The Urantia Book
PAPER 101
THE REAL NATURE OF RELIGION
Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.
101:0.1 RELIGION, as a human experience,
ranges from the primitive fear slavery of the evolving savage up
to the sublime and magnificent faith liberty of those civilized
mortals who are superbly conscious of sonship with the eternal
God.
101:0.2 Religion is the ancestor of the
advanced ethics and morals of progressive social evolution. But
religion, as such, is not merely a moral movement, albeit the
outward and social manifestations of religion are mightily
influenced by the ethical and moral momentum of human society.
Always is religion the inspiration of man's evolving nature, but
it is not the secret of that evolution.
101:0.3 Religion, the conviction-faith of the
personality, can always triumph over the superficially
contradictory logic of despair born in the unbelieving material
mind. There really is a true and genuine inner voice, that "true
light which lights every man who comes into the world." And this
spirit leading is distinct from the ethical prompting of human
conscience. The feeling of religious assurance is more than an
emotional feeling. The assurance of religion transcends the
reason of the mind, even the logic of philosophy. Religion is
faith, trust, and assurance.
1. TRUE RELIGION
101:1.1 True religion is not a system of
philosophic belief which can be reasoned out and substantiated
by natural proofs, neither is it a fantastic and mystic
experience of indescribable feelings of ecstasy which can be
enjoyed only by the romantic devotees of mysticism. Religion is
not the product of reason, but viewed from within, it is
altogether reasonable. Religion is not derived from the logic of
human philosophy, but as a mortal experience it is altogether
logical. 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 satisfactions while yet in the flesh.
101:1.2 The Thought Adjuster has no special
mechanism through which to gain self-expression; there is no
mystic religious faculty for the reception or expression of
religious emotions. These experiences are made available through
the naturally ordained mechanism of mortal mind. And therein
lies one explanation of the Adjuster's difficulty in engaging in
direct communication with the material mind of its constant
indwelling.
101:1.3 The divine spirit makes contact with
mortal man, not by feelings or emotions, but in the realm of the
highest and most spiritualized thinking. It is your thoughts,
not your feelings, that lead you Godward. The divine nature may
be perceived only with the eyes of the mind. But the mind that
really discerns God, hears the indwelling Adjuster, is the pure
mind. "Without holiness no man may see the Lord." All such inner
and spiritual communion is termed spiritual insight. Such
religious experiences result from the impress made upon the mind
of man by the combined operations of the Adjuster and the Spirit
of Truth as they function amid and upon the ideas, ideals,
insights, and spirit strivings of the evolving sons of God.
101:1.4 Religion lives and prospers, then, not
by sight and feeling, but rather by faith and insight. It
consists not in the discovery of new facts or in the finding of
a unique experience, but rather in the discovery of new and
spiritual meanings in facts already well known to
mankind. The highest religious experience is not dependent on
prior acts of belief, tradition, and authority; neither is
religion the offspring of sublime feelings and purely mystical
emotions. It is, rather, a profoundly deep and actual experience
of spiritual communion with the spirit influences resident
within the human mind, and as far as such an experience is
definable in terms of psychology, it is simply the experience of
experiencing the reality of believing in God as the reality of
such a purely personal experience.
101:1.5 While religion is not the product of
the rationalistic speculations of a material cosmology, it is,
nonetheless, the creation of a wholly rational insight which
originates in man's mind-experience. Religion is born neither of
mystic meditations nor of isolated contemplations, albeit it is
ever more or less mysterious and always indefinable and
inexplicable in terms of purely intellectual reason and
philosophic logic. The germs of true religion originate in the
domain of man's moral consciousness, and they are revealed in
the growth of man's spiritual insight, that faculty of human
personality which accrues as a consequence of the presence of
the God-revealing Thought Adjuster in the God-hungry mortal
mind.
101:1.6 Faith unites moral insight with
conscientious discriminations of values, and the pre-existent
evolutionary sense of duty completes the ancestry of true
religion. The experience of religion eventually results in the
certain consciousness of God and in the undoubted assurance of
the survival of the believing personality.
101:1.7 Thus it may be seen that religious
longings and spiritual urges are not of such a nature as would
merely lead men to want to believe in God, but rather are
they of such nature and power that men are profoundly impressed
with the conviction that they ought to believe in God.
