PAPER 101
THE REAL NATURE OF RELIGION
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.
