© 2004 The Brotherhood of Man Library
In the not too far distant future there will come a time when much of The Urantia Book will have become outdated. This will be because of the outdated-ness of much of its science as well as considerable portions of the historical content, including its biblical material.
There can now be little doubt that the revelators anticipated this. Throughout the book there is scattered a huge amount of material that relates directly to things of spiritual value. In fact there is so much in this category that we are forced to speculate on whether the main function of the Urantia Papers is to divert our attention from the material and the secular to, “things of the spirit.”
That this is factually so is illustrated by:
“Only those human experiences which were of spiritual value are common possessions of the surviving mortal and the returning Adjuster and hence are immediately remembered subsequent to mortal survival.” (UB 40:9.7) Think about that!!
Despite a large number of references to “spirituality” and “spiritual value,” in the Urantia Papers, nowhere do these Papers provide an exact definition of such terms. Among the best we are given is:
“Everything we do that is good contributes to the enhancement of the afterlife,” combined with statements such as “only those human experiences of spiritual value,” survive—“your past life and its memories having neither spiritual meaning nor morontia value, will perish with the material brain” (UB 112:5.22).
Thus, we can take spiritual value to mean “that which is good.” Other relevant statements are:
Spirituality is the indicator of one’s nearness to God and the measure of one’s usefulness to our fellow beings. Spirituality enhances the ability to discover beauty in things, recognize truth in meanings, and discover goodness in values. Spiritual development is determined by our capacity thereof and is directly proportional to the elimination of the selfish qualities of love. (UB 100:2.4)
Actual spiritual status is the measure of Deity attainment, attunement to the indwelling Spirit of God. The achievement of finality of spirituality is equivalent to the attainment of the maximum of reality, the maximum of Godlikeness. (UB 100:2.5)
From which we conclude: Spirituality is what God is—and is measurable by our nearness to God, our God-likeness.
First and last—eternally—the infinite God is a Father. God is a Father in the highest possible sense of that term. He is eternally motivated by the perfect idealism of divine love and tender nature that finds its strongest expression and greatest satisfaction in loving and being loved.
Selflessness is inherent in parental love. God loves not like a father but as a father.
The First Father is universal spirit, eternal truth, infinite reality, and father personality—a transcendent reality. But God is even more. He is a saving person and a loving Father to all who enjoy spiritual peace on Earth, and who crave to experience personality survival in death.
The existence of God is utterly beyond all possibility of demonstration, except for the God-consciousness of the human mind and the presence of the God-Spirit that indwells the mortal intellect—and is bestowed as the free gift of the Universal Father. It is not there by right of possession, but it is designed to be so for all those who choose to survive the mortal existence.
The Universal Father is the acme of divine personality; he is the origin and destiny of all personality; he is infinite personality. But although God is much more than a personality as it is understood by man, we equally well know he cannot be anything less than holy, just and great, an eternal, infinite, true, beautiful, loving, and good personality.
Only through a personality approach can we begin to comprehend the unity of God. To deny the personality of the First Source and Center leaves only the choice between two philosophical dilemmas—materialism or pantheism.
God is spirit—spirit personality; man is also spirit—potential spirit personality. Jesus of Nazareth attained the full realization of man’s spirit potential. Therefore his life of achieving the Father’s will becomes man’s most real and ideal revelation of the personality of God.
There sojourns within each mortal being a fragment of God, a part and parcel of divinity, the Spirit of God that indwells each individual. And the presence of this indwelling Spirit of God is evidenced by:
When the mind believes God and the soul knows God and when, with the fostering of the indwelling Spirit, they all desire God, then is survival of the individual assured.
The material self has personality and identity, temporal identity. The pre-personal indwelling God-Spirit also has identity, eternal identity. Together, the material personality and the spirit pre-personality are capable of so uniting their creative attributes so as to bring into existence the surviving entity—the immortal soul.
The nature of God can be best understood by the revelation of the Father that Jesus of Nazareth unfolded in his manifold teachings and in his superb life in the flesh.