The sense of evolutionary duty and the obligations consequent
upon the illumination of revelation make such a profound
impression upon man's moral nature that he finally reaches that
position of mind and that attitude of soul where he concludes
that he has no right not to believe in God. The higher
and superphilosophic wisdom of such enlightened and disciplined
individuals ultimately instructs them that to doubt God or
distrust his goodness would be to prove untrue to the realest
and deepest thing within the human mind and soul -- the
divine Adjuster.
2. THE FACT OF RELIGION
101:2.1 The fact of religion consists wholly
in the religious experience of rational and average human
beings. And this is the only sense in which religion can ever be
regarded as scientific or even psychological. The proof that
revelation is revelation is this same fact of human experience:
the fact that revelation does synthesize the apparently
divergent sciences of nature and the theology of religion into a
consistent and logical universe philosophy, a co-ordinated and
unbroken explanation of both science and religion, thus creating
a harmony of mind and satisfaction of spirit which answers in
human experience those questionings of the mortal mind which
craves to know how the Infinite works out his will and plans in
matter, with minds, and on spirit.
101:2.2 Reason is the method of science; faith
is the method of religion; logic is the attempted technique of
philosophy. Revelation compensates for the absence of the
morontia viewpoint by providing a technique for achieving unity
in the comprehension of the reality and relationships of matter
and spirit by the mediation of mind. And true revelation never
renders science unnatural, religion unreasonable, or philosophy
illogical.
101:2.3 Reason, through the study of science,
may lead back through nature to a First Cause, but it requires
religious faith to transform the First Cause of science into a
God of salvation; and revelation is further required for the
validation of such a faith, such spiritual insight.
101:2.4 There are two basic reasons for
believing in a God who fosters human survival:
1. Human experience, personal
assurance, the somehow registered hope and trust initiated by
the indwelling Thought Adjuster.
2. The revelation of truth, whether
by direct personal ministry of the Spirit of Truth, by the world
bestowal of divine Sons, or through the revelations of the
written word.
101:2.5 Science ends its reason-search in the
hypothesis of a First Cause. Religion does not stop in its
flight of faith until it is sure of a God of salvation. The
discriminating study of science logically suggests the reality
and existence of an Absolute. Religion believes unreservedly in
the existence and reality of a God who fosters personality
survival. What metaphysics fails utterly in doing, and what even
philosophy fails partially in doing, revelation does; that is,
affirms that this First Cause of science and religion's God of
salvation are one and the same Deity.
101:2.6 Reason is the proof of science, faith
the proof of religion, logic the proof of philosophy, but
revelation is validated only by human experience. Science
yields knowledge; religion yields happiness; philosophy yields
unity; revelation confirms the experiential harmony of this
triune approach to universal reality.
101:2.7 The contemplation of nature can only
reveal a God of nature, a God of motion. Nature exhibits only
matter, motion, and animation -- life. Matter plus energy, under
certain conditions, is manifested in living forms, but while
natural life is thus relatively continuous as a phenomenon, it
is wholly transient as to individualities. Nature does not
afford ground for logical belief in human-personality survival.
The religious man who finds God in nature has already and first
found this same personal God in his own soul.
101:2.8 Faith reveals God in the soul.
Revelation, the substitute for morontia insight on an
evolutionary world, enables man to see the same God in nature
that faith exhibits in his soul. Thus does revelation
successfully bridge the gulf between the material and the
spiritual, even between the creature and the Creator, between
man and God.
101:2.9 The contemplation of nature does
logically point in the direction of intelligent guidance, even
living supervision, but it does not in any satisfactory manner
reveal a personal God. On the other hand, nature discloses
nothing which would preclude the universe from being looked upon
as the handiwork of the God of religion. God cannot be found
through nature alone, but man having otherwise found him, the
study of nature becomes wholly consistent with a higher and more
spiritual interpretation of the universe.
101:2.10 Revelation as an epochal phenomenon
is periodic; as a personal human experience it is continuous.
Divinity functions in mortal personality as the Adjuster gift of
the Father, as the Spirit of Truth of the Son, and as the Holy
Spirit of the Universe Spirit, while these three supermortal
endowments are unified in human experiential evolution as the
ministry of the Supreme.
101:2.11 True religion is an insight into
reality, the faith-child of the moral consciousness, and not a
mere intellectual assent to any body of dogmatic doctrines. True
religion consists in the experience that "the Spirit itself
bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God."
Religion consists not in theologic propositions but in spiritual
insight and the sublimity of the soul's trust.
