PAPER 92
- THE LATER EVOLUTION OF RELIGION
Man possessed a religion
of natural origin as a part of his evolutionary experience
long before any systematic revelations were made on Urantia.
But this religion of natural origin was, in itself,
the product of man's superanimal endowments. Evolutionary
religion arose slowly throughout the millenniums of
mankind's experiential career through the ministry of the
following influences operating within, and impinging upon,
savage, barbarian, and civilized man:
1. The adjutant of
worship--the appearance in animal consciousness of
superanimal potentials for reality perception. This might be
termed the primordial human instinct for Deity.
2. The adjutant of
wisdom--the manifestation in a worshipful mind of the
tendency to direct its adoration in higher channels of
expression and toward ever-expanding concepts of Deity
reality.
3. The Holy Spirit--this
is the initial supermind bestowal, and it unfailingly
appears in all bona fide human personalities. This ministry
to a worship-craving and wisdom-desiring mind creates the
capacity to self-realize the postulate of human survival,
both in theologic concept and as an actual and factual
personality experience.
The co-ordinate
functioning of these three divine ministrations is quite
sufficient to initiate and prosecute the growth of
evolutionary religion. These influences are later augmented
by Thought Adjusters, seraphim, and the Spirit of Truth, all
of which accelerate the rate of religious development. These
agencies have long functioned on Urantia, and they will
continue here as long as this planet remains an inhabited
sphere. Much of the potential of these divine agencies has
never yet had opportunity for expression; much will be
revealed in the ages to come as mortal religion ascends,
level by level, toward the supernal heights of morontia
value and spirit truth.
1. THE
EVOLUTIONARY NATURE OF RELIGION
The evolution of religion
has been traced from early fear and ghosts down through many
successive stages of development, including those efforts
first to coerce and then to cajole the spirits. Tribal
fetishes grew into totems and tribal gods; magic formulas
became modern prayers. Circumcision, at first a sacrifice,
became a hygienic procedure.
Religion progressed from
nature worship up through ghost worship to fetishism
throughout the savage childhood of the races. With the dawn
of civilization
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the human race espoused the
more mystic and symbolic beliefs, while now, with
approaching maturity, mankind is ripening for the
appreciation of real religion, even a beginning of the
revelation of truth itself.
Religion arises as a
biologic reaction of mind to spiritual beliefs and the
environment; it is the last thing to perish or change in a
race. Religion is society's adjustment, in any age, to that
which is mysterious. As a social institution it embraces
rites, symbols, cults, scriptures, altars, shrines, and
temples. Holy water, relics, fetishes, charms, vestments,
bells, drums, and priesthoods are common to all religions.
And it is impossible entirely to divorce purely evolved
religion from either magic or sorcery.
Mystery and power have
always stimulated religious feelings and fears, while
emotion has ever functioned as a powerful conditioning
factor in their development. Fear has always been the basic
religious stimulus. Fear fashions the gods of evolutionary
religion and motivates the religious ritual of the primitive
believers. As civilization advances, fear becomes modified
by reverence, admiration, respect, and sympathy and is then
further conditioned by remorse and repentance.
One Asiatic people taught
that "God is a great fear"; that is the outgrowth of purely
evolutionary religion. Jesus, the revelation of the highest
type of religious living, proclaimed that "God is love."
2. RELIGION AND
THE MORES
Religion is the most rigid
and unyielding of all human institutions, but it does
tardily adjust to changing society. Eventually, evolutionary
religion does reflect the changing mores, which, in turn,
may have been affected by revealed religion. Slowly, surely,
but grudgingly, does religion (worship) follow in the wake
of wisdom--knowledge directed by experiential reason and
illuminated by divine revelation.
Religion clings to the
mores; that which was is ancient and supposedly
sacred. For this reason and no other, stone implements
persisted long into the age of bronze and iron. This
statement is of record: "And if you will make me an altar of
stone, you shall not build it of hewn stone, for, if you use
your tools in making it, you have polluted it." Even today,
the Hindus kindle their altar fires by using a primitive
fire drill. In the course of evolutionary religion, novelty
has always been regarded as sacrilege. The sacrament must
consist, not of new and manufactured food, but of the most
primitive of viands: "The flesh roasted with fire and
unleavened bread served with bitter herbs." All types of
social usage and even legal procedures cling to the old
forms.