The divine nature can also be better understood by mankind if individuals regard themselves as children of God—and look up to the Creator as a true and spiritual Father.
God’s primal perfection consists in the inherent perfection of the goodness of his divine nature. And God’s attributes of love, truth, beauty, and goodness are definitive of the meaning of all such terms.
The creature’s need is wholly sufficient to ensure the full flow of the Father’s tender mercies and saving grace.
The greatest evidence of the goodness of God and the supreme reason for loving him is the indwelling of his Spirit—the Spirit that so patiently awaits the hour when you both shall, eternally, become as one.
When man loses sight of the love of a personal God, the kingdom of God becomes, at best, merely the kingdom of good. Love is the dominant characteristic of all God’s personal dealings with his creatures.
It is the indwelling Spirit of God that individualizes the love of God to each human soul. And man’s nearest and dearest approach to God is by and through love—for God is love.
In the physical universe we may see divine beauty, in the intellectual world we may discern eternal truth, but the goodness of God is found only in the spiritual world of personal religious experience.
In its true essence, religion is a faith trust in the goodness of God.
In philosophy, God could be great and absolute, somehow even intelligent and personal, but in religion God must also be moral, he must be good. Man may fear a great God, but he loves and trusts only a good God. Therefore, to be lovable, God must be good.
This goodness of God is part of the personality of God. Its full revelation appears only in the personal religious experience of the believing children of God. The entire mortal concept of God is transcendently illuminated by the revelatory life of Jesus of Nazareth.
Truth is beautiful because it is both replete and symmetrical. When man searches for truth, he pursues the divinely real.
Divine truth is best known by its spiritual flavor.
Truth is coherent, beauty attractive, goodness stabilizing.
Within the bounds of that which is consistent with the divine nature, it is literally true, with God all things are possible.
God is all and in all. But even that is not all of God.
The creature not only exists in God, but God also lives in the creature—and in wrongdoing we torment the indwelling Spirit of God for it needs must go through the consequences of our evil thinking with the human mind of its own incarceration.
To you, the creature, many of the acts of the all powerful Creator seem to be heartless and cruel. But this is not true. God’s doings are all purposeful, intelligent, wise, kind, and eternally considerate of the best good, not always of the individual, but for the welfare and best good of all concerned from the lowest to the highest. But many things do occur on the evolutionary worlds that are not the personal doings of the Universal Father.
God knows all things. The divine mind is conscious of, and conversant with, the thought of all creation. His knowledge of events is universal and perfect.
The infinite and eternal Ruler of the universes is power, form, energy, process, pattern, principle, presence, and idealized reality. But he is more. He is personal. And he exercises a sovereign will, experiences self-consciousness of divinity, executes the mandates of a creative mind, pursues the satisfaction of the realization of an eternal purpose, and manifests a Father’s love and affection for his universe children.
In the hearts of men the Universal Father may not always have his way; but in the conduct and destiny of a planet the divine plan prevails; the eternal purpose of wisdom and love always triumphs.
If God should retire as the upholder of all creation, there would immediately occur a universal collapse. Except for God, there would be no such thing as reality.
The Father desires all his creatures to be in personal communion with him. Therefore settle in your philosophy now: God is approachable; the way is open.
Likewise is man’s final destiny assured when individuals become as one with their indwelling God-Spirit thereby proclaiming to the universe that such an ascender has made an irrevocable decision to forever live the Father’s will.
The divine presence cannot be discovered anywhere more certainly than in your attempted communion with the indwelling God-Spirit. What a mistake to dream of a God far off in the skies when the Universal Father lives within your mind.
As the soul of joint mind and God-Spirit creation becomes more existent, there also evolves a new phase of soul consciousness which is increasingly capable both of experiencing the presence and recognizing the spirit leadings of the indwelling Spirit-of-God.
It requires revelation to show that the First Cause of Science and the self-existent Unity of Philosophy are the God of religion, full of mercy, goodness, and love and pledged to effect the eternal survival of his children on Earth.
God is not only the determiner of destiny—he is our destiny.