101:2.12 Your deepest nature -- the divine
Adjuster -- creates within you a hunger and thirst for
righteousness, a certain craving for divine perfection. Religion
is the faith act of the recognition of this inner urge to divine
attainment; and thus is brought about that soul trust and
assurance of which you become conscious as the way of salvation,
the technique of the survival of personality and all those
values which you have come to look upon as being true and good.
101:2.13 The realization of religion never has
been, and never will be, dependent on great learning or clever
logic. It is spiritual insight, and that is just the reason why
some of the world's greatest religious teachers, even the
prophets, have sometimes possessed so little of the wisdom of
the world. Religious faith is available alike to the learned and
the unlearned.
101:2.14 Religion must ever be its own critic
and judge; it can never be observed, much less understood, from
the outside. Your only assurance of a personal God consists in
your own insight as to your belief in, and experience with,
things spiritual. To all of your fellows who have had a similar
experience, no argument about the personality or reality of God
is necessary, while to all other men who are not thus sure of
God no possible argument could ever be truly convincing.
101:2.15 Psychology may indeed attempt to
study the phenomena of religious reactions to the social
environment, but never can it hope to penetrate to the real and
inner motives and workings of religion. Only theology, the
province of faith and the technique of revelation, can afford
any sort of intelligent account of the nature and content of
religious experience.
3. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF RELIGION
101:3.1 Religion is so vital that it persists
in the absence of learning. It lives in spite of its
contamination with erroneous cosmologies and false philosophies;
it survives even the confusion of metaphysics. In and through
all the historic vicissitudes of religion there ever persists
that which is indispensable to human progress and survival: the
ethical conscience and the moral consciousness.
101:3.2 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. Spiritual
reason, soul intelligence, is the endowment of the Holy Spirit,
the Creative Spirit's gift to man. Spiritual philosophy, the
wisdom of spirit realities, is the endowment of the Spirit of
Truth, the combined gift of the bestowal Sons to the children of
men. And the co-ordination and interassociation of these spirit
endowments constitute man a spirit personality in potential
destiny.
101:3.3 It is this same spirit personality, in
primitive and embryonic form, the Adjuster possession of which
survives the natural death in the flesh. This composite entity
of spirit origin in association with human experience is
enabled, by means of the living way provided by the divine Sons,
to survive (in Adjuster custody) the dissolution of the material
self of mind and matter when such a transient partnership of the
material and the spiritual is divorced by the cessation of vital
motion.
101:3.4 Through religious faith the soul of
man reveals itself and demonstrates the potential divinity of
its emerging nature by the characteristic manner in which it
induces the mortal personality to react to certain trying
intellectual and testing social situations. Genuine spiritual
faith (true moral consciousness) is revealed in that it:
1. Causes ethics and morals to
progress despite inherent and adverse animalistic tendencies.
2. Produces a sublime trust in the
goodness of God even in the face of bitter disappointment and
crushing defeat.
3. Generates profound courage and
confidence despite natural adversity and physical calamity.
4. Exhibits inexplicable poise and
sustaining tranquillity notwithstanding baffling diseases and
even acute physical suffering.
5. Maintains a mysterious poise and
composure of personality in the face of maltreatment and the
rankest injustice.
6. Maintains a divine trust in
ultimate victory in spite of the cruelties of seemingly blind
fate and the apparent utter indifference of natural forces to
human welfare.
7. Persists in the unswerving belief
in God despite all contrary demonstrations of logic and
successfully withstands all other intellectual sophistries.
8. Continues to exhibit undaunted
faith in the soul's survival regardless of the deceptive
teachings of false science and the persuasive delusions of
unsound philosophy.
9. Lives and triumphs irrespective
of the crushing overload of the complex and partial
civilizations of modern times.
10. Contributes to the continued
survival of altruism in spite of human selfishness, social
antagonisms, industrial greeds, and political maladjustments.
11. Steadfastly adheres to a sublime
belief in universe unity and divine guidance regardless of the
perplexing presence of evil and sin.
12. Goes right on worshiping God in
spite of anything and everything. Dares to declare, "Even though
he slay me, yet will I serve him."
101:3.5 We know, then, by three phenomena,
that man has a divine spirit or spirits dwelling within him:
first, by personal experience -- religious faith; second, by
revelation -- personal and racial; and third, by the amazing
exhibition of such extraordinary and unnatural reactions to his
material environment as are illustrated by the foregoing recital
of twelve spiritlike performances in the presence of the actual
and trying situations of real human existence. And there are
still others.
