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The 5th Epochal Revelation
-The Urantia Papers
PAPER 102
THE FOUNDATIONS OF RELIGIOUS FAITH
102:0.1
TO THE unbelieving materialist, man is simply an
evolutionary accident. His hopes of survival are strung
on a figment of mortal imagination; his fears, loves,
longings, and beliefs are but the reaction of the
incidental juxtaposition of certain lifeless atoms of
matter. No display of energy nor expression of trust can
carry him beyond the grave. The devotional labors and
inspirational genius of the best of men are doomed to be
extinguished by death, the long and lonely night of
eternal oblivion and soul extinction. Nameless despair
is man's only reward for living and toiling under the
temporal sun of mortal existence. Each day of life
slowly and surely tightens the grasp of a pitiless doom
which a hostile and relentless universe of matter has
decreed shall be the crowning insult to everything in
human desire which is beautiful, noble, lofty, and good.
102:0.2
But such is not man's end and eternal destiny; such a
vision is but the cry of despair uttered by some
wandering soul who has become lost in spiritual
darkness, and who bravely struggles on in the face of
the mechanistic sophistries of a material philosophy,
blinded by the confusion and distortion of a complex
learning. And all this doom of darkness and all this
destiny of despair are forever dispelled by one brave
stretch of faith on the part of the most humble and
unlearned of God's children on earth.
102:0.3
This saving faith has its birth in the human heart when
the moral consciousness of man realizes that human
values may be translated in mortal experience from the
material to the spiritual, from the human to the divine,
from time to eternity.
1. ASSURANCES OF FAITH
102:1.1
The work of the Thought Adjuster constitutes the
explanation of the translation of man's primitive and
evolutionary sense of duty into that higher and more
certain faith in the eternal realities of revelation.
There must be perfection hunger in man's heart to insure
capacity for comprehending the faith paths to supreme
attainment. If any man chooses to do the divine will, he
shall know the way of truth. It is literally true,
"Human things must be known in order to be loved, but
divine things must be loved in order to be known." But
honest doubts and sincere questionings are not sin; such
attitudes merely spell delay in the progressive journey
toward perfection attainment. Childlike trust secures
man's entrance into the kingdom of heavenly ascent, but
progress is wholly dependent on the vigorous exercise of
the robust and confident faith of the full-grown man.
102:1.2
The reason of science is based on the observable facts
of time; the faith of religion argues from the spirit
program of eternity. What knowledge and reason cannot do
for us, true wisdom admonishes us to allow faith to
accomplish through religious insight and spiritual
transformation.
102:1.3
Owing to the isolation of rebellion, the revelation of
truth on Urantia has all too often been mixed up with
the statements of partial and transient cosmologies.
Truth remains unchanged from generation to generation,
but the associated teachings about the physical world
vary from day to day and from year to year. Eternal
truth should not be slighted because it chances to be
found in company with obsolete ideas regarding the
material world. The more of science you know, the less
sure you can be; the more of religion you
have, the
more certain you are.
102:1.4
The certainties of science proceed entirely from the
intellect; the certitudes of religion spring from the
very foundations of the
entire
personality. Science appeals to the understanding of
the mind; religion appeals to the loyalty and devotion
of the body, mind, and spirit, even to the whole
personality.
102:1.5
God is so all real and absolute that no material sign of
proof or no demonstration of so-called miracle may be
offered in testimony of his reality. Always will we know
him because we trust him, and our belief in him is
wholly based on our personal participation in the divine
manifestations of his infinite reality.
102:1.6
The indwelling Thought Adjuster unfailingly arouses in
man's soul a true and searching hunger for perfection
together with a far-reaching curiosity which can be
adequately satisfied only by communion with God, the
divine source of that Adjuster. The hungry soul of man
refuses to be satisfied with anything less than the
personal realization of the living God. Whatever more
God may be than a high and perfect moral personality, he
cannot, in our hungry and finite concept, be anything
less.
2. RELIGION AND REALITY
102:2.1
Observing minds and discriminating souls know religion
when they find it in the lives of their fellows.
Religion requires no definition; we all know its social,
intellectual, moral, and spiritual fruits. And this all
grows out of the fact that religion is the property of
the human race; it is not a child of culture. True,
one's perception of religion is still human and
therefore subject to the bondage of ignorance, the
slavery of superstition, the deceptions of
sophistication, and the delusions of false philosophy.
