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The 5th Epochal Revelation
-The Urantia Papers
PAPER 99
THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS OF RELIGION
99:0.1
RELIGION achieves its highest social ministry when it
has least connection with the secular institutions of
society. In past ages, since social reforms were largely
confined to the moral realms, religion did not have to
adjust its attitude to extensive changes in economic and
political systems. The chief problem of religion was the
endeavor to replace evil with good within the existing
social order of political and economic culture. Religion
has thus indirectly tended to perpetuate the established
order of society, to foster the maintenance of the
existent type of civilization.
99:0.2
But religion should not be directly concerned either
with the creation of new social orders or with the
preservation of old ones. True religion does oppose
violence as a technique of social evolution, but it does
not oppose the intelligent efforts of society to adapt
its usages and adjust its institutions to new economic
conditions and cultural requirements.
99:0.3
Religion did approve the occasional social reforms of
past centuries, but in the twentieth century it is of
necessity called upon to face adjustment to extensive
and continuing social reconstruction. Conditions of
living alter so rapidly that institutional modifications
must be greatly accelerated, and religion must
accordingly quicken its adaptation to this new and
ever-changing social order.
1. RELIGION AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION
99:1.1
Mechanical inventions and the dissemination of knowledge
are modifying civilization; certain economic adjustments
and social changes are imperative if cultural disaster
is to be avoided. This new and oncoming social order
will not settle down complacently for a millennium. The
human race must become reconciled to a procession of
changes, adjustments, and readjustments. Mankind is on
the march toward a new and unrevealed planetary destiny.
99:1.2
Religion must become a forceful influence for moral
stability and spiritual progression functioning
dynamically in the midst of these ever-changing
conditions and never-ending economic adjustments.
99:1.3
Urantia society can never hope to settle down as in past
ages. The social ship has steamed out of the sheltered
bays of established tradition and has begun its cruise
upon the high seas of evolutionary destiny; and the soul
of man, as never before in the world's history, needs
carefully to scrutinize its charts of morality and
painstakingly to observe the compass of religious
guidance. The paramount mission of religion as a social
influence is to stabilize the ideals of mankind during
these dangerous times of transition from one phase of
civilization to another, from one level of culture to
another.
99:1.4
Religion has no new duties to perform, but it is
urgently called upon to function as a wise guide and
experienced counselor in all of these new and rapidly
changing human situations. Society is becoming more
mechanical, more compact, more complex, and more
critically interdependent. Religion must function to
prevent these new and intimate interassociations from
becoming mutually retrogressive or even destructive.
Religion must act as the cosmic salt which prevents the
ferments of progression from destroying the cultural
savor of civilization. These new social relations and
economic upheavals can result in lasting brotherhood
only by the ministry of religion.
99:1.5
A godless humanitarianism is, humanly speaking, a noble
gesture, but true religion is the only power which can
lastingly increase the responsiveness of one social
group to the needs and sufferings of other groups. In
the past, institutional religion could remain passive
while the upper strata of society turned a deaf ear to
the sufferings and oppression of the helpless lower
strata, but in modern times these lower social orders
are no longer so abjectly ignorant nor so politically
helpless.
99:1.6
Religion must not become organically involved in the
secular work of social reconstruction and economic
reorganization. But it must actively keep pace with all
these advances in civilization by making clear-cut and
vigorous restatements of its moral mandates and
spiritual precepts, its progressive philosophy of human
living and transcendent survival. The spirit of religion
is eternal, but the form of its expression must be
restated every time the dictionary of human language is
revised.
2. WEAKNESS OF INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION
99:2.1
Institutional religion cannot afford inspiration and
provide leadership in this impending world-wide social
reconstruction and economic reorganization because it
has unfortunately become more or less of an organic part
of the social order and the economic system which is
destined to undergo reconstruction. Only the real
religion of personal spiritual experience can function
helpfully and creatively in the present crisis of
civilization.
99:2.2
Institutional religion is now caught in the stalemate of
a vicious circle. It cannot reconstruct society without
first reconstructing itself; and being so much an
integral part of the established order, it cannot
reconstruct itself until society has been radically
reconstructed.
99:2.3
Religionists must function in society, in industry, and
in politics as individuals, not as groups, parties, or
institutions. A religious group which presumes to
function as such, apart from religious activities,
immediately becomes a political party, an economic
organization, or a social institution. Religious
collectivism must confine its efforts to the furtherance
of religious causes.
99:2.4
Religionists are of no more value in the tasks of social
reconstruction than nonreligionists except in so far as
their religion has conferred upon them enhanced cosmic
foresight and endowed them with that superior social
wisdom which is born of the sincere desire to love God
supremely and to love every man as a brother in the
heavenly kingdom. An ideal social order is that in which
every man loves his neighbor as he loves himself.