101:3.6 And it is just such a vital and
vigorous performance of faith in the domain of religion that
entitles mortal man to affirm the personal possession and
spiritual reality of that crowning endowment of human nature,
religious experience.
4. THE LIMITATIONS OF REVELATION
101:4.1 Because your world is generally
ignorant of origins, even of physical origins, it has appeared
to be wise from time to time to provide instruction in
cosmology. And always has this made trouble for the future. The
laws of revelation hamper us greatly by their proscription of
the impartation of unearned or premature knowledge. Any
cosmology presented as a part of revealed religion is destined
to be outgrown in a very short time. Accordingly, future
students of such a revelation are tempted to discard any element
of genuine religious truth it may contain because they discover
errors on the face of the associated cosmologies therein
presented.
101:4.2 Mankind should understand that we who
participate in the revelation of truth are very rigorously
limited by the instructions of our superiors. We are not at
liberty to anticipate the scientific discoveries of a thousand
years. Revelators must act in accordance with the instructions
which form a part of the revelation mandate. We see no way of
overcoming this difficulty, either now or at any future time. We
full well know that, while the historic facts and religious
truths of this series of revelatory presentations will stand on
the records of the ages to come, within a few short years many
of our statements regarding the physical sciences will stand in
need of revision in consequence of additional scientific
developments and new discoveries. These new developments we even
now foresee, but we are forbidden to include such humanly
undiscovered facts in the revelatory records. Let it be made
clear that revelations are not necessarily inspired. The
cosmology of these revelations is not inspired. It is
limited by our permission for the co-ordination and sorting of
present-day knowledge. While divine or spiritual insight is a
gift, human wisdom must evolve.
101:4.3 Truth is always a revelation:
autorevelation when it emerges as a result of the work of the
indwelling Adjuster; epochal revelation when it is presented by
the function of some other celestial agency, group, or
personality.
101:4.4 In the last analysis, religion is to
be judged by its fruits, according to the manner and the extent
to which it exhibits its own inherent and divine excellence.
101:4.5 Truth may be but relatively inspired,
even though revelation is invariably a spiritual phenomenon.
While statements with reference to cosmology are never inspired,
such revelations are of immense value in that they at least
transiently clarify knowledge by:
1. The reduction of confusion by the
authoritative elimination of error.
2. The co-ordination of known or
about-to-be-known facts and observations.
3. The restoration of important bits
of lost knowledge concerning epochal transactions in the distant
past.
4. The supplying of information
which will fill in vital missing gaps in otherwise earned
knowledge.
5. Presenting cosmic data in such a
manner as to illuminate the spiritual teachings contained in the
accompanying revelation.
5. RELIGION EXPANDED BY REVELATION
101:5.1 Revelation is a technique whereby ages
upon ages of time are saved in the necessary work of sorting and
sifting the errors of evolution from the truths of spirit
acquirement.
101:5.2 Science deals with facts;
religion is concerned only with values. Through
enlightened philosophy the mind endeavors to unite the meanings
of both facts and values, thereby arriving at a concept of
complete reality. Remember that science is the domain of
knowledge, philosophy the realm of wisdom, and religion the
sphere of the faith experience. But religion, nonetheless,
presents two phases of manifestation:
101:5.3 1. Evolutionary religion. The
experience of primitive worship, the religion which is a mind
derivative.
101:5.4 2. Revealed religion. The universe
attitude which is a spirit derivative; the assurance of, and
belief in, the conservation of eternal realities, the survival
of personality, and the eventual attainment of the cosmic Deity,
whose purpose has made all this possible. It is a part of the
plan of the universe that, sooner or later, evolutionary
religion is destined to receive the spiritual expansion of
revelation.
101:5.5 Both science and religion start out
with the assumption of certain generally accepted bases for
logical deductions. So, also, must philosophy start its career
upon the assumption of the reality of three things:
1. The material body.
2. The supermaterial phase of the
human being, the soul or even the indwelling spirit.
3. The human mind, the mechanism for
intercommunication and interassociation between spirit and
matter, between the material and the spiritual.
101:5.6 Scientists assemble facts,
philosophers co-ordinate ideas, while prophets exalt ideals.
Feeling and emotion are invariable concomitants of religion, but
they are not religion. Religion may be the feeling of
experience, but it is hardly the experience of feeling. Neither
logic (rationalization) nor emotion (feeling) is essentially a
part of religious experience, although both may variously be
associated with the exercise of faith in the furtherance of
spiritual insight into reality, all according to the status and
temperamental tendency of the individual mind.