102:2.2
One of the characteristic peculiarities of genuine
religious assurance is that, notwithstanding the
absoluteness of its affirmations and the stanchness of
its attitude, the spirit of its expression is so poised
and tempered that it never conveys the slightest
impression of self-assertion or egoistic exaltation. The
wisdom of religious experience is something of a paradox
in that it is both humanly original and Adjuster
derivative. Religious force is not the product of the
individual's personal prerogatives but rather the
outworking of that sublime partnership of man and the
everlasting source of all wisdom. Thus do the words and
acts of true and undefiled religion become compellingly
authoritative for all enlightened mortals.
102:2.3
It is difficult to identify and analyze the factors of a
religious experience, but it is not difficult to observe
that such religious practitioners live and carry on as
if already in the presence of the Eternal. Believers
react to this temporal life as if immortality already
were within their grasp. In the lives of such mortals
there is a valid originality and a spontaneity of
expression that forever segregate them from those of
their fellows who have imbibed only the wisdom of the
world. Religionists seem to live in effective
emancipation from harrying haste and the painful stress
of the vicissitudes inherent in the temporal currents of
time; they exhibit a stabilization of personality and a
tranquillity of character not explained by the laws of
physiology, psychology, and sociology.
102:2.4
Time is an invariable element in the attainment of
knowledge; religion makes its endowments immediately
available, albeit there is the important factor of
growth in grace, definite advancement in all phases of
religious experience. Knowledge is an eternal quest;
always are you learning, but never are you able to
arrive at the full knowledge of absolute truth. In
knowledge alone there can never be absolute certainty,
only increasing probability of approximation; but the
religious soul of spiritual illumination
knows, and
knows now.
And yet this profound and positive certitude does not
lead such a sound-minded religionist to take any less
interest in the ups and downs of the progress of human
wisdom, which is bound up on its material end with the
developments of slow-moving science.
102:2.5
Even the discoveries of science are not truly
real in the
consciousness of human experience until they are
unraveled and correlated, until their relevant facts
actually become
meaning through encircuitment in the thought streams
of mind. Mortal man views even his physical environment
from the mind level, from the perspective of its
psychological registry. It is not, therefore, strange
that man should place a highly unified interpretation
upon the universe and then seek to identify this energy
unity of his science with the spirit unity of his
religious experience. Mind is unity; mortal
consciousness lives on the mind level and perceives the
universal realities through the eyes of the mind
endowment. The mind perspective will not yield the
existential unity of the source of reality, the First
Source and Center, but it can and sometime will portray
to man the experiential synthesis of energy, mind, and
spirit in and as the Supreme Being. But mind can never
succeed in this unification of the diversity of reality
unless such mind is firmly aware of material things,
intellectual meanings, and spiritual values; only in the
harmony of the triunity of functional reality is there
unity, and only in unity is there the personality
satisfaction of the realization of cosmic constancy and
consistency.
102:2.6
Unity is best found in human experience through
philosophy. And while the body of philosophic thought
must ever be founded on material facts, the soul and
energy of true philosophic dynamics is mortal spiritual
insight.
102:2.7
Evolutionary man does not naturally relish hard work. To
keep pace in his life experience with the impelling
demands and the compelling urges of a growing religious
experience means incessant activity in spiritual growth,
intellectual expansion, factual enlargement, and social
service. There is no real religion apart from a highly
active personality. Therefore do the more indolent of
men often seek to escape the rigors of truly religious
activities by a species of ingenious self-deception
through resorting to a retreat to the false shelter of
stereotyped religious doctrines and dogmas. But true
religion is alive. Intellectual crystallization of
religious concepts is the equivalent of spiritual death.
You cannot conceive of religion without ideas, but when
religion once becomes reduced only to an
idea, it is
no longer religion; it has become merely a species of
human philosophy.