99:2.5
The institutionalized church may have appeared to serve
society in the past by glorifying the established
political and economic orders, but it must speedily
cease such action if it is to survive. Its only proper
attitude consists in the teaching of nonviolence, the
doctrine of peaceful evolution in the place of violent
revolution -- peace on earth and good will among all
men.
99:2.6
Modern religion finds it difficult to adjust its
attitude toward the rapidly shifting social changes only
because it has permitted itself to become so thoroughly
traditionalized, dogmatized, and institutionalized. The
religion of living experience finds no difficulty in
keeping ahead of all these social developments and
economic upheavals, amid which it ever functions as a
moral stabilizer, social guide, and spiritual pilot.
True religion carries over from one age to another the
worth-while culture and that wisdom which is born of the
experience of knowing God and striving to be like him.
3. RELIGION AND THE RELIGIONIST
99:3.1
Early Christianity was entirely free from all civil
entanglements, social commitments, and economic
alliances. Only did later institutionalized Christianity
become an organic part of the political and social
structure of Occidental civilization.
99:3.2
The kingdom of heaven is neither a social nor economic
order; it is an exclusively spiritual brotherhood of
God-knowing individuals. True, such a brotherhood is in
itself a new and amazing social phenomenon attended by
astounding political and economic repercussions.
99:3.3
The religionist is not unsympathetic with social
suffering, not unmindful of civil injustice, not
insulated from economic thinking, neither insensible to
political tyranny. Religion influences social
reconstruction directly because it spiritualizes and
idealizes the individual citizen. Indirectly, cultural
civilization is influenced by the attitude of these
individual religionists as they become active and
influential members of various social, moral, economic,
and political groups.
99:3.4
The attainment of a high cultural civilization demands,
first, the ideal type of citizen and, then, ideal and
adequate social mechanisms wherewith such a citizenry
may control the economic and political institutions of
such an advanced human society.
99:3.5
The church, because of overmuch false sentiment, has
long ministered to the underprivileged and the
unfortunate, and this has all been well, but this same
sentiment has led to the unwise perpetuation of racially
degenerate stocks which have tremendously retarded the
progress of civilization.
99:3.6
Many individual social reconstructionists, while
vehemently repudiating institutionalized religion, are,
after all, zealously religious in the propagation of
their social reforms. And so it is that religious
motivation, personal and more or less unrecognized, is
playing a great part in the present-day program of
social reconstruction.
99:3.7
The great weakness of all this unrecognized and
unconscious type of religious activity is that it is
unable to profit from open religious criticism and
thereby attain to profitable levels of self-correction.
It is a fact that religion does not grow unless it is
disciplined by constructive criticism, amplified by
philosophy, purified by science, and nourished by loyal
fellowship.
99:3.8
There is always the great danger that religion will
become distorted and perverted into the pursuit of false
goals, as when in times of war each contending nation
prostitutes its religion into military propaganda.
Loveless zeal is always harmful to religion, while
persecution diverts the activities of religion into the
achievement of some sociologic or theologic drive.
99:3.9
Religion can be kept free from unholy secular alliances
only by:
1. A critically corrective philosophy.
2. Freedom from all social, economic, and political
alliances.
3. Creative, comforting, and love-expanding fellowships.
4. Progressive enhancement of spiritual insight and the
appreciation of cosmic values.
5. Prevention of fanaticism by the compensations of the
scientific mental attitude.
99:3.10
Religionists, as a group, must never concern themselves
with anything but
religion, albeit any one such religionist, as an
individual citizen, may become the outstanding leader of
some social, economic, or political reconstruction
movement.
99:3.11
It is the business of religion to create, sustain, and
inspire such a cosmic loyalty in the individual citizen
as will direct him to the achievement of success in the
advancement of all these difficult but desirable social
services.
4. TRANSITION DIFFICULTIES
99:4.1
Genuine religion renders the religionist socially
fragrant and creates insights into human fellowship. But
the formalization of religious groups many times
destroys the very values for the promotion of which the
group was organized. Human friendship and divine
religion are mutually helpful and significantly
illuminating if the growth in each is equalized and
harmonized. Religion puts new meaning into all group
associations -- families, schools, and clubs. It imparts
new values to play and exalts all true humor.
99:4.2
Social leadership is transformed by spiritual insight;
religion prevents all collective movements from losing
sight of their true objectives. Together with children,
religion is the great unifier of family life, provided
it is a living and growing faith. Family life cannot be
had without children; it can be lived without religion,
but such a handicap enormously multiplies the
difficulties of this intimate human association. During
the early decades of the twentieth century, family life,
next to personal religious experience, suffers most from
the decadence consequent upon the transition from old
religious loyalties to the emerging new meanings and
values.