101:5.7 Evolutionary religion is the
outworking of the endowment of the local universe mind adjutant
charged with the creation and fostering of the worship trait in
evolving man. Such primitive religions are directly concerned
with ethics and morals, the sense of human duty. Such
religions are predicated on the assurance of conscience and
result in the stabilization of relatively ethical civilizations.
101:5.8 Personally revealed religions are
sponsored by the bestowal spirits representing the three persons
of the Paradise Trinity and are especially concerned with the
expansion of truth. Evolutionary religion drives home to
the individual the idea of personal duty; revealed religion lays
increasing emphasis on loving, the golden rule.
101:5.9 Evolved religion rests wholly on
faith. Revelation has the additional assurance of its expanded
presentation of the truths of divinity and reality and the still
more valuable testimony of the actual experience which
accumulates in consequence of the practical working union of the
faith of evolution and the truth of revelation. Such a working
union of human faith and divine truth constitutes the possession
of a character well on the road to the actual acquirement of a
morontial personality.
101:5.10 Evolutionary religion provides only
the assurance of faith and the confirmation of conscience;
revelatory religion provides the assurance of faith plus the
truth of a living experience in the realities of revelation. The
third step in religion, or the third phase of the experience of
religion, has to do with the morontia state, the firmer grasp of
mota. Increasingly in the morontia progression the truths of
revealed religion are expanded; more and more you will know the
truth of supreme values, divine goodnesses, universal
relationships, eternal realities, and ultimate destinies.
101:5.11
Increasingly throughout the morontia progression the assurance
of truth replaces the assurance of faith. When you are finally
mustered into the actual spirit world, then will the assurances
of pure spirit insight operate in the place of faith and truth
or, rather, in conjunction with, and superimposed upon, these
former techniques of personality assurance.
6. PROGRESSIVE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
101:6.1 The morontia phase of revealed
religion has to do with the experience of survival, and
its great urge is the attainment of spirit perfection. There
also is present the higher urge of worship, associated with an
impelling call to increased ethical service. Morontia insight
entails an ever-expanding consciousness of the Sevenfold, the
Supreme, and even the Ultimate.
101:6.2 Throughout all religious experience,
from its earliest inception on the material level up to the time
of the attainment of full spirit status, the Adjuster is the
secret of the personal realization of the reality of the
existence of the Supreme; and this same Adjuster also holds the
secrets of your faith in the transcendental attainment of the
Ultimate. The experiential personality of evolving man, united
to the Adjuster essence of the existential God, constitutes the
potential completion of supreme existence and is inherently the
basis for the superfinite eventuation of transcendental
personality.
101:6.3 Moral will embraces decisions based on
reasoned knowledge, augmented by wisdom, and sanctioned by
religious faith. Such choices are acts of moral nature and
evidence the existence of moral personality, the forerunner of
morontia personality and eventually of true spirit status.
101:6.4 The evolutionary type of knowledge is
but the accumulation of protoplasmic memory material; this is
the most primitive form of creature consciousness. Wisdom
embraces the ideas formulated from protoplasmic memory in
process of association and recombination, and such phenomena
differentiate human mind from mere animal mind. Animals have
knowledge, but only man possesses wisdom capacity. Truth is made
accessible to the wisdom-endowed individual by the bestowal on
such a mind of the spirits of the Father and the Sons, the
Thought Adjuster and the Spirit of Truth.
101:6.5 Christ Michael, when bestowed on
Urantia, lived under the reign of evolutionary religion up to
the time of his baptism. From that moment up to and including
the event of his crucifixion he carried forward his work by the
combined guidance of evolutionary and revealed religion. From
the morning of his resurrection until his ascension he traversed
the manifold phases of the morontia life of mortal transition
from the world of matter to that of spirit. After his ascension
Michael became master of the experience of Supremacy, the
realization of the Supreme; and being the one person in Nebadon
possessed of unlimited capacity to experience the reality of the
Supreme, he forthwith attained to the status of the sovereignty
of supremacy in and to his local universe.
101:6.6 With man, the eventual fusion and
resultant oneness with the indwelling Adjuster -- the
personality synthesis of man and the essence of God --
constitute him, in potential, a living part of the Supreme and
insure for such a onetime mortal being the eternal birthright of
the endless pursuit of finality of universe service for and with
the Supreme.