102:2.8
Again, there are other types of unstable and poorly
disciplined souls who would use the sentimental ideas of
religion as an avenue of escape from the irritating
demands of living. When certain vacillating and timid
mortals attempt to escape from the incessant pressure of
evolutionary life, religion, as they conceive it, seems
to present the nearest refuge, the best avenue of
escape. But it is the mission of religion to prepare man
for bravely, even heroically, facing the vicissitudes of
life. Religion is evolutionary man's supreme endowment,
the one thing which enables him to carry on and "endure
as seeing Him who is invisible." Mysticism, however, is
often something of a retreat from life which is embraced
by those humans who do not relish the more robust
activities of living a religious life in the open arenas
of human society and commerce. True religion must
act. Conduct
will be the result of religion when man actually has it,
or rather when religion is permitted truly to possess
the man. Never will religion be content with mere
thinking or unacting feeling.
102:2.9
We are not blind to the fact that religion often acts
unwisely, even irreligiously, but it
acts.
Aberrations of religious conviction have led to bloody
persecutions, but always and ever religion does
something; it is dynamic!
3. KNOWLEDGE, WISDOM, AND INSIGHT
102:3.1
Intellectual deficiency or educational poverty
unavoidably handicaps higher religious attainment
because such an impoverished environment of the
spiritual nature robs religion of its chief channel of
philosophic contact with the world of scientific
knowledge. The intellectual factors of religion are
important, but their overdevelopment is likewise
sometimes very handicapping and embarrassing. Religion
must continually labor under a paradoxical necessity:
the necessity of making effective use of thought while
at the same time discounting the spiritual
serviceableness of all thinking.
102:3.2
Religious speculation is inevitable but always
detrimental; speculation invariably falsifies its
object. Speculation tends to translate religion into
something material or humanistic, and thus, while
directly interfering with the clarity of logical
thought, it indirectly causes religion to appear as a
function of the temporal world, the very world with
which it should everlastingly stand in contrast.
Therefore will religion always be characterized by
paradoxes, the paradoxes resulting from the absence of
the experiential connection between the material and the
spiritual levels of the universe -- morontia mota, the
superphilosophic sensitivity for truth discernment and
unity perception.
102:3.3
Material feelings, human emotions, lead directly to
material actions, selfish acts. Religious insights,
spiritual motivations, lead directly to religious
actions, unselfish acts of social service and altruistic
benevolence.
102:3.4
Religious desire is the hunger quest for divine reality.
Religious experience is the realization of the
consciousness of having found God. And when a human
being does find God, there is experienced within the
soul of that being such an indescribable restlessness of
triumph in discovery that he is impelled to seek loving
service-contact with his less illuminated fellows, not
to disclose that he has found God, but rather to allow
the overflow of the welling-up of eternal goodness
within his own soul to refresh and ennoble his fellows.
Real religion leads to increased social service.
102:3.5
Science, knowledge, leads to
fact
consciousness; religion, experience, leads to
value
consciousness; philosophy, wisdom, leads to
co-ordinate
consciousness; revelation (the substitute for morontia
mota) leads to the consciousness of
true reality;
while the co-ordination of the consciousness of fact,
value, and true reality constitutes awareness of
personality reality, maximum of being, together with the
belief in the possibility of the survival of that very
personality.
102:3.6
Knowledge leads to placing men, to originating social
strata and castes. Religion leads to serving men, thus
creating ethics and altruism. Wisdom leads to the higher
and better fellowship of both ideas and one's fellows.
Revelation liberates men and starts them out on the
eternal adventure.
102:3.7
Science sorts men; religion loves men, even as yourself;
wisdom does justice to differing men; but revelation
glorifies man and discloses his capacity for partnership
with God.
102:3.8
Science vainly strives to create the brotherhood of
culture; religion brings into being the brotherhood of
the spirit. Philosophy strives for the brotherhood of
wisdom; revelation portrays the eternal brotherhood, the
Paradise Corps of the Finality.
102:3.9
Knowledge yields pride in the fact of personality;
wisdom is the consciousness of the meaning of
personality; religion is the experience of cognizance of
the value of personality; revelation is the assurance of
personality survival.
102:3.10
Science seeks to identify, analyze, and classify the
segmented parts of the limitless cosmos. Religion grasps
the idea-of-the-whole, the entire cosmos. Philosophy
attempts the identification of the material segments of
science with the spiritual-insight concept of the whole.