God-consciousness is experienced in three stages—first in mind consciousness, the comprehension of the idea of God; second in soul consciousness, the realization of the ideal of God; then last dawns spirit-consciousness, the realization of the spirit reality of God. By unification of these three factors there dawns the realization of the personality of God. In achieving this unification man can thrive in the personal experience of divine companionship and in the spiritual satisfactions of true worship.
All personality , from the lowest mortal creature to the highest creator dignitary of divine status, is centered completely in the Universal Father.
God, the Father, is the bestower and the conservator of every personality. Likewise the Father is the destiny of all those finite personalities who choose to do the divine will, those who love God and long to be like him.
God is personally conscious of, and in personal touch with, all personalities of all levels of self-conscious existence—and this consciousness is independent of the mission of the God-Spirit-Within.
“The nature of God can best be understood by the revelation of the Father which Jesus of Nazareth unfolded in his manifold teachings and in his superb mortal life in the flesh. The divine nature can also be better understood if individuals regard themselves as children of God and look up to the Paradise Creator as their true spiritual Father.” (UB 2:0.1)
Only the real religion of personal spiritual experience can function helpfully and creatively in the present crisis of civilization.
Religionists must function in society, in industry, and in politics as individuals—not as groups, parties, or institutions.
Religionists are of no more value in the tasks of social reconstruction than non-religionists.
The only proper attitude of organized religion consists in the teaching of non-violence, the doctrine of peaceful evolution in the place of violent revolution—peace on Earth and goodwill amongst all mankind.
The kingdom of heaven on Earth is neither a social nor an economic order; it is an exclusively spiritual family of God-knowing individuals.
No matter what upheavals may attend the growth of a civilization, religion is genuine and worthwhile if it fosters the sovereignty of truth, beauty, and goodness—and through love and worship this becomes meaningful as consciousness of the presence of God and fellowship with all mankind.
Purely factual knowledge exerts very little direct influence upon the personal performance of the individual. It is what one believes rather than what one knows that dominates our attitude to our fellows.
There is no danger in religion becoming more and more a private and personal experience—provided it does not lose its motivation for selfless, loving service.
Mankind’s greatest spiritual jeopardy consists in partial progress—unfinished growth—the forsaking of religions of authority and fear without grasping firm hold upon the revelatory religion of love.
In modern times, religious progress is hindered by the incompatibility of primitive and exclusive belief systems such as those that:
What is now needed is the harmony that can proceed from acceptance of the conjoint existence of God-consciousness, spirit, mind, and energy.
Religion is not a slavish belief in threats of punishment or promises of magical rewards. Rather, true religion is to know God as your Father and mankind as your family.
The religion of Jesus is the most dynamic influence ever to activate the human race. Jesus shattered tradition, destroyed dogma, and called upon mankind to seek to achieve the highest ideals in time and eternity—to be perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect.
The doctrine of the total depravity of man destroyed much of the potential of religion for effecting social repercussions of an uplifting nature and of inspirational value. Jesus sought to restore the dignity of mankind when he declared we are all children of God.
Someday religionists will get together and actually effect cooperation on the basis of unity of ideals and purposes. And it will be goals rather than creeds that will unify religionists.
Because true religion is a matter of personal religious experience, it is inevitable that each individual religionist will have his own personal interpretation of the realization of his own experience.
Future religionists must live out their religion, dedicating themselves to the wholehearted service of God and mankind.
It is high time that men and women should have religious experience so personal and so sublime that it could be realized and expressed only by “feelings that lie too deep for words.”
Economic interdependence and social fraternizing will ultimately conduce to the unification of mankind. People, naturally, are dreamers, but science is sobering them so that religion can presently become their activator and with far less danger than previously of precipitating fanatical reactions. Economic necessity ties them to reality and personal religious experience brings them face to face with the eternal realities of cosmic citizenship.
The experience of dynamic religious living can transform the mediocre individual into a personality of idealistic power.
Religion ministers to the progress of all through fostering the progress of each—and the progress of each is augmented by the progress of all.