99:4.3
True religion is a meaningful way of living dynamically
face to face with the commonplace realities of everyday
life. But if religion is to stimulate individual
development of character and augment integration of
personality, it must not be standardized. If it is to
stimulate evaluation of experience and serve as a
value-lure, it must not be stereotyped. If religion is
to promote supreme loyalties, it must not be formalized.
99:4.4
No matter what upheavals may attend the social and
economic growth of civilization, religion is genuine and
worth while if it fosters in the individual an
experience in which the sovereignty of truth, beauty,
and goodness prevails, for such is the true spiritual
concept of supreme reality. And through love and worship
this becomes meaningful as fellowship with man and
sonship with God.
99:4.5
After all, it is what one believes rather than what one
knows that determines conduct and dominates personal
performances. Purely factual knowledge exerts very
little influence upon the average man unless it becomes
emotionally activated. But the activation of religion is
superemotional, unifying the entire human experience on
transcendent levels through contact with, and release
of, spiritual energies in the mortal life.
99:4.6
During the psychologically unsettled times of the
twentieth century, amid the economic upheavals, the
moral crosscurrents, and the sociologic rip tides of the
cyclonic transitions of a scientific era, thousands upon
thousands of men and women have become humanly
dislocated; they are anxious, restless, fearful,
uncertain, and unsettled; as never before in the world's
history they need the consolation and stabilization of
sound religion. In the face of unprecedented scientific
achievement and mechanical development there is
spiritual stagnation and philosophic chaos.
99:4.7
There is no danger in religion's becoming more and more
of a private matter -- a personal experience -- provided
it does not lose its motivation for unselfish and loving
social service. Religion has suffered from many
secondary influences: sudden mixing of cultures,
intermingling of creeds, diminution of ecclesiastical
authority, changing of family life, together with
urbanization and mechanization.
99:4.8
Man's greatest spiritual jeopardy consists in partial
progress, the predicament of unfinished growth:
forsaking the evolutionary religions of fear without
immediately grasping the revelatory religion of love.
Modern science, particularly psychology, has weakened
only those religions which are so largely dependent upon
fear, superstition, and emotion.
99:4.9
Transition is always accompanied by confusion, and there
will be little tranquillity in the religious world until
the great struggle between the three contending
philosophies of religion is ended:
1. The spiritistic belief (in a providential Deity) of
many religions.
2. The humanistic and idealistic belief of many
philosophies.
3. The mechanistic and naturalistic conceptions of many
sciences.
99:4.10
And these three partial approaches to the reality of the
cosmos must eventually become harmonized by the
revelatory presentation of religion, philosophy, and
cosmology which portrays the triune existence of spirit,
mind, and energy proceeding from the Trinity of Paradise
and attaining time-space unification within the Deity of
the Supreme.
5. SOCIAL ASPECTS OF RELIGION
99:5.1
While religion is exclusively a personal spiritual
experience -- knowing God as a Father -- the corollary
of this experience -- knowing man as a brother --
entails the adjustment of the self to other selves, and
that involves the social or group aspect of religious
life. Religion is first an inner or personal adjustment,
and then it becomes a matter of social service or group
adjustment. The fact of man's gregariousness perforce
determines that religious groups will come into
existence. What happens to these religious groups
depends very much on intelligent leadership. In
primitive society the religious group is not always very
different from economic or political groups. Religion
has always been a conservator of morals and a stabilizer
of society. And this is still true, notwithstanding the
contrary teaching of many modern socialists and
humanists.
99:5.2
Always keep in mind: True religion is to know God as
your Father and man as your brother. Religion is not a
slavish belief in threats of punishment or magical
promises of future mystical rewards.
99:5.3
The religion of Jesus is the most dynamic influence ever
to activate the human race. Jesus shattered tradition,
destroyed dogma, and called mankind to the achievement
of its highest ideals in time and eternity -- to be
perfect, even as the Father in heaven is perfect.
99:5.4
Religion has little chance to function until the
religious group becomes separated from all other groups
-- the social association of the spiritual membership of
the kingdom of heaven.
99:5.5
The doctrine of the total depravity of man destroyed
much of the potential of religion for effecting social
repercussions of an uplifting nature and of
inspirational value. Jesus sought to restore man's
dignity when he declared that all men are the children
of God.
99:5.6
Any religious belief which is effective in
spiritualizing the believer is certain to have powerful
repercussions in the social life of such a religionist.
Religious experience unfailingly yields the "fruits of
the spirit" in the daily life of the spirit-led mortal.
99:5.7
Just as certainly as men share their religious beliefs,
they create a religious group of some sort which
eventually creates common goals. Someday religionists
will get together and actually effect co-operation on
the basis of unity of ideals and purposes rather than
attempting to do so on the basis of psychological
opinions and theological beliefs. Goals rather than
creeds should unify religionists. Since true religion is
a matter of personal spiritual experience, it is
inevitable that each individual religionist must have
his own and personal interpretation of the realization
of that spiritual experience. Let the term "faith" stand
for the individual's relation to God rather than for the
creedal formulation of what some group of mortals have
been able to agree upon as a common religious attitude.