Wherein philosophy fails in this attempt, revelation
succeeds, affirming that the cosmic circle is universal,
eternal, absolute, and infinite. This cosmos of the
Infinite I AM is therefore endless, limitless, and
all-inclusive -- timeless, spaceless, and unqualified.
And we bear testimony that the Infinite I AM is also the
Father of Michael of Nebadon and the God of human
salvation.
102:3.11
Science indicates Deity as a
fact;
philosophy presents the
idea of an
Absolute; religion envisions God as a loving
spiritual
personality. Revelation affirms the
unity of the
fact of Deity, the idea of the Absolute, and the
spiritual personality of God and, further, presents this
concept as our Father -- the universal fact of
existence, the eternal idea of mind, and the infinite
spirit of life.
102:3.12
The pursuit of knowledge constitutes science; the search
for wisdom is philosophy; the love for God is religion;
the hunger for truth
is a
revelation. But it is the indwelling Thought Adjuster
that attaches the feeling of reality to man's spiritual
insight into the cosmos.
102:3.13
In science, the idea precedes the expression of its
realization; in religion, the experience of realization
precedes the expression of the idea. There is a vast
difference between the evolutionary will-to-believe and
the product of enlightened reason, religious insight,
and revelation -- the
will that
believes.
102:3.14
In evolution, religion often leads to man's creating his
concepts of God; revelation exhibits the phenomenon of
God's evolving man himself, while in the earth life of
Christ Michael we behold the phenomenon of God's
revealing himself to man. Evolution tends to make God
manlike; revelation tends to make man Godlike.
102:3.15
Science is only satisfied with first causes, religion
with supreme personality, and philosophy with unity.
Revelation affirms that these three are one, and that
all are good. The
eternal real is the good of the universe and not the
time illusions of space evil. In the spiritual
experience of all personalities, always is it true that
the real is the good and the good is the real.
4. THE FACT OF EXPERIENCE
102:4.1
Because of the presence in your minds of the Thought
Adjuster, it is no more of a mystery for you to know the
mind of God than for you to be sure of the consciousness
of knowing any other mind, human or superhuman. Religion
and social consciousness have this in common: They are
predicated on the consciousness of other-mindness. The
technique whereby you can accept another's idea as yours
is the same whereby you may "let the mind which was in
Christ be also in you."
102:4.2
What is human experience? It is simply any interplay
between an active and questioning self and any other
active and external reality. The mass of experience is
determined by depth of concept plus totality of
recognition of the reality of the external. The motion
of experience equals the force of expectant imagination
plus the keenness of the sensory discovery of the
external qualities of contacted reality. The fact of
experience is found in self-consciousness plus
other-existences -- other-thingness, other-mindness, and
other-spiritness.
102:4.3
Man very early becomes conscious that he is not alone in
the world or the universe. There develops a natural
spontaneous self-consciousness of other-mindness in the
environment of selfhood. Faith translates this natural
experience into religion, the recognition of God as the
reality -- source, nature, and destiny -- of
other-mindness.
But such a knowledge of God is ever and always a reality
of personal experience. If God were not a personality,
he could not become a living part of the real religious
experience of a human personality.
102:4.4
The element of error present in human religious
experience is directly proportional to the content of
materialism which contaminates the spiritual concept of
the Universal Father. Man's prespirit progression in the
universe consists in the experience of divesting himself
of these erroneous ideas of the nature of God and of the
reality of pure and true spirit. Deity is more than
spirit, but the spiritual approach is the only one
possible to ascending man.
102:4.5
Prayer is indeed a part of religious experience, but it
has been wrongly emphasized by modern religions, much to
the neglect of the more essential communion of worship.
The reflective powers of the mind are deepened and
broadened by worship. Prayer may enrich the life, but
worship illuminates destiny.
102:4.6
Revealed religion is the unifying element of human
existence. Revelation unifies history, co-ordinates
geology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology,
sociology, and psychology. Spiritual experience is the
real soul of man's cosmos.
5. THE SUPREMACY OF PURPOSIVE POTENTIAL
102:5.1
Although the establishment of the fact of belief is not
equivalent to establishing the fact of that which is
believed, nevertheless, the evolutionary progression of
simple life to the status of personality does
demonstrate the fact of the existence of the potential
of personality to start with. And in the time universes,
potential is always supreme over the actual. In the
evolving cosmos the potential is what is to be, and what
is to be is the unfolding of the purposive mandates of
Deity.