When modern man wonders at
the presentation of so much in the scriptures of different
religions that may be regarded as obscene, he should pause
to consider that passing generations have feared to
eliminate what their ancestors deemed to be holy and sacred.
A great deal that one generation might look upon as obscene,
preceding generations have considered a part of their
accepted mores, even as approved religious rituals. A
considerable amount of religious controversy has been
occasioned by the never-ending attempts to reconcile olden
but reprehensible practices with newly advanced reason, to
find plausible theories in justification of creedal
perpetuation of ancient and outworn customs.
But it is only foolish to
attempt the too sudden acceleration of religious growth. A
race or nation can only assimilate from any advanced
religion that
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which is reasonably
consistent and compatible with its current evolutionary
status, plus its genius for adaptation. Social, climatic,
political, and economic conditions are all influential in
determining the course and progress of religious evolution.
Social morality is not determined by religion, that is, by
evolutionary religion; rather are the forms of religion
dictated by the racial morality.
Races of men only
superficially accept a strange and new religion; they
actually adjust it to their mores and old ways of believing.
This is well illustrated by the example of a certain New
Zealand tribe whose priests, after nominally accepting
Christianity, professed to have received direct revelations
from Gabriel to the effect that this selfsame tribe had
become the chosen people of God and directing that they be
permitted freely to indulge in loose sex relations and
numerous other of their olden and reprehensible customs. And
immediately all of the new-made Christians went over to this
new and less exacting version of Christianity.
Religion has at one time
or another sanctioned all sorts of contrary and inconsistent
behavior, has at some time approved of practically all that
is now regarded as immoral or sinful. Conscience, untaught
by experience and unaided by reason, never has been, and
never can be, a safe and unerring guide to human conduct.
Conscience is not a divine voice speaking to the human soul.
It is merely the sum total of the moral and ethical content
of the mores of any current stage of existence; it simply
represents the humanly conceived ideal of reaction in any
given set of circumstances.
3. THE NATURE OF
EVOLUTIONARY RELIGION
The study of human
religion is the examination of the fossil-bearing social
strata of past ages. The mores of the anthropomorphic gods
are a truthful reflection of the morals of the men who first
conceived such deities. Ancient religions and mythology
faithfully portray the beliefs and traditions of peoples
long since lost in obscurity. These olden cult practices
persist alongside newer economic customs and social
evolutions and, of course, appear grossly inconsistent. The
remnants of the cult present a true picture of the racial
religions of the past. Always remember, the cults are
formed, not to discover truth, but rather to promulgate
their creeds.
Religion has always been
largely a matter of rites, rituals, observances, ceremonies,
and dogmas. It has usually become tainted with that
persistently mischief-making error, the chosen-people
delusion. The cardinal religious ideas of incantation,
inspiration, revelation, propitiation, repentance,
atonement, intercession, sacrifice, prayer, confession,
worship, survival after death, sacrament, ritual, ransom,
salvation, redemption, covenant, uncleanness, purification,
prophecy, original sin--they all go back to the early times
of primordial ghost fear.
Primitive religion is
nothing more nor less than the struggle for material
existence extended to embrace existence beyond the grave.
The observances of such a creed represented the extension of
the self-maintenance struggle into the domain of an imagined
ghost-spirit world. But when tempted to criticize
evolutionary religion, be careful. Remember, that is what
happened; it is a historical fact. And further recall
that the power of any idea lies, not in its certainty or
truth, but rather in the vividness of its human appeal.
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Evolutionary religion makes
no provision for change or revision; unlike science, it does
not provide for its own progressive correction. Evolved
religion commands respect because its followers believe it
is The Truth; "the faith once delivered to the
saints" must, in theory, be both final and infallible. The
cult resists development because real progress is certain to
modify or destroy the cult itself; therefore must revision
always be forced upon it.
Only two influences can
modify and uplift the dogmas of natural religion: the
pressure of the slowly advancing mores and the periodic
illumination of epochal revelation. And it is not strange
that progress was slow; in ancient days, to be progressive
or inventive meant to be killed as a sorcerer. The cult
advances slowly in generation epochs and agelong cycles. But
it does move forward. Evolutionary belief in ghosts laid the
foundation for a philosophy of revealed religion which will
eventually destroy the superstition of its origin.
