© 1959 William S. Sadler
© 1961 Urantia Foundation
And it is in this business of facing failure and adjusting to defeat that the far-reaching vision of religion exerts its supreme influence. Failure is simply an educational episode—a cultural experiment in the acquirement of wisdom—in the experience of the God-seeking man who has embarked on the eternal adventure of the exploration of a universe. To such men defeat is but a new tool for the achievement of higher levels of universe reality.
The career of a God—seeking man may prove to be a great success in the light of eternity, even though the whole temporal—life enterprise may appear as an overwhelming failure, provided each life failure yielded the culture of wisdom and spirit achievement. UB 160:4.15
Eternal justice and divine mercy together constitute what in human experience would be called fairness. UB 2:4.4
Fairness (justice in harmony with mercy) UB 10:6.3
Faith—the supreme assertion of human thought. UB 3:5.9
Let the term “faith” stand for the individual’s relation to God rather than for the creedal formulation of what some group of mortals have common religious attitude. “Have you faith? Then have it to yourself.” UB 99:5.7
Faith unites moral insight with conscientious discriminations of values, and the pre—existent evolutionary sense of duty completes the ancestry of true religion. UB 101:1.6
Reason is the method of science; faith is the method of religion; logic is the attempted technique of philosophy… UB 101:2.2
Faith—insight, or spiritual intuition, is the endowment of the cosmic mind in association with the Thought Adjuster, which is the Father’s gift to man. UB 101:3.2
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 not conviction faith. A state of mind attains to faith levels only when it actually 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; such an attitude of saving faith is centered on God alone, who is all of these personified and infinitely more.
Belief is always limiting and binding; faith is expanding and releasing. Belief fixates, faith liberates. But living religious faith is more than the association of noble beliefs; it is more than an exalted system of philosophy; it is a living experience concerned with spiritual meanings, divine ideals, and supreme values; it is God—knowing and man-serving. Beliefs may become group possessions, but faith must be personal. Theologic beliefs can be suggested, to a group, but faith can rise up only in the heart of the individual religionist.
Faith has falsified its trust when it presumes to deny realities and to confer upon its devotees assumed knowledge… Faith is a traitor when it fosters betrayal of intellectual integrity and belittles loyalty to supreme values and divine ideals. Faith never shuns the problem—solving duty of mortal living. Living faith does not foster bigotry, persecution, or intolerance.
Faith does not shackle the creative imagination, neither does it maintain an unreasoning prejudice toward the discoveries of scientific investigation. Faith vitalizes religion and constrains the religionist heroically to live the golden rule. The zeal of faith is according to knowledge, and its strivings are the preludes to sublime peace. UB 101:8.1-4
Faith becomes the connection between moral consciousness and the spiritual concept of enduring reality. UB 101:9.9
Man very early becomes conscious that he is not alone in the world or the universe. There develops a natural spontaneous self—consciousness of other—mindedness in the environment of selfhood. Faith translates this natural experience into religion, the recognition of God as the reality—source, nature, and destiny—of other mindedness. UB 102:4.3
Faith is the insight technique of religion. UB 103:6.7
Faith is the act of recognizing the validity of spiritual consciousness—something which is incapable of other mortal proof. UB 103:7.13
Through spiritual faith man gains insight into the love of God but soon discovers that this spiritual faith has no influence on the ordained laws of the material universe. UB 104:2.3
But truth can never become man’s possession without the exercise of faith. This is true because man’s thoughts, wisdom, ethics, and ideals will never rise higher than his faith, his sublime hope. And all such true faith is predicated on profound reflection, sincere self-criticism, and uncompromising moral consciousness. Faith is the inspiration of the spiritized creative imagination.
Faith acts to release the superhuman activities of the divine spark, the immortal germ, that lives within the mind of man, and which is the potential of eternal survival. UB 132:3.5-6
“Peace be upon you. You rejoice to know that I am the resurrection and the life, but this will avail you nothing unless you are first born of the eternal spirit, thereby coming to possess, by faith, the gift of eternal life. If you are the faith sons of my Father, you shall never die; you shall not perish.” UB 193:1.2
The Paradise counselors to the Most High rulers of the constellation governments. UB 15:10.17
Faithfulness is the unerring measure of human trustworthiness. He who is faithful in little things is also likely to exhibit faithfulness in everything consistent with his endowments. UB 171:8.11
Falsehood is not a matter of narration technique but something premeditated as a perversion of truth. The shadow of a hair’s turning, premeditated for an untrue purpose, the slightest twisting or perversion of that which is principle—these constitute falseness. UB 48:6.33
The family is the fundamental unit of fraternity in which parents and children learn those lessons of patience, altruism, tolerance, and forbearance which are so essential to the realization of brotherhood among all men. UB 84:7.28
Family life is the progenitor of true morality, the ancestor of the consciousness of loyalty to duty. The enforced associations of family life stabilize personality and stimulate its growth through the compulsion of necessitous adjustment to other and diverse personalities. But even more, a true family—a good family—reveals to the parental procreators the attitude of the Creator to his children, while at the same time such true parents portray to their children the first of a long series of ascending disclosures of the love of the Paradise parent of all universe children. UB 84:7.30
The concept of a spirit’s entering into an inanimate object, an animal, or a human being, is a very ancient and honorable belief, having prevailed since the beginning of the evolution of religion. This doctrine of spirit possession is nothing more nor less than fetishism. UB 88:0.1
The finite level of reality is characterized by creature life and time-space limitations. Finite realities may not have endings, but they always have beginnings—they are created. The deity level of Supremacy may be may be conceived as a function in relation to finite existences. UB 0:1.11
God—the Universal Father—is the personality of the First Source and Center. UB 0:3.10
The First Source and Center is, therefore, primal in all domains; deified or undeified, personal or impersonal, actual or potential, finite or infinite. No thing or being, no relativity or finality, exists except in direct or indirect relation to, and dependence on, the primacy of the First Source and Center. UB 0:3.11
Energy we use as an all-inclusive term applied to spiritual, mindal, and material, realms. Force is also thus broadly used. UB 0:6.2
Cosmic force embraces all energies deriving from the Unqualified Absolute but which are as yet unresponsive to Paradise gravity. UB 0:6.5
This represents the first basic change in space potency and may be one of the nether Paradise functions of the Unqualified Absolute. We know that the space presence going out from nether Paradise is modified in some manner from that which is incoming. But regardless of any such possible relationships, the openly recognized transmutation of space potency into primordial force is the primary differentating function of the tension-presence of the living paradise force organizers. UB 42:2.7
Passive and potential force becomes active and primordial in response to the resistance afforded by the space presence of the Primary Eventuated Master Force Organizers. Force is now emerging from the exclusive domain of the Unqualified Absolute into the realms of multiple response—response to certain primal motions initiated by the God of Action and thereupon to certain compensating motions emanating from the Universal Absolute. UB 42:2.7
Primordial force is seemingly reactive to transcendental causation in proportion to absoluteness. Primordial force is sometimes spoken of as pure energy: on Uversa we refer to it as SEGREGATA.