Children are permanently impressed only by the loyalties of their adult associates. Loyal persons are growing persons—and growth is an impressive and inspiring reality.
Live loyally each day—grow—and tomorrow will look after itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live each day loyally as a tadpole.
Religion is a personal experience that grows in proportion to the expanding quest for final values.
Religious growth is favored by sensitivity to divine values; sharing one’s spiritual life with one’s fellows, avoidance of selfishness, refusal to presume on divine mercy, and living as in the presence of God.
Spiritual development depends on maintaining a living spiritual connection with true spiritual forces plus a consequential and continuous bearing of spiritual fruit—thereby yielding the ministry to our fellows of that which has been received from our spiritual benefactors.
Spiritual progress is predicated upon intellectual recognition of our spiritual poverty and self-consciousness of perfection hunger—our desire to know God and be like him, our whole hearted purpose to do the will of the Father in heaven.
Spiritual growth commences with an awakening to needs, followed by the discernment of meanings and the discovery of values.
The evidence for true spiritual development consists in a human personality motivated by love, activated by unselfish ministry, and dominated by the perfect ideals of divinity. This entire experience constitutes the true reality of religion.
Spirituality is the measure of our nearness to God and usefulness to our fellow beings. And it is directly proportional to the elimination of selfish qualities from our love.
Actual spiritual status is a function of deity attainment, attunement to the divine Spirit-Within.
The goal of human self-realization should be spiritual, not material. The only realities worth striving for are divine, spiritual and eternal.
Choose your goals carefully—for the immortal personality you are building must transcend space, vanquish time, and achieve our eternal destiny of divine perfection and service.
Religion is not a technique for attaining a blissful peace of mind; it is an impulse for organizing the soul for dynamic service—the dedication of the self in the loyal service of loving God and serving mankind.
The supreme value of human life consists in the growth of values, progress in meanings, and realization of their cosmic interrelatedness. Such experience is the equivalent of God-consciousness.
In the physical life, the senses tell us of the existence of things; mind discovers the reality of meanings; spiritual experience reveals their true values.
If you love your fellows, you must have discovered their value. Jesus loved us so much because he placed such a high value upon each one of us.
If you understand your neighbor, you will become tolerant—and this tolerance will grow into friendship and ripen into love.
You cannot truly love your fellows simply as an act of will. Love is only born of a thorough going understanding of their real motives and sentiments.
It is not so important that you love all mankind today as it is that each day you learn to love one more human being.
Love is infectious, and when human devotion is intelligent and wise, love is more catching than hate.
If each mortal could only become a focus of infection, the benign virus that is love would soon pervade all humanity—and that would be the realization that we all are children in the one family of God.
The sincere religionist is conscious of universe citizenship and self-worth—a self that has surrendered to an all-encompassing motivation that imposes heightened self-discipline, lessens emotional conflict, and makes mortal life truly worth living.
The morbid recognition of human limitations is changed to the natural consciousness of mortal shortcomings that is associated with moral determination and the spiritual aspiration to attain the highest universe goals. And this intense striving for the attainment of super-mortal ideals is always characterized by increasing patience, forbearance, fortitude, and tolerance.
True religion is living love, a life of service. But the religionist’s detachment from much that is purely temporal and trivial never leads to social isolation. Genuine religion takes nothing away from human existence, but it does add new meanings to all of life.
One of the most amazing hallmarks of religious living is that dynamic and sublime peace that passes all understanding, that cosmic poise that betokens the absence of all doubt and turmoil.
Although the average mortal cannot hope to attain the perfection of character reached by Jesus during his sojourn in the flesh, nevertheless it is possible for every mortal believer to develop a strong and unified personality along the perfected lines of Jesus’ personality.
The unfailing kindness and stalwart strength of character of Jesus amazed his followers. He was truly sincere, had nothing of the hypocrite in him. He was free from shamming—acting. He lived the truth, even as he taught it. He was the truth. He was reasonable, approachable, practical, free from all freakish, erratic, and eccentric tendencies. And he was unafraid.