102:5.2
This same purposive supremacy is shown in the evolution
of mind ideation when primitive animal fear is
transmuted into the constantly deepening reverence for
God and into increasing awe of the universe. Primitive
man had more religious fear than faith, and the
supremacy of spirit potentials over mind actuals is
demonstrated when this craven fear is translated into
living faith in spiritual realities.
102:5.3
You can psychologize evolutionary religion but not the
personal-experience religion of spiritual origin. Human
morality may recognize values, but only religion can
conserve, exalt, and spiritualize such values. But
notwithstanding such actions, religion is something more
than emotionalized morality. Religion is to morality as
love is to duty, as sonship is to servitude, as essence
is to substance. Morality discloses an almighty
Controller, a Deity to be served; religion discloses an
all-loving Father, a God to be worshiped and loved. And
again this is because the spiritual potentiality of
religion is dominant over the duty actuality of the
morality of evolution.
6. THE CERTAINTY OF RELIGIOUS FAITH
102:6.1
The philosophic elimination of religious fear and the
steady progress of science add greatly to the mortality
of false gods; and even though these casualties of
man-made deities may momentarily befog the spiritual
vision, they eventually destroy that ignorance and
superstition which so long obscured the living God of
eternal love. The relation between the creature and the
Creator is a living experience, a dynamic religious
faith, which is not subject to precise definition. To
isolate part of life and call it religion is to
disintegrate life and to distort religion. And this is
just why the God of worship claims all allegiance or
none.
102:6.2
The gods of primitive men may have been no more than
shadows of themselves; the living God is the divine
light whose interruptions constitute the creation
shadows of all space.
102:6.3
The religionist of philosophic attainment has faith in a
personal God of personal salvation, something more than
a reality, a value, a level of achievement, an exalted
process, a transmutation, the ultimate of time-space, an
idealization, the personalization of energy, the entity
of gravity, a human projection, the idealization of
self, nature's upthrust, the inclination to goodness,
the forward impulse of evolution, or a sublime
hypothesis. The religionist has faith in a God of love.
Love is the essence of religion and the wellspring of
superior civilization.
102:6.4
Faith transforms the philosophic God of probability into
the saving God of certainty in the personal religious
experience. Skepticism may challenge the theories of
theology, but confidence in the dependability of
personal experience affirms the truth of that belief
which has grown into faith.
102:6.5
Convictions about God may be arrived at through wise
reasoning, but the individual becomes God-knowing only
by faith, through personal experience. In much that
pertains to life, probability must be reckoned with, but
when contacting with cosmic reality, certainty may be
experienced when such meanings and values are approached
by living faith. The God-knowing soul dares to say, "I
know," even when this knowledge of God is questioned by
the unbeliever who denies such certitude because it is
not wholly supported by intellectual logic. To every
such doubter the believer only replies, "How do you know
that I do not know?"
102:6.6
Though reason can always question faith, faith can
always supplement both reason and logic. Reason creates
the probability which faith can transform into a moral
certainty, even a spiritual experience. God is the first
truth and the last fact; therefore does all truth take
origin in him, while all facts exist relative to him.
God is absolute truth. As truth one may know God, but to
understand -- to explain -- God, one must explore the
fact of the universe of universes. The vast gulf between
the experience of the truth of God and ignorance as to
the fact of God can be bridged only by living faith.
Reason alone cannot achieve harmony between infinite
truth and universal fact.
102:6.7
Belief may not be able to resist doubt and withstand
fear, but faith is always triumphant over doubting, for
faith is both positive and living. The positive always
has the advantage over the negative, truth over error,
experience over theory, spiritual realities over the
isolated facts of time and space. The convincing
evidence of this spiritual certainty consists in the
social fruits of the spirit which such believers,
faithers, yield as a result of this genuine spiritual
experience. Said Jesus: "If you love your fellows as I
have loved you, then shall all men know that you are my
disciples."
102:6.8
To science God is a possibility, to psychology a
desirability, to philosophy a probability, to religion a
certainty, an actuality of religious experience. Reason
demands that a philosophy which cannot find the God of
probability should be very respectful of that religious
faith which can and does find the God of certitude.
