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The 5th Epochal Revelation
-The Urantia Papers
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.
*
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