Of Jesus it was truly said, “He trusted God.” As a man amongst men, he most sublimely trusted the Father in heaven. He trusted his Father as a little child trusts an earthly parent. His faith was perfect but never presumptuous. He never faltered in his faith. He was immune to disappointment, impervious to persecution, and untouched by apparent failure. He loved people. And he went about doing good.
Jesus was unusually cheerful—though never blind and unreasonable. He was always generous, and never grew weary of stating that it is more blessed to give than to receive.
He controlled his enthusiasm; it never controlled him. He was unreservedly dedicated to “being about his Father’s business.”
Jesus was a soul of gladness. But when duty required, he was willing to walk courageously through the “valley of the shadow of death.” He was gladsome but at the same time humble.
His courage was equaled only by his patience. He was never in a hurry; his composure was sublime.
Jesus was great because he was good—yet he fraternized with little children. He was gentle and unassuming in his personal life—yet he was the perfected man of a universe. And his associates called him “Master” unbidden.
Jesus was a perfectly unified human personality. Today he continues to unify mortal existence. He enters the human mind to elevate, transform, and transfigure. It is literally true: “If any man has the spirit of Jesus Christ within him, he is a new creature; old things are passing away; behold all things are becoming new.” (2 Cor. 5:17)
Religion as human experience ranges from the primitive slavery of the fear of the evolving primitive up to the magnificent liberty of faith of those mortals who are superbly conscious of being members of the family of the eternal God who is love.
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 satisfaction while yet in the flesh.
There really is a true and genuine inner voice, “the true light that lights every man who comes into the world.” And this spirit leading is distinct from the ethical prompting of human conscience.
The assurance of religion transcends the reason of mind, even the logic of philosophy. Religion IS faith, trust, and assurance.
The Divine Spirit makes contact with mortal beings, not by feelings or emotions, but in the realm of your highest and most spiritualized thinking. It is your thoughts not your feelings that lead you God-ward.
The divine nature may be perceived only with the eyes of the mind. But the mind that really discerns God, hears his indwelling Spirit, is the pure mind. For “Without holiness no man may see the Lord.”
Religion is a profoundly deep and actual experience of spiritual communion with the spirit influences resident within the human mind—and in so far as such an experience is definable, it is simply the experiencing of experiencing the reality of believing in God as the reality of such a personal experience.
Religious longings and spiritual urges are of such a nature as lead us to want to believe in God—whence they evolve to the conviction that we ought to believe in God, so that finally we reach that attitude of soul that concludes we do not have the right not to believe in God.
And so we come to conclude that to even doubt God or to distrust his perfect goodness would amount to being untrue to the realest and deepest thing within the human mind and soul—the indwelling Spirit of the Father.
The faith of Jesus pointed the way to the ultimate of mortal attainment in that it provided for salvation from material fetters, intellectual bondage, spiritual blindness, time, and incompleteness of self—the finite.
Such salvation involves the personal realization that we are children of the Father who are aware of the universality of the family of God, the goodness of spiritual values, and the necessity for spirit levels of harmony with others—plus achievement of an eternal life of progression in God-recognition, God-consciousness, and God-service.
Jesus made the discovery, in human experience, of the Final Father—and we, his brothers and sisters in the flesh, can follow him in this same experience of Father-discovery of the absolute goodness of God. Mortal beings, ourselves, can even attain, as we are, the same satisfaction in this experience of Father-discovery as did Jesus, as he was.
Jesus was and is the new and living way whereby mankind can come into the divine inheritance which the Father has decreed will be theirs for the asking.
Philosophy transforms primitive religion, largely a fairy-tale of conscience, into a living experience—thereby freeing the individual who dares to think, act, and live honestly, loyally, fearlessly, and truthfully from all the traditional handicaps imposed by convention.
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 or conviction faith. A state of mind attains to faith levels only when it 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. Saving faith is centered on God alone who is all of these personified and infinitely more.
The enlightened spiritual consciousness is not concerned so much with some intellectual belief or any 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.