Religion has handicapped
social development in many ways, but without religion there
would have been no enduring morality nor ethics, no
worth-while civilization. Religion enmothered much
nonreligious culture: Sculpture originated in idol making,
architecture in temple building, poetry in incantations,
music in worship chants, drama in the acting for spirit
guidance, and dancing in the seasonal worship festivals.
But while calling
attention to the fact that religion was essential to the
development and preservation of civilization, it should be
recorded that natural religion has also done much to cripple
and handicap the very civilization which it otherwise
fostered and maintained. Religion has hampered industrial
activities and economic development; it has been wasteful of
labor and has squandered capital; it has not always been
helpful to the family; it has not adequately fostered peace
and good will; it has sometimes neglected education and
retarded science; it has unduly impoverished life for the
pretended enrichment of death. Evolutionary religion, human
religion, has indeed been guilty of all these and many more
mistakes, errors, and blunders; nevertheless, it did
maintain cultural ethics, civilized morality, and social
coherence, and made it possible for later revealed religion
to compensate for these many evolutionary shortcomings.
Evolutionary religion has
been man's most expensive but incomparably effective
institution. Human religion can be justified only in the
light of evolutionary civilization. If man were not the
ascendant product of animal evolution, then would such a
course of religious development stand without justification.
Religion facilitated the
accumulation of capital; it fostered work of certain kinds;
the leisure of the priests promoted art and knowledge; the
race, in the end, gained much as a result of all these early
errors in ethical technique. The shamans, honest and
dishonest, were terribly expensive, but they were worth all
they cost. The learned professions and science itself
emerged from the parasitical priesthoods. Religion fostered
civilization and provided societal continuity; it has been
the moral police force of all time. Religion provided that
human discipline and self-control which made wisdom
possible. Religion is the efficient scourge of evolution
which ruthlessly drives indolent and suffering humanity from
its natural state of intellectual inertia forward and upward
to the higher levels of reason and wisdom.
And this sacred heritage
of animal ascent, evolutionary religion, must ever continue
to be refined and ennobled by the continuous censorship of
revealed religion and by the fiery furnace of genuine
science.
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4. THE GIFT OF
REVELATION
Revelation is evolutionary
but always progressive. Down through the ages of a world's
history, the revelations of religion are ever-expanding and
successively more enlightening. It is the mission of
revelation to sort and censor the successive religions of
evolution. But if revelation is to exalt and upstep the
religions of evolution, then must such divine visitations
portray teachings which are not too far removed from the
thought and reactions of the age in which they are
presented. Thus must and does revelation always keep in
touch with evolution. Always must the religion of revelation
be limited by man's capacity of receptivity.
But regardless of apparent
connection or derivation, the religions of revelation are
always characterized by a belief in some Deity of final
value and in some concept of the survival of personality
identity after death.
Evolutionary religion is
sentimental, not logical. It is man's reaction to belief in
a hypothetical ghost-spirit world--the human belief-reflex,
excited by the realization and fear of the unknown.
Revelatory religion is propounded by the real spiritual
world; it is the response of the superintellectual cosmos to
the mortal hunger to believe in, and depend upon, the
universal Deities. Evolutionary religion pictures the
circuitous gropings of humanity in quest of truth;
revelatory religion is that very truth.
There have been many
events of religious revelation but only five of epochal
significance. These were as follows:
1. The Dalamatian
teachings. The true concept of the First Source and
Center was first promulgated on Urantia by the one hundred
corporeal members of Prince Caligastia's staff. This
expanding revelation of Deity went on for more than three
hundred thousand years until it was suddenly terminated by
the planetary secession and the disruption of the teaching
regime. Except for the work of Van, the influence of the
Dalamatian revelation was practically lost to the whole
world. Even the Nodites had forgotten this truth by the time
of Adam's arrival. Of all who received the teachings of the
one hundred, the red men held them longest, but the idea of
the Great Spirit was but a hazy concept in Amerindian
religion when contact with Christianity greatly clarified
and strengthened it.
