeling. The religions of authority crystallize into lifeless creeds; the religion of the spirit grows into the increasing joy and liberty of ennobling deeds of loving service and merciful ministration. (UB 155:6.9)
When authoritative religions try to impose and coerce lifeless creeds on society, only secularism can be born. A rebellion arises against the authoritarian and dictatorial impositions that almost all religions have tried to forge on the minds of the people.
Secularism has been a rebellion in almost all religions against the imposition and coercion that religions of authority have practiced throughout history. The laity did not have to give up and sacrifice their inner and personal faith in a personal and universal God.
It is not necessary to sacrifice faith in God in order to enjoy the blessings of the modern secularistic revolt: tolerance, social service, democratic government, and civil liberties. It was not necessary for the secularists to antagonize true religion in order to promote science and to advance education. (UB 195:8.8)
But even after materialism and mechanism have been more or less vanquished, the devastating influence of twentieth-century secularism will still blight the spiritual experience of millions of unsuspecting souls.
Modern secularism has been fostered by two world-wide influences. The father of secularism was the narrow-minded and godless attitude of nineteenth- and twentieth-century so-called science—atheistic science. The mother of modern secularism was the totalitarian medieval Christian church. Secularism had its inception as a rising protest against the almost complete domination of Western civilization by the institutionalized Christian church.
At the time of this revelation, the prevailing intellectual and philosophical climate of both European and American life is decidedly secular—humanistic. For three hundred years Western thinking has been progressively secularized. Religion has become more and more a nominal influence, largely a ritualistic exercise. The majority of professed Christians of Western civilization are unwittingly actual secularists.
It required a great power, a mighty influence, to free the thinking and living of the Western peoples from the withering grasp of a totalitarian ecclesiastical domination. Secularism did break the bonds of church control, and now in turn it threatens to establish a new and godless type of mastery over the hearts and minds of modern man. The tyrannical and dictatorial political state is the direct offspring of scientific materialism and philosophic secularism. Secularism no sooner frees man from the domination of the institutionalized church than it sells him into slavish bondage to the totalitarian state. Secularism frees man from ecclesiastical slavery only to betray him into the tyranny of political and economic slavery. (UB 195:8.1-4)
The great problem of this modern and materialistic society is that, having abandoned God, it has also thrown overboard the highest values, Love, peace, the search for truth, inner values, and that only produces a deep void in the mind and spirit of people.
The big problem with secularism is that it has rebelled against God and the high values of eternity and well-being of the human being, and that ultimately only produces a lot of unhappiness and ignorance.
Materialism denies God, secularism simply ignores him; at least that was the earlier attitude. More recently, secularism has assumed a more militant attitude, assuming to take the place of the religion whose totalitarian bondage it onetime resisted. Twentieth-century secularism tends to affirm that man does not need God. But beware! this godless philosophy of human society will lead only to unrest, animosity, unhappiness, war, and world-wide disaster. (UB 195:8.5)
Neither secularism, nor religion: what this world needs is to enter a new, more advanced stage of progress and advanced spiritual training.
The authoritative religions have already fulfilled their role in human history. The religion of the future will be the religion of the spirit, based on the individual’s personal experience and selfless service to others. That is the religion that the great teachers of truth have taught throughout history. Authoritative religions have been the scaffolding and crutches no longer needed by progressive and enterprising people seeking the truth.
The religion of the spirit promotes the highest type of human civilization, in the sense that it creates the highest type of spiritual personality and proclaims the sacredness of that person.
| Facts, meanings, values and other trilogies | Luz y Vida — No. 27 — December 2011 — Index | Convergences and divergences: Human chromosomes |