Neither should science discount religious experience on
grounds of credulity, not so long as it persists in the
assumption that man's intellectual and philosophic
endowments emerged from increasingly lesser
intelligences the further back they go, finally taking
origin in primitive life which was utterly devoid of all
thinking and feeling.
102:6.9
The facts of evolution must not be arrayed against the
truth of the reality of the certainty of the spiritual
experience of the religious living of the God-knowing
mortal. Intelligent men should cease to reason like
children and should attempt to use the consistent logic
of adulthood, logic which tolerates the concept of truth
alongside the observation of fact. Scientific
materialism has gone bankrupt when it persists, in the
face of each recurring universe phenomenon, in refunding
its current objections by referring what is admittedly
higher back into that which is admittedly lower.
Consistency demands the recognition of the activities of
a purposive Creator.
102:6.10
Organic evolution is a fact; purposive or progressive
evolution is a truth which makes consistent the
otherwise contradictory phenomena of the ever-ascending
achievements of evolution. The higher any scientist
progresses in his chosen science, the more will he
abandon the theories of materialistic fact in favor of
the cosmic truth of the dominance of the Supreme Mind.
Materialism cheapens human life; the gospel of Jesus
tremendously enhances and supernally exalts every
mortal. Mortal existence must be visualized as
consisting in the intriguing and fascinating experience
of the realization of the reality of the meeting of the
human upreach and the divine and saving downreach.
7. THE CERTITUDE OF THE DIVINE
102:7.1
The Universal Father, being self-existent, is also
self-explanatory; he actually lives in every rational
mortal. But you cannot be sure about God unless you know
him; sonship is the only experience which makes
fatherhood certain. The universe is everywhere
undergoing change. A changing universe is a dependent
universe; such a creation cannot be either final or
absolute. A finite universe is wholly dependent on the
Ultimate and the Absolute. The universe and God are not
identical; one is cause, the other effect. The cause is
absolute, infinite, eternal, and changeless; the effect,
time-space and transcendental but ever changing, always
growing.
102:7.2
God is the one and only self-caused fact in the
universe. He is the secret of the order, plan, and
purpose of the whole creation of things and beings. The
everywhere-changing universe is regulated and stabilized
by absolutely unchanging laws, the habits of an
unchanging God. The fact of God, the divine law, is
changeless; the truth of God, his relation to the
universe, is a relative revelation which is ever
adaptable to the constantly evolving universe.
102:7.3
Those who would invent a religion without God are like
those who would gather fruit without trees, have
children without parents. You cannot have effects
without causes; only the I AM is causeless. The fact of
religious experience implies God, and such a God of
personal experience must be a personal Deity. You cannot
pray to a chemical formula, supplicate a mathematical
equation, worship a hypothesis, confide in a postulate,
commune with a process, serve an abstraction, or hold
loving fellowship with a law.
102:7.4
True, many apparently religious traits can grow out of
nonreligious roots. Man can, intellectually, deny God
and yet be morally good, loyal, filial, honest, and even
idealistic. Man may graft many purely humanistic
branches onto his basic spiritual nature and thus
apparently prove his contentions in behalf of a godless
religion, but such an experience is devoid of survival
values, God-knowingness and God-ascension. In such a
mortal experience only social fruits are forthcoming,
not spiritual. The graft determines the nature of the
fruit, notwithstanding that the living sustenance is
drawn from the roots of original divine endowment of
both mind and spirit.
102:7.5
The intellectual earmark of religion is certainty; the
philosophical characteristic is consistency; the social
fruits are love and service.
102:7.6
The God-knowing individual is not one who is blind to
the difficulties or unmindful of the obstacles which
stand in the way of finding God in the maze of
superstition, tradition, and materialistic tendencies of
modern times. He has encountered all these deterrents
and triumphed over them, surmounted them by living
faith, and attained the highlands of spiritual
experience in spite of them. But it is true that many
who are inwardly sure about God fear to assert such
feelings of certainty because of the multiplicity and
cleverness of those who assemble objections and magnify
difficulties about believing in God. It requires no
great depth of intellect to pick flaws, ask questions,
or raise objections. But it does require brilliance of
mind to answer these questions and solve these
difficulties; faith certainty is the greatest technique
for dealing with all such superficial contentions.
