© 1986 William Wentworth
© 1986 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
At a political seminar in Sydney recently it was clearly understood, that the quality of our political life grows out of the values we live by. The values we live by determine the essence and quality of our entire civilisation; and our system of social co-operation and control — our political life in general — is no exception. An understanding of this fact — that values lie behind all our social processes — is one of the keys to improving the level of our political life in Australia, but it is something which often seems to be overlooked both by elected representatives and by the population at large.
When this same seminar came to consider the question of the derivation of values, however, there was much less understanding. Two capable and courageous women from Queensland, who have been struggling to influence education policy in that state, made out the case for the official inculcation of traditional Christian values, which are often attacked and derided by radical teachers. There seemed to be general agreement that any moral revival in Australia would be based on such values. And it was at this point that I found myself in disagreement with these sincere women.
The difficulty, of course, is that “Christian Values” contain much that is non — Jesusonian, but the proponents of “Christian Values”do not accept this.They require that all “Christian Values” be adopted, and that none but those values are worthwhile. Thus they insist that the Bible is the infallible word of God, that the Church is the creation of Jesus, that only Christians experience salvation and so on. They fear that if any compromise is allowed on “Christian Values”, then the way is open for such values to be perverted or ignored, and that the authoritative power assumed for such values will be lost.
Students of The Urantia Book will be familiar with this problem. Those who wish to reinstate Christian Values as the cornerstone of our civilisation, do not understand that values must be constantly re-interpreted in the light of spiritual experience. They are insisting that we accept the dross with the gold, and that the gold itself must not be further refined. They want us to accept the values, without personally participating in the derivation of such values.
It seems, therefore, a good time to remind ourselves that the teaching of Jsaus carries a completely different emphasis. He teaches that if we know God as our Father and men as our brothers, we will be moved to develop fluid and progressing values to live by, embodied in a morality which can be adapted to human progress without in any way diverting us from our overriding purpose, which is God-seeking. True values, for any generation, are thus to be discovered from living spiritual experience, from the struggle of the individual to find God and do His will. Crystallised values from the past cannot substitute for this process. Any attempt to inculcate values without allowing for the means of derivation of values is to orphan those values by cutting them off from their source. The souls of men will not respond to such orphans.
“But religious leaders are making a great mistake when they try to call modern men to spiritual battle with the trumpet blasts of the Middle Ages. Religion must provide itself with new and up-todate slogans. Neither democracy nor any other political panacea will take the place of spiritual progress.”(UB 195:6.10)
William Wentworth, Towamba, N.S.W.