2. The Edenic
teachings. Adam and Eve again portrayed the concept of
the Father of all to the evolutionary peoples. The
disruption of the first Eden halted the course of the Adamic
revelation before it had ever fully started. But the aborted
teachings of Adam were carried on by the Sethite priests,
and some of these truths have never been entirely lost to
the world. The entire trend of Levantine religious evolution
was modified by the teachings of the Sethites. But by 2500
B.C. mankind had largely lost sight of the revelation
sponsored in the days of Eden.
3. Melchizedek of
Salem. This emergency Son of Nebadon inaugurated the
third revelation of truth on Urantia. The cardinal precepts
of his teachings were trust and faith. He
taught trust in the omnipotent beneficence of God and
proclaimed that faith was the act by which men earned God's
favor. His teachings gradually commingled with the beliefs
and practices of various evolutionary religions
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and finally developed into
those theologic systems present on Urantia at the opening of
the first millennium after Christ.
4. Jesus of Nazareth.
Christ Michael presented for the fourth time to Urantia the
concept of God as the Universal Father, and this teaching
has generally persisted ever since. The essence of his
teaching was love and service, the loving
worship which a creature son voluntarily gives in
recognition of, and response to, the loving ministry of God
his Father; the freewill service which such creature sons
bestow upon their brethren in the joyous realization that in
this service they are likewise serving God the Father.
5. The Urantia Papers.
The papers, of which this is one, constitute the most recent
presentation of truth to the mortals of Urantia. These
papers differ from all previous revelations, for they are
not the work of a single universe personality but a
composite presentation by many beings. But no revelation
short of the attainment of the Universal Father can ever be
complete. All other celestial ministrations are no more than
partial, transient, and practically adapted to local
conditions in time and space. While such admissions as this
may possibly detract from the immediate force and authority
of all revelations, the time has arrived on Urantia when it
is advisable to make such frank statements, even at the risk
of weakening the future influence and authority of this, the
most recent of the revelations of truth to the mortal races
of Urantia.
5. THE GREAT
RELIGIOUS LEADERS
In evolutionary religion,
the gods are conceived to exist in the likeness of man's
image; in revelatory religion, men are taught that they are
God's sons--even fashioned in the finite image of divinity;
in the synthesized beliefs compounded from the teachings of
revelation and the products of evolution, the God concept is
a blend of:
1. The pre-existent ideas
of the evolutionary cults.
2. The sublime ideals of
revealed religion.
3. The personal viewpoints
of the great religious leaders, the prophets and teachers of
mankind.
Most great religious
epochs have been inaugurated by the life and teachings of
some outstanding personality; leadership has originated a
majority of the worth-while moral movements of history. And
men have always tended to venerate the leader, even at the
expense of his teachings; to revere his personality, even
though losing sight of the truths which he proclaimed. And
this is not without reason; there is an instinctive longing
in the heart of evolutionary man for help from above and
beyond. This craving is designed to anticipate the
appearance on earth of the Planetary Prince and the later
Material Sons. On Urantia man has been deprived of these
superhuman leaders and rulers, and therefore does he
constantly seek to make good this loss by enshrouding his
human leaders with legends pertaining to supernatural
origins and miraculous careers.
Many races have conceived
of their leaders as being born of virgins; their careers are
liberally sprinkled with miraculous episodes, and their
return is always expected by their respective groups. In
central Asia the tribesmen still look for the return of
Genghis Khan; in Tibet, China, and India it is Buddha; in
Islam it is Mohammed; among the Amerinds it was Hesunanin
Onamonalonton;
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with the Hebrews it was, in
general, Adam's return as a material ruler. In Babylon the
god Marduk was a perpetuation of the Adam legend, the
son-of-God idea, the connecting link between man and God.
Following the appearance of Adam on earth, so-called sons of
God were common among the world races.
But regardless of the
superstitious awe in which they were often held, it remains
a fact that these teachers were the temporal personality
fulcrums on which the levers of revealed truth depended for
the advancement of the morality, philosophy, and religion of
mankind.