101:6.7 Revelation teaches mortal man that, to
start such a magnificent and intriguing adventure through space
by means of the progression of time, he should begin by the
organization of knowledge into idea-decisions; next, mandate
wisdom to labor unremittingly at its noble task of transforming
self-possessed ideas into increasingly practical but nonetheless
supernal ideals, even those concepts which are so reasonable as
ideas and so logical as ideals that the Adjuster dares so to
combine and spiritize them as to render them available for such
association in the finite mind as will constitute them the
actual human complement thus made ready for the action of the
Truth Spirit of the Sons, the time-space manifestations of
Paradise truth -- universal truth. The co-ordination of
idea-decisions, logical ideals, and divine truth constitutes the
possession of a righteous character, the prerequisite for mortal
admission to the ever-expanding and increasingly spiritual
realities of the morontia worlds.
101:6.8 The teachings of Jesus constituted the
first Urantian religion which so fully embraced a harmonious
co-ordination of knowledge, wisdom, faith, truth, and love as
completely and simultaneously to provide temporal tranquillity,
intellectual certainty, moral enlightenment, philosophic
stability, ethical sensitivity, God-consciousness, and the
positive assurance of personal survival. The faith of Jesus
pointed the way to finality of human salvation, to the ultimate
of mortal universe attainment, since it provided for:
1. Salvation from material fetters
in the personal realization of sonship with God, who is spirit.
2. Salvation from intellectual
bondage: man shall know the truth, and the truth shall set him
free.
3. Salvation from spiritual
blindness, the human realization of the fraternity of mortal
beings and the morontian awareness of the brotherhood of all
universe creatures; the service-discovery of spiritual reality
and the ministry-revelation of the goodness of spirit values.
4. Salvation from incompleteness of
self through the attainment of the spirit levels of the universe
and through the eventual realization of the harmony of Havona
and the perfection of Paradise.
5. Salvation from self, deliverance
from the limitations of self-consciousness through the
attainment of the cosmic levels of the Supreme mind and by
co-ordination with the attainments of all other self-conscious
beings.
6. Salvation from time, the
achievement of an eternal life of unending progression in
God-recognition and God-service.
7. Salvation from the finite, the
perfected oneness with Deity in and through the Supreme by which
the creature attempts the transcendental discovery of the
Ultimate on the postfinaliter levels of the absonite.
101:6.9 Such a sevenfold salvation is the
equivalent of the completeness and perfection of the realization
of the ultimate experience of the Universal Father. And all
this, in potential, is contained within the reality of the faith
of the human experience of religion. And it can be so contained
since the faith of Jesus was nourished by, and was revelatory
of, even realities beyond the ultimate; the faith of Jesus
approached the status of a universe absolute in so far as such
is possible of manifestation in the evolving cosmos of time and
space.
101:6.10 Through the appropriation of the
faith of Jesus, mortal man can foretaste in time the realities
of eternity. Jesus made the discovery, in human experience, of
the Final Father, and his brothers in the flesh of mortal life
can follow him along this same experience of Father discovery.
They can even attain, as they are, the same satisfaction in this
experience with the Father as did Jesus as he was. New
potentials were actualized in the universe of Nebadon consequent
upon the terminal bestowal of Michael, and one of these was the
new illumination of the path of eternity that leads to the
Father of all, and which can be traversed even by the mortals of
material flesh and blood in the initial life on the planets of
space. Jesus was and is the new and living way whereby man can
come into the divine inheritance which the Father has decreed
shall be his for but the asking. In Jesus there is abundantly
demonstrated both the beginnings and endings of the faith
experience of humanity, even of divine humanity.
7. A PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
101:7.1 An idea is only a theoretical plan for
action, while a positive decision is a validated plan of action.
A stereotype is a plan of action accepted without validation.
The materials out of which to build a personal philosophy of
religion are derived from both the inner and the environmental
experience of the individual. The social status, economic
conditions, educational opportunities, moral trends,
institutional influences, political developments, racial
tendencies, and the religious teachings of one's time and place
all become factors in the formulation of a personal philosophy
of religion. Even the inherent temperament and intellectual bent
markedly determine the pattern of religious philosophy.
Vocation, marriage, and kindred all influence the evolution of
one's personal standards of life.