"Have you faith? Then have it to yourself."
99:5.8
That faith is concerned only with the grasp of ideal
values is shown by the New Testament definition which
declares that faith is the substance of things hoped for
and the evidence of things not seen.
99:5.9
Primitive man made little effort to put his religious
convictions into words. His religion was danced out
rather than thought out. Modern men have thought out
many creeds and created many tests of religious faith.
Future religionists must live out their religion,
dedicate themselves to the wholehearted service of the
brotherhood of man. It is high time that man had a
religious experience so personal and so sublime that it
could be realized and expressed only by "feelings that
lie too deep for words."
99:5.10
Jesus did not require of his followers that they should
periodically assemble and recite a form of words
indicative of their common beliefs. He only ordained
that they should gather together to actually
do something
-- partake of the communal supper of the remembrance of
his bestowal life on Urantia.
99:5.11
What a mistake for Christians to make when, in
presenting Christ as the supreme ideal of spiritual
leadership, they dare to require God-conscious men and
women to reject the historic leadership of the
God-knowing men who have contributed to their particular
national or racial illumination during past ages.
6. INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION
99:6.1
Sectarianism is a disease of institutional religion, and
dogmatism is an enslavement of the spiritual nature. It
is far better to have a religion without a church than a
church without religion. The religious turmoil of the
twentieth century does not, in and of itself, betoken
spiritual decadence. Confusion goes before growth as
well as before destruction.
99:6.2
There is a real purpose in the socialization of
religion. It is the purpose of group religious
activities to dramatize the loyalties of religion; to
magnify the lures of truth, beauty, and goodness; to
foster the attractions of supreme values; to enhance the
service of unselfish fellowship; to glorify the
potentials of family life; to promote religious
education; to provide wise counsel and spiritual
guidance; and to encourage group worship. And all live
religions encourage human friendship, conserve morality,
promote neighborhood welfare, and facilitate the spread
of the essential gospel of their respective messages of
eternal salvation.
99:6.3
But as religion becomes institutionalized, its power for
good is curtailed, while the possibilities for evil are
greatly multiplied. The dangers of formalized religion
are: fixation of beliefs and crystallization of
sentiments; accumulation of vested interests with
increase of secularization; tendency to standardize and
fossilize truth; diversion of religion from the service
of God to the service of the church; inclination of
leaders to become administrators instead of ministers;
tendency to form sects and competitive divisions;
establishment of oppressive ecclesiastical authority;
creation of the aristocratic "chosen-people" attitude;
fostering of false and exaggerated ideas of sacredness;
the routinizing of religion and the petrification of
worship; tendency to venerate the past while ignoring
present demands; failure to make up-to-date
interpretations of religion; entanglement with functions
of secular institutions; it creates the evil
discrimination of religious castes; it becomes an
intolerant judge of orthodoxy; it fails to hold the
interest of adventurous youth and gradually loses the
saving message of the gospel of eternal salvation.
99:6.4
Formal religion restrains men in their personal
spiritual activities instead of releasing them for
heightened service as kingdom builders.
7. RELIGION'S CONTRIBUTION
99:7.1
Though churches and all other religious groups should
stand aloof from all secular activities, at the same
time religion must do nothing to hinder or retard the
social co-ordination of human institutions. Life must
continue to grow in meaningfulness; man must go on with
his reformation of philosophy and his clarification of
religion.
99:7.2
Political science must effect the reconstruction of
economics and industry by the techniques it learns from
the social sciences and by the insights and motives
supplied by religious living. In all social
reconstruction religion provides a stabilizing loyalty
to a transcendent object, a steadying goal beyond and
above the immediate and temporal objective. In the midst
of the confusions of a rapidly changing environment
mortal man needs the sustenance of a far-flung cosmic
perspective.
99:7.3
Religion inspires man to live courageously and joyfully
on the face of the earth; it joins patience with
passion, insight to zeal, sympathy with power, and
ideals with energy.
99:7.4
Man can never wisely decide temporal issues or transcend
the selfishness of personal interests unless he
meditates in the presence of the sovereignty of God and
reckons with the realities of divine meanings and
spiritual values.
99:7.5
Economic interdependence and social fraternity will
ultimately conduce to brotherhood. Man is naturally a
dreamer, but science is sobering him so that religion
can presently activate him with far less danger of
precipitating fanatical reactions. Economic necessities
tie man up with reality, and personal religious
experience brings this same man face to face with the
eternal realities of an ever-expanding and progressing
cosmic citizenship.
99:7.6
Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.
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