There have been hundreds
upon hundreds of religious leaders in the million-year human
history of Urantia from Onagar to Guru Nanak. During this
time there have been many ebbs and flows of the tide of
religious truth and spiritual faith, and each renaissance of
Urantian religion has, in the past, been identified with the
life and teachings of some religious leader. In considering
the teachers of recent times, it may prove helpful to group
them into the seven major religious epochs of post-Adamic
Urantia:
1. The Sethite period.
The Sethite priests, as regenerated under the leadership of
Amosad, became the great post-Adamic teachers. They
functioned throughout the lands of the Andites, and their
influence persisted longest among the Greeks, Sumerians, and
Hindus. Among the latter they have continued to the present
time as the Brahmans of the Hindu faith. The Sethites and
their followers never entirely lost the Trinity concept
revealed by Adam.
2. Era of the
Melchizedek missionaries. Urantia religion was in no
small measure regenerated by the efforts of those teachers
who were commissioned by Machiventa Melchizedek when he
lived and taught at Salem almost two thousand years before
Christ. These missionaries proclaimed faith as the price of
favor with God, and their teachings, though unproductive of
any immediately appearing religions, nevertheless formed the
foundations on which later teachers of truth were to build
the religions of Urantia.
3. The post-Melchizedek
era. Though Amenemope and Ikhnaton both taught in this
period, the outstanding religious genius of the
post-Melchizedek era was the leader of a group of Levantine
Bedouins and the founder of the Hebrew religion--Moses.
Moses taught monotheism. Said he: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord
our God is one God." "The Lord he is God. There is none
beside him." He persistently sought to uproot the remnants
of the ghost cult among his people, even prescribing the
death penalty for its practitioners. The monotheism of Moses
was adulterated by his successors, but in later times they
did return to many of his teachings. The greatness of Moses
lies in his wisdom and sagacity. Other men have had greater
concepts of God, but no one man was ever so successful in
inducing large numbers of people to adopt such advanced
beliefs.
4. The sixth century
before Christ. Many men arose to proclaim truth in this,
one of the greatest centuries of religious awakening ever
witnessed on Urantia. Among these should be recorded
Gautama, Confucius, Lao-tse, Zoroaster, and the Jainist
teachers. The teachings of Gautama have become widespread in
Asia, and he is revered as the Buddha by millions. Confucius
was to Chinese morality what Plato was to Greek philosophy,
and while there were religious repercussions to the
teachings of both, strictly speaking, neither was a
religious teacher; Lao-tse envisioned more of God in Tao
than did Confucius in humanity or Plato in idealism.
Zoroaster, while much affected by the prevalent
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concept of dual spiritism,
the good and the bad, at the same time definitely exalted
the idea of one eternal Deity and of the ultimate victory of
light over darkness.
5. The first century
after Christ. As a religious teacher, Jesus of Nazareth
started out with the cult which had been established by John
the Baptist and progressed as far as he could away from
fasts and forms. Aside from Jesus, Paul of Tarsus and Philo
of Alexandria were the greatest teachers of this era. Their
concepts of religion have played a dominant part in the
evolution of that faith which bears the name of Christ.
6. The sixth century
after Christ. Mohammed founded a religion which was
superior to many of the creeds of his time. His was a
protest against the social demands of the faiths of
foreigners and against the incoherence of the religious life
of his own people.
7. The fifteenth
century after Christ. This period witnessed two
religious movements: the disruption of the unity of
Christianity in the Occident and the synthesis of a new
religion in the Orient. In Europe institutionalized
Christianity had attained that degree of inelasticity which
rendered further growth incompatible with unity. In the
Orient the combined teachings of Islam, Hinduism, and
Buddhism were synthesized by Nanak and his followers into
Sikhism, one of the most advanced religions of Asia.
The future of Urantia will
doubtless be characterized by the appearance of teachers of
religious truth--the Fatherhood of God and the fraternity of
all creatures. But it is to be hoped that the ardent and
sincere efforts of these future prophets will be directed
less toward the strengthening of interreligious barriers and
more toward the augmentation of the religious brotherhood of
spiritual worship among the many followers of the differing
intellectual theologies which so characterize Urantia of
Satania.