102:7.7
If science, philosophy, or sociology dares to become
dogmatic in contending with the prophets of true
religion, then should God-knowing men reply to such
unwarranted dogmatism with that more farseeing dogmatism
of the certainty of personal spiritual experience, "I
know what I have experienced because I am a son of I
AM." If the personal experience of a faither is to be
challenged by dogma, then this faith-born son of the
experiencible Father may reply with that unchallengeable
dogma, the statement of his actual sonship with the
Universal Father.
102:7.8
Only an unqualified reality, an absolute, could dare
consistently to be dogmatic. Those who assume to be
dogmatic must, if consistent, sooner or later be driven
into the arms of the Absolute of energy, the Universal
of truth, and the Infinite of love.
102:7.9
If the nonreligious approaches to cosmic reality presume
to challenge the certainty of faith on the grounds of
its unproved status, then the spirit experiencer can
likewise resort to the dogmatic challenge of the facts
of science and the beliefs of philosophy on the grounds
that they are likewise unproved; they are likewise
experiences in the consciousness of the scientist or the
philosopher.
102:7.10
Of God, the most inescapable of all presences, the most
real of all facts, the most living of all truths, the
most loving of all friends, and the most divine of all
values, we have the right to be the most certain of all
universe experiences.
8. THE EVIDENCES OF RELIGION
102:8.1
The highest evidence of the reality and efficacy of
religion consists in the
fact of human
experience; namely, that man, naturally fearful and
suspicious, innately endowed with a strong instinct of
self-preservation and craving survival after death, is
willing fully to trust the deepest interests of his
present and future to the keeping and direction of that
power and person designated by his faith as God. That is
the one central truth of all religion. As to what that
power or person requires of man in return for this
watchcare and final salvation, no two religions agree;
in fact, they all more or less disagree.
102:8.2
Regarding the status of any religion in the evolutionary
scale, it may best be judged by its moral judgments and
its ethical standards. The higher the type of any
religion, the more it encourages and is encouraged by a
constantly improving social morality and ethical
culture. We cannot judge religion by the status of its
accompanying civilization; we had better estimate the
real nature of a civilization by the purity and nobility
of its religion. Many of the world's most notable
religious teachers have been virtually unlettered. The
wisdom of the world is not necessary to an exercise of
saving faith in eternal realities.
102:8.3
The difference in the religions of various ages is
wholly dependent on the difference in man's
comprehension of reality and on his differing
recognition of moral values, ethical relationships, and
spirit realities.
102:8.4
Ethics is the eternal social or racial mirror which
faithfully reflects the otherwise unobservable progress
of internal spiritual and religious developments. Man
has always thought of God in the terms of the best he
knew, his deepest ideas and highest ideals. Even
historic religion has always created its God conceptions
out of its highest recognized values. Every intelligent
creature gives the name of God to the best and highest
thing he knows.
102:8.5
Religion, when reduced to terms of reason and
intellectual expression, has always dared to criticize
civilization and evolutionary progress as judged by its
own standards of ethical culture and moral progress.
102:8.6
While personal religion precedes the evolution of human
morals, it is regretfully recorded that institutional
religion has invariably lagged behind the slowly
changing mores of the human races. Organized religion
has proved to be conservatively tardy. The prophets have
usually led the people in religious development; the
theologians have usually held them back. Religion, being
a matter of inner or personal experience, can never
develop very far in advance of the intellectual
evolution of the races.
102:8.7
But religion is never enhanced by an appeal to the
so-called miraculous. The quest for miracles is a
harking back to the primitive religions of magic. True
religion has nothing to do with alleged miracles, and
never does revealed religion point to miracles as proof
of authority. Religion is ever and always rooted and
grounded in personal experience. And your highest
religion, the life of Jesus, was just such a personal
experience: man, mortal man, seeking God and finding him
to the fullness during one short life in the flesh,
while in the same human experience there appeared God
seeking man and finding him to the full satisfaction of
the perfect soul of infinite supremacy. And that is
religion, even the highest yet revealed in the universe
of Nebadon -- the earth life of Jesus of Nazareth.
102:8.8
Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.
*
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