Belief is always limiting and binding; faith is expanding and releasing. Belief fixates, faith liberates.
Religious faith is a living experience concerned with spiritual meanings, divine ideals, and supreme values; it is God-knowing and mankind-serving. It vitalizes religion and constrains the religionist to heroically live the golden rule.
Though religion is imperfect, there are at least two practical manifestations of its nature and function—firstly, the spiritual urge to cause religious persons to project their moral values directly outward into the affairs of their fellows (the ethical reaction of religion) and secondly, religion creates for the human mind a spiritualized consciousness of divine reality derived from moral values and coordinated with superimposed spiritual values.
Religion thus provides an avenue of escape from the mutual limitations of the finite world to the supernal realities of the eternal and spiritual world.
Never can there be scientific or logical proofs of divinity. Reason alone can never validate the value and goodness of religious experience. But it will always remain true: “Whosoever wills to do the will of God shall comprehend the validity of spiritual value.” This is the nearest approach that can be made on the mortal level to offering proof of the reality of religious experience. It is the only passport to the completion of reality and to the eternity of life in a universal creation of love, law, unity, and progressive deity attainment.
By following the gleam of righteousness discernible in our soul, we can identify ourselves with the plan of the Infinite and the purpose of the Eternal. When we experience such a transformation of faith, we are no longer a slavish part of the mathematical cosmos but rather a liberated volitional child of the Universal Father.
Perfection hunger in our hearts is necessary to ensure capacity for comprehending the faith pathways to supreme attainment.
It is literally true, “Human things must be known in order to be loved, but divine things must be loved in order to be known.”
The indwelling Father-Spirit unfailingly arouses in our souls a true and searching hunger for perfection, together with a far reaching curiosity that can only be satisfied by communion with God.
God is so real and so absolute that no material sign of proof and no demonstration through so-called miracle may be offered in testimony of his reality. Always will we know God because we trust him—and our belief in him is wholly based on our personal participation in the divine manifestations of his infinite reality.
The hungry soul of man refuses to be satisfied with anything less than the personal realization of the living God. Whatever more God may be than a higher moral personality, God cannot, in our hungry and finite concept, be anything less.
One of the characteristic peculiarities of genuine religious assurance is that, despite the absoluteness of its affirmations and staunchness of attitude, the spirit of its expression is so poised and tempered that it never conveys the slightest impression of self- assertion or egoistic exaltation.
The wisdom of religious experience is something of a paradox in that it is, at the same time, humanly original yet a derivative of the influence of the Divine Spirit-Within.
Religious desire is the hunger quest for divine reality. Religious experience is the realization of the consciousness of having found God. Religious insights, spiritual motivations, lead directly to religious actions, unselfish acts of social service and altruistic benevolence.
If God were not a personality, he could not become a living part of the religious experience of a human personality.
Revealed religion is the unifying element of human existence. Revelation unifies history, co-ordinates geology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and psychology. Spiritual experience is the real soul of mankind’s cosmos.
Religion is to morality as love is to duty, as sonship is to servitude, as essence is to substance. Morality discloses a mighty Controller, a Deity to be served; religion discloses an all-loving Father, a God to be worshiped and loved. And again, this is because the spiritual potentiality of religion is dominant over the duty actuality of the morality of evolution.
To isolate part of life and call it religion is to disintegrate life and distort religion. And this is just why the God of worship claims all allegiance or none.
The gods of primitive men are, mostly, mere shadows of themselves; whereas the living God is the divine light whose interruptions constitute the creation shadows of all space.
Convictions about God may be arrived at through reason, but the individual becomes God-knowing only by faith.
Though reason can always question faith, faith can always supplement both reason and logic. Reason creates the possibility that faith can transform experience into a moral certainty, even a spiritual experience.
God is the first truth and the last fact; therefore does all truth take origin in him, while all facts exist relative to him. God is absolute truth.
One may know God as truth, but to understand, to explain God, one must explore the fact of the universe.