6. THE COMPOSITE
RELIGIONS
Twentieth-century Urantia
religions present an interesting study of the social
evolution of man's worship impulse. Many faiths have
progressed very little since the days of the ghost cult. The
Pygmies of Africa have no religious reactions as a class,
although some of them believe slightly in a spirit
environment. They are today just where primitive man was
when the evolution of religion began. The basic belief of
primitive religion was survival after death. The idea of
worshiping a personal God indicates advanced evolutionary
development, even the first stage of revelation. The Dyaks
have evolved only the most primitive religious practices.
The comparatively recent Eskimos and Amerinds had very
meager concepts of God; they believed in ghosts and had an
indefinite idea of survival of some sort after death.
Present-day native Australians have only a ghost fear, dread
of the dark, and a crude ancestor veneration. The Zulus are
just evolving a religion of ghost fear and sacrifice. Many
African tribes, except through missionary work of Christians
and Mohammedans, are not yet beyond the fetish stage of
religious evolution. But some groups have long held to the
idea of monotheism, like the onetime Thracians, who also
believed in immortality.
On Urantia, evolutionary
and revelatory religion are progressing side by side while
they blend and coalesce into the diversified theologic
systems found
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in the world in the times of
the inditement of these papers. These religions, the
religions of twentieth-century Urantia, may be enumerated as
follows:
1. Hinduism--the most
ancient.
2. The Hebrew religion.
3. Buddhism.
4. The Confucian
teachings.
5. The Taoist beliefs.
6. Zoroastrianism.
7. Shinto.
8. Jainism.
9. Christianity.
10. Islam.
11. Sikhism--the most
recent.
The most advanced
religions of ancient times were Judaism and Hinduism, and
each respectively has greatly influenced the course of
religious development in Orient and Occident. Both Hindus
and Hebrews believed that their religions were inspired and
revealed, and they believed all others to be decadent forms
of the one true faith.
India is divided among
Hindu, Sikh, Mohammedan, and Jain, each picturing God, man,
and the universe as these are variously conceived. China
follows the Taoist and the Confucian teachings; Shinto is
revered in Japan.
The great international,
interracial faiths are the Hebraic, Buddhist, Christian, and
Islamic. Buddhism stretches from Ceylon and Burma through
Tibet and China to Japan. It has shown an adaptability to
the mores of many peoples that has been equaled only by
Christianity.
The Hebrew religion
encompasses the philosophic transition from polytheism to
monotheism; it is an evolutionary link between the religions
of evolution and the religions of revelation. The Hebrews
were the only western people to follow their early
evolutionary gods straight through to the God of revelation.
But this truth never became widely accepted until the days
of Isaiah, who once again taught the blended idea of a
racial deity combined with a Universal Creator : "O Lord of
Hosts, God of Israel, you are God, even you alone; you have
made heaven and earth." At one time the hope of the survival
of Occidental civilization lay in the sublime Hebraic
concepts of goodness and the advanced Hellenic concepts of
beauty.
The Christian religion is
the religion about the life and teachings of Christ based
upon the theology of Judaism, modified further through the
assimilation of certain Zoroastrian teachings and Greek
philosophy, and formulated primarily by three individuals:
Philo, Peter, and Paul. It has passed through many phases of
evolution since the time of Paul and has become so
thoroughly Occidentalized that many non-European peoples
very naturally look upon Christianity as a strange
revelation of a strange God and for strangers.
Islam is the
religio-cultural connective of North Africa, the Levant, and
southeastern Asia. It was Jewish theology in connection with
the later Christian teachings that made Islam monotheistic.
The followers of Mohammed stumbled at the advanced teachings
of the Trinity; they could not comprehend the doctrine of
three divine personalities and one Deity. It is always
difficult to induce evolutionary
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minds suddenly to
accept advanced revealed truth. Man is an evolutionary
creature and in the main must get his religion by
evolutionary techniques.
Ancestor worship onetime
constituted a decided advance in religious evolution, but it
is both amazing and regrettable that this primitive concept
persists in China, Japan, and India amidst so much that is
relatively more advanced, such as Buddhism and Hinduism. In
the Occident, ancestor worship developed into the veneration
of national gods and respect for racial heroes. In the
twentieth century this hero-venerating nationalistic
religion makes its appearance in the various radical and
nationalistic secularisms which characterize many races and
nations of the Occident. Much of this same attitude is also
found in the great universities and the larger industrial
communities of the English-speaking peoples. Not very
different from these concepts is the idea that religion is
but "a shared quest of the good life." The "national
religions" are nothing more than a reversion to the early
Roman emperor worship and to Shinto--worship of the state in
the imperial family.
