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Religion is now, and probably always has been, a hot topic.
Religion is a concept that has been used to define many things, but
what is religion, really? In The Urantia Book, we are given a
refreshingly
understandable picture of religion and we are told that it is, among
other things, evolutionary, societal, institutional,
unifying, spiritual, but most
of all - personal. The following collection of quotes will help you to
understand the scope of religion as discussed in The Urantia Book, and
you may click through any of the
references for an expanded context for the quote.
For the most complete look at the subject of Religion, please
see
Paper 100, Religion
In Human Experience
Paper 101,
The
Real Nature of Religion
Paper 102, The
Foundations of Religious Faith and
Paper 103, The
Reality of Religious Experience
What IS Religion?
...religion
is a faith-trust in the goodness of God. God could be
great and absolute, somehow even intelligent and personal, in
philosophy, but in religion God must also be moral; he must be good.
Man might fear a great God, but he trusts and loves only a good God.
This goodness of God is a part of the personality of God, and its full
revelation appears only in the personal religious experience of the
believing sons of God.
The Urantia Book, (2:6.1)
Religion is destined to become the reality of the
spiritual unification of all that is good, beautiful, and true in human
experience.
The Urantia Book, (5:4.7)
Religion is an independent realm of human response to
life situations and is unfailingly exhibited at all stages of human
development which are postmoral. Religion may permeate all four levels
of the realization of values and the enjoyment of universe fellowship:
the physical or material level of self-preservation; the social or
emotional level of fellowship; the moral or duty level of reason; the
spiritual level of the consciousness of universe fellowship through
divine worship.
The Urantia Book, (5:5.2)
...while religion is normal and natural to man, it is also
optional. Man does not have to be religious against his will.
The Urantia Book, (5:5.5)
...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.
The Urantia Book, (92:1.3)
...true religion is the only power which can lastingly increase
the responsiveness of one social group to the needs and sufferings of
other groups.
The Urantia Book, (92:1.5)
...True religion is a meaningful way of living dynamically face
to face with the commonplace realities of everyday life.
The Urantia Book, (99:4.3)
Religion is first an inner or personal adjustment, and
then it becomes a matter of social service or group adjustment.
The Urantia Book, (99:5.1)
Religion is not a technique for attaining a static and blissful
peace of mind; it is an impulse for organizing the soul for dynamic
service. It is the enlistment of the totality of selfhood in the loyal
service of loving God and serving man.
The Urantia Book, (100:3.1)
But true religion is a living love, a life of service.
The Urantia Book, (100:6.5)
Religion is the experiencing of divinity in the
consciousness of a moral being of evolutionary origin; it represents
true experience with eternal realities in time, the realization of
spiritual satisfactions while yet in the flesh.
The Urantia Book, (101:1.1)
Religion is to morality as love is to duty, as
sonship is to servitude, as essence is to substance.
The Urantia Book, (102:5.3)
Religion is ever and always rooted and grounded in personal
experience.
The Urantia Book, (102:8.7)
True religion is the act of an individual soul in its
self-conscious relations with the Creator; organized religion is man's
attempt to socialize the worship of individual religionists.
The Urantia Book, (143:7.2)
"Religion is a revelation to man