The vast gap between the experience of the truth of God, and ignorance as to the fact of God, can only be bridged by living faith. Reason alone cannot achieve harmony between infinite truth and universal fact.
True religious practitioners should seek to live and carry on as if already in the presence of the Eternal.
The gospel of Jesus tremendously enhances and supernally exalts every mortal. Mortal existence must be visualized as the meeting of the human up-reach with the divine down reach.
The Universal Father, being self-existent, is also self-explanatory. He actually lives in every rational mortal, wherein his purpose is to be self-revealing. But you cannot be sure about God unless you know him. Our relationship as a child of God is the only experience that makes God’s Fatherhood certain.
God is the one and only self-caused fact in the universe. The universe and God are not identical; one is cause, the other effect. The cause is absolute, infinite, eternal, and changeless; the effect both finite or transcendental, but ever changing and ever growing.
Those who would invent a religion without God are like those who would gather fruit without trees, have children without parents. The fact of religious experience implies God, and such a God of personal experience must also be personal.
Of God, the most inescapable of all presences, the most real of all facts, the most living of all truths, the most loving of all friends, the most divine of all values, we have the right to be the most certain of all universe experiences.
While personal religion precedes the evolution of human morals, institutional religion invariably lags behind. But being a matter of inner or personal experience, religion can never develop very far in advance of the intellectual evolution of mankind.
Religion is ever and always rooted in personal experience. And your highest religion, the life of Jesus, was just such a personal experience—man, mortal man, seeking God and finding him to the fullness during one short life in the flesh, while in that same human experience, there appeared God seeking man and finding him. And that is religion, even the highest yet revealed in the universe—the earth life of Jesus of Nazareth.
If a moral being chooses to be unselfish when confronted by the urge to be selfish, that is a primitive religious experience. No animal can make such a choice; such a decision is both human and religious.
Unselfishness in the face of selfish choice exhibits the impulse towards social service and embraces the reality of God-consciousness.
Mankind tends to identify selfish urges with the ego—the self; and to identify the will to be altruistic with some outside influence—God. Such a judgment is correct for all such unselfish desires do have their origin in the leading of the indwelling Spirit of the Father.
Regardless of the influence of all primitive contributions to the early religion of mankind, the fact remains that all true religious impulses originate from genuine spirit presences activating the will to be unselfish.
Jesus swept away all of the ceremonials of sacrifice and atonement. He destroyed the basis of fictitious guilt and the sense of isolation in the universe by declaring that we are children of God, that God is our loving Father, and all ceremonials not a legitimate part of such an intimate family relationship are forever abrogated.
God, the Father, deals with his earthly children, not on the basis of actual virtue or worthiness but in recognition of motivation—the creature purpose and intent. The relationship is one of parent-child association and is actuated by divine love.
Jesus enlarged the neighbor scope to embrace the whole of humanity, even that we should love our enemies. And there is something inside of every normal human being that tells him this teaching is moral—right.
All men recognize the morality of the universal human urge to be unselfish and altruistic. The humanist ascribes its origin to the natural outworking of the mind; the religionist more correctly recognizes that all of the truly unselfish drive of the mortal mind is in response to the inner spirit leading of our indwelling God- Spirit.
The pursuit of the ideal—the striving to be God-like—is a continuous effort before death and after. Life after death is no different in its essentials from our mortal existence. Everything we do that is good contributes to the enhancement of the after life. Every mortal gain enriches the immortal survival experience.
It lifts us out from ourselves when once we recognize that there lives and strives within us something that is eternal and divine—the indwelling spirit of the Father.
Man is most truly the architect of his own destiny.
Revelation is the only hope and the only way than we can bridge the gulf between the material and the spiritual. Unaided, faith and reason cannot conceive or construct a logical universe.
Faith, human religious insight, can be surely instructed only by revelation, can be surely elevated only by personal experience with the indwelling presence of the God who is spirit.
The progression of science is not limited to the terrestrial life of mankind; our universe ascension experience will, to no small degree, be the study of energy transmutation and material metamorphosis.
