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          Urantia Book Paper 102 The Foundations Of Religious Faith
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                 Paper 102 The Foundations Of Religious Faith

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Introduction

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.

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.

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

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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reduced only to an idea, it is no longer religion; it has become merely a
species of human philosophy.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Science indicates Deity as a fact; philosophy presents the idea of an Absolute;
religion envisions God as 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.

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.

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 the product of
enlightened reason, religious insight, and revelation--the will that believes.

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.

Science is only satisfied with first causes, religion with supreme personality,
and philosophy with unity. Revelation affirms that these three are one, and

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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

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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,

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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"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?"

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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7. THE CERTITUDE OF THE DIVINE

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.

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.

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.

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.

The intellectual earmark of religion is certainty; the philosophical
characteristic is consistency; the social fruits are love and service.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

                               top of page - 1128

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.

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.

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.

[Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]

                               top of page - 1129

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Subjects Archive The Urantia Book Urantia Book PART III: The History of Urantia
  : The Origin Of Urantia Life Establishment On Urantia The Marine-life Era On
Urantia Urantia During The Early Land-life Era The Mammalian Era On Urantia The
 Dawn Races Of Early Man The First Human Family The Evolutionary Races Of Color
   The Overcontrol Of Evolution The Planetary Prince Of Urantia The Planetary
  Rebellion The Dawn Of Civilization Primitive Human Institutions The Evolution
Of Human Government Development Of The State Government On A Neighboring Planet
  The Garden Of Eden Adam And Eve The Default Of Adam And Eve The Second Garden
The Midway Creatures The Violet Race After The Days Of Adam Andite Expansion In
 The Orient Andite Expansion In The Occident Development Of Modern Civilization
The Evolution Of Marriage The Marriage Institution Marriage And Family Life The
    Origins Of Worship Early Evolution Of Religion The Ghost Cults Fetishes,
  Charms, And Magic Sin, Sacrifice, And Atonement Shamanism--medicine Men And
   Priests The Evolution Of Prayer The Later Evolution Of Religion Machiventa
  Melchizedek The Melchizedek Teachings In The Orient The Melchizedek Teachings
In The Levant Yahweh--god Of The Hebrews Evolution Of The God Concept Among The
    Hebrews The Melchizedek Teachings In The Occident The Social Problems Of
      Religion Religion In Human Experience The Real Nature Of Religion The
  Foundations Of Religious Faith The Reality Of Religious Experience Growth Of
  The Trinity Concept Deity And Reality Universe Levels Of Reality Origin And
 Nature Of Thought Adjusters Mission And Ministry Of Thought Adjusters Relation
 Of Adjusters To Universe Creatures Relation Of Adjusters To Individual Mortals
  The Adjuster And The Soul Personality Survival Seraphic Guardians Of Destiny
  Seraphic Planetary Government The Supreme Being The Almighty Supreme God The
  Supreme Supreme And Ultimate--time And Space The Bestowals Of Christ Michael

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