7. THE FURTHER
EVOLUTION OF RELIGION
Religion can never become
a scientific fact. Philosophy may, indeed, rest on a
scientific basis, but religion will ever remain either
evolutionary or revelatory, or a possible combination of
both, as it is in the world today.
New religions cannot be
invented; they are either evolved, or else they are
suddenly revealed. All new evolutionary religions are
merely advancing expressions of the old beliefs, new
adaptations and adjustments. The old does not cease to
exist; it is merged with the new, even as Sikhism budded and
blossomed out of the soil and forms of Hinduism, Buddhism,
Islam, and other contemporary cults. Primitive religion was
very democratic; the savage was quick to borrow or lend.
Only with revealed religion did autocratic and intolerant
theologic egotism appear.
The many religions of
Urantia are all good to the extent that they bring man to
God and bring the realization of the Father to man. It is a
fallacy for any group of religionists to conceive of their
creed as The Truth; such attitudes bespeak more of
theological arrogance than of certainty of faith. There is
not a Urantia religion that could not profitably study and
assimilate the best of the truths contained in every other
faith, for all contain truth. Religionists would do better
to borrow the best in their neighbors' living spiritual
faith rather than to denounce the worst in their lingering
superstitions and outworn rituals.
All these religions have
arisen as a result of man's variable intellectual response
to his identical spiritual leading. They can never hope to
attain a uniformity of creeds, dogmas, and rituals--these
are intellectual; but they can, and some day will, realize a
unity in true worship of the Father of all, for this is
spiritual, and it is forever true, in the spirit all men are
equal.
Primitive religion was
largely a material-value consciousness, but civilization
elevates religious values, for true religion is the devotion
of the self to the service of meaningful and supreme values.
As religion evolves, ethics becomes the philosophy of
morals, and morality becomes the discipline of self by the
standards of highest meanings and supreme values--divine and
spiritual ideals. And thus religion becomes a spontaneous
and exquisite devotion, the living experience of the loyalty
of love.
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The quality of a religion is
indicated by:
1. Level
values--loyalties.
2. Depth of meanings--the
sensitization of the individual to the idealistic
appreciation of these highest values.
3. Consecration
intensity--the degree of devotion to these divine values.
4. The unfettered progress
of the personality in this cosmic path of idealistic
spiritual living, realization of sonship with God and
never-ending progressive citizenship in the universe.
Religious meanings
progress in self-consciousness when the child transfers his
ideas of omnipotence from his parents to God. And the entire
religious experience of such a child is largely dependent on
whether fear or love has dominated the parent-child
relationship. Slaves have always experienced great
difficulty in transferring their master-fear into concepts
of God-love. Civilization, science, and advanced religions
must deliver mankind from those fears born of the dread of
natural phenomena. And so should greater enlightenment
deliver educated mortals from all dependence on
intermediaries in communion with Deity.
These intermediate stages
of idolatrous hesitation in the transfer of veneration from
the human and the visible to the divine and invisible are
inevitable, but they should be shortened by the
consciousness of the facilitating ministry of the indwelling
divine spirit. Nevertheless, man has been profoundly
influenced, not only by his concepts of Deity, but also by
the character of the heroes whom he has chosen to honor. It
is most unfortunate that those who have come to venerate the
divine and risen Christ should have overlooked the man--the
valiant and courageous hero--Joshua ben Joseph.
Modern man is adequately
self-conscious of religion, but his worshipful customs are
confused and discredited by his accelerated social
metamorphosis and unprecedented scientific developments.
Thinking men and women want religion redefined, and this
demand will compel religion to re-evaluate itself.
Modern man is confronted
with the task of making more readjustments of human values
in one generation than have been made in two thousand years.
And this all influences the social attitude toward religion,
for religion is a way of living as well as a technique of
thinking.
True religion must ever
be, at one and the same time, the eternal foundation and the
guiding star of all enduring civilizations.
[Presented by a
Melchizedek of Nebadon.] |