101:7.2 A philosophy of religion evolves out
of a basic growth of ideas plus experimental living as both are
modified by the tendency to imitate associates. The soundness of
philosophic conclusions depends on keen, honest, and
discriminating thinking in connection with sensitivity to
meanings and accuracy of evaluation. Moral cowards never achieve
high planes of philosophic thinking; it requires courage to
invade new levels of experience and to attempt the exploration
of unknown realms of intellectual living.
101:7.3 Presently new systems of values come
into existence; new formulations of principles and standards are
achieved; habits and ideals are reshaped; some idea of a
personal God is attained, followed by enlarging concepts of
relationship thereto.
101:7.4 The great difference between a
religious and a nonreligious philosophy of living consists in
the nature and level of recognized values and in the object of
loyalties. There are four phases in the evolution of religious
philosophy: Such an experience may become merely conformative,
resigned to submission to tradition and authority. Or it may be
satisfied with slight attainments, just enough to stabilize the
daily living, and therefore becomes early arrested on such an
adventitious level. Such mortals believe in letting well enough
alone. A third group progress to the level of logical
intellectuality but there stagnate in consequence of cultural
slavery. It is indeed pitiful to behold giant intellects held so
securely within the cruel grasp of cultural bondage. It is
equally pathetic to observe those who trade their cultural
bondage for the materialistic fetters of a science, falsely so
called. The fourth level of philosophy attains freedom from all
conventional and traditional handicaps and dares to think, act,
and live honestly, loyally, fearlessly, and truthfully.
101:7.5 The acid test for any religious
philosophy consists in whether or not it distinguishes between
the realities of the material and the spiritual worlds while at
the same moment recognizing their unification in intellectual
striving and in social serving. A sound religious philosophy
does not confound the things of God with the things of Caesar.
Neither does it recognize the aesthetic cult of pure wonder as a
substitute for religion.
101:7.6 Philosophy transforms that primitive
religion which was largely a fairy tale of conscience into a
living experience in the ascending values of cosmic reality.
8. FAITH AND BELIEF
101:8.1 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 nor 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.
101:8.2 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.
101:8.3 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.
101:8.4 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.
9. RELIGION AND MORALITY
101:9.1 No professed revelation of religion
could be regarded as authentic if it failed to recognize the
duty demands of ethical obligation which had been created and
fostered by preceding evolutionary religion. Revelation
unfailingly enlarges the ethical horizon of evolved religion
while it simultaneously and unfailingly expands the moral
obligations of all prior revelations.
101:9.2 When you presume to sit in critical
judgment on the primitive religion of man (or on the religion of
primitive man), you should remember to judge such savages and to
evaluate their religious experience in accordance with their
enlightenment and status of conscience. Do not make the mistake
of judging another's religion by your own standards of knowledge
and truth.
101:9.3 True religion is that sublime and
profound conviction within the soul which compellingly
admonishes man that it would be wrong for him not to believe in
those morontial realities which constitute his highest ethical
and moral concepts, his highest interpretation of life's
greatest values and the universe's deepest realities. And such a
religion is simply the experience of yielding intellectual
loyalty to the highest dictates of spiritual consciousness.
101:9.4 The search for beauty is a part of
religion only in so far as it is ethical and to the extent that
it enriches the concept of the moral. Art is only religious when
it becomes diffused with purpose which has been derived from
high spiritual motivation.
101:9.5 The enlightened spiritual
consciousness of civilized man is not concerned so much with
some specific intellectual belief or with any one 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. Moral consciousness is just a name applied
to the human recognition and awareness of those ethical and
emerging morontial values which duty demands that man shall
abide by in the day-by-day control and guidance of conduct.
101:9.6 Though recognizing that religion is
imperfect, there are at least two practical manifestations of
its nature and function:
101:9.7 1. The spiritual urge and philosophic
pressure of religion tend to cause man to project his estimation
of moral values directly outward into the affairs of his fellows
-- the ethical reaction of religion.
101:9.8 2. Religion creates for the human mind
a spiritualized consciousness of divine reality based on, and by
faith derived from, antecedent concepts of moral values and
co-ordinated with superimposed concepts of spiritual values.
Religion thereby becomes a censor of mortal affairs, a form of
glorified moral trust and confidence in reality, the enhanced
realities of time and the more enduring realities of eternity.
101:9.9 Faith becomes the connection between
moral consciousness and the spiritual concept of enduring
reality. Religion becomes the avenue of man's escape from the
material limitations of the temporal and natural world to the
supernal realities of the eternal and spiritual world by and
through the technique of salvation, the progressive morontia
transformation.