Logic can never succeed in harmonizing the findings of science and the insights of religion unless both the scientific and religious aspects of a personality are truth dominated, sincerely desirous of following the truth wherever it may lead regardless of the conclusions that may be reached.
What both developing science and religion need is more searching and fearless self-criticism, a greater awareness of incompleteness of evolutionary status.
The truth—an understanding of cosmic relationships, universe facts, and spiritual values—can best be had through ministry of the Spirit of Truth and can best be criticized by revelation. But revelation originates neither a science or a religion; its function is to co-ordinate both with the truth of reality.
In the mortal state nothing can be absolutely proved, both science and religion are predicated on assumptions.
There is a real “proof” of “spiritual reality” in the presence of the indwelling Spirit of God—but the validity of the “proof” is not demonstrable to the external world, but only to the one who thus experiences the indwelling of God.
The consciousness of God’s indwelling is based upon the intellectual reception of truth, the supermind perception of goodness, and the personality motivation to love.
Religion has to do with feeling, acting, and living, not merely with thinking. Thinking is more closely related to the material life and, in the main, should be dominated by reason and the facts of science except in its nonmaterial reaches toward the spirit realms when truth must dominate.
The ideal religious philosophy is such a faith-trust as would lead mankind to unqualifiedly depend upon the absolute love of the Father.
Such a genuine religious experience far transcends all idealistic desire, takes salvation for granted, and is concerned only with doing the Father’s will.
When theology masters religion, religion dies. It becomes a doctrine instead of a life.
When reason once recognizes right and wrong, it exhibits wisdom; when wisdom chooses between right and wrong, truth and error, it demonstrates spirit leading. And thus are the functions of mind, soul, and spirit united and functionally inter-associated.
To understand the Urantia Papers it is vital to understand the role attributed to the Spirit of God that now indwells the minds of virtually all human beings born on this planet. It is referred to in the New Testament in about 25 of its verses, e.g. “Know you not that you are the temple of God, that the Spirit of God dwells in you” (1. Cor. 3:16), and, “If we love one another, God dwells in us.” (1 John 4:12).
This indwelling Spirit is the source of all true meanings and values of a non-material nature. Thus it is the source of true morality, non-material truth, beauty and goodness, and all revealed truth. So, one way or another, all true revelation is from God regardless of the means of its origin. But the recognition of this truth is an individual function, crucially dependent upon the personal relation between the individual and the God-Spirit within. Empirical truths of science may appear to be different, but basically, they are not.
The Urantia Papers have been presented to the world as the Fifth Epochal Revelation and, as such, this has generated claims for infallibility by some. The reality is that the Papers themselves state that “nothing which human nature has touched can be regarded as infallible.” And there is not a single statement in all the Papers that has not, at some stage, been open to the contaminating hand of man. Thus all decisions on the validity of revelatory truth in these Papers, or elsewhere, must forever be the personal responsibility of the individual.
Certainly there are many aspects of the Urantia Papers, particularly their history and cosmology that should definitely be described with the authors’ term of ‘a framework in which to think,’ rather than being taken as factual truth. But there are also other sections, in fact a major portion of the Papers, about which many have said that if it is not revelation, then indeed, it surely ought to be.
What follows in our next issue comes from Part 4 of the Papers only—a much compressed summary of the spiritual life and spiritual teachings of the one many call, “Master.” This is also totally consistent with the spirit of the word of Jesus from the New Testament. Familiarity with this word will certainly promote our familiarity with the mind of Jesus.
The Urantia Papers confirm that the purpose of
Jesus’ life on our planet included revealing God to man and man to God, and that his life was to exhibit “the transcendent possibilities attainable by a God-knowing mortal being during the short career of mortal existence.”
Having fully achieved his purpose, Jesus left us with this injunction: “Your mission to the world is founded on the fact that I lived a God-revealing life among you; on the truth that you and all other men and women are the sons and daughters of God; and it shall consist in the life which you will live among them–the actual and living experience of loving them and serving them—even as I have loved and served you.”
Consequently the Papers tell us: “that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it.”
To be continued in our next issue