10. RELIGION AS MAN'S LIBERATOR
101:10.1 Intelligent man knows that he is a
child of nature, a part of the material universe; he likewise
discerns no survival of individual personality in the motions
and tensions of the mathematical level of the energy universe.
Nor can man ever discern spiritual reality through the
examination of physical causes and effects.
101:10.2 A human being is also aware that he
is a part of the ideational cosmos, but though concept may
endure beyond a mortal life span, there is nothing inherent in
concept which indicates the personal survival of the conceiving
personality. Nor will the exhaustion of the possibilities of
logic and reason ever reveal to the logician or to the reasoner
the eternal truth of the survival of personality.
101:10.3 The material level of law provides
for causality continuity, the unending response of effect to
antecedent action; the mind level suggests the perpetuation of
ideational continuity, the unceasing flow of conceptual
potentiality from pre-existent conceptions. But neither of these
levels of the universe discloses to the inquiring mortal an
avenue of escape from partiality of status and from the
intolerable suspense of being a transient reality in the
universe, a temporal personality doomed to be extinguished upon
the exhaustion of the limited life energies.
101:10.4 It is only through the morontial
avenue leading to spiritual insight that man can ever break the
fetters inherent in his mortal status in the universe. Energy
and mind do lead back to Paradise and Deity, but neither the
energy endowment nor the mind endowment of man proceeds directly
from such Paradise Deity. Only in the spiritual sense is man a
child of God. And this is true because it is only in the
spiritual sense that man is at present endowed and indwelt by
the Paradise Father. Mankind can never discover divinity except
through the avenue of religious experience and by the exercise
of true faith. The faith acceptance of the truth of God enables
man to escape from the circumscribed confines of material
limitations and affords him a rational hope of achieving safe
conduct from the material realm, whereon is death, to the
spiritual realm, wherein is life eternal.
101:10.5 The purpose of religion is not to
satisfy curiosity about God but rather to afford intellectual
constancy and philosophic security, to stabilize and enrich
human living by blending the mortal with the divine, the partial
with the perfect, man and God. It is through religious
experience that man's concepts of ideality are endowed with
reality.
101:10.6 Never can there be either scientific
or logical proofs of divinity. Reason alone can never validate
the values and goodnesses of religious experience. But it will
always remain true: Whosoever wills to do the will of God shall
comprehend the validity of spiritual values. This is the nearest
approach that can be made on the mortal level to offering proofs
of the reality of religious experience. Such faith affords the
only escape from the mechanical clutch of the material world and
from the error distortion of the incompleteness of the
intellectual world; it is the only discovered solution to the
impasse in mortal thinking regarding the continuing survival of
the individual personality. It is the only passport to
completion of reality and to eternity of life in a universal
creation of love, law, unity, and progressive Deity attainment.
101:10.7 Religion effectually cures man's
sense of idealistic isolation or spiritual loneliness; it
enfranchises the believer as a son of God, a citizen of a new
and meaningful universe. Religion assures man that, in following
the gleam of righteousness discernible in his soul, he is
thereby identifying himself with the plan of the Infinite and
the purpose of the Eternal. Such a liberated soul immediately
begins to feel at home in this new universe, his universe.
101:10.8 When you experience such a
transformation of faith, you are no longer a slavish part of the
mathematical cosmos but rather a liberated volitional son of the
Universal Father. No longer is such a liberated son fighting
alone against the inexorable doom of the termination of temporal
existence; no longer does he combat all nature, with the odds
hopelessly against him; no longer is he staggered by the
paralyzing fear that, perchance, he has put his trust in a
hopeless phantasm or pinned his faith to a fanciful error.
101:10.9 Now, rather, are the sons of God
enlisted together in fighting the battle of reality's triumph
over the partial shadows of existence. At last all creatures
become conscious of the fact that God and all the divine hosts
of a well-nigh limitless universe are on their side in the
supernal struggle to attain eternity of life and divinity of
status. Such faith-liberated sons have certainly enlisted in the
struggles of time on the side of the supreme forces and divine
personalities of eternity; even the stars in their courses are
now doing battle for them; at last they gaze upon the universe
from within, from God's viewpoint, and all is transformed from
the uncertainties of material isolation to the sureties of
eternal spiritual progression. Even time itself becomes but the
shadow of eternity cast by Paradise realities upon the moving
panoply of space.
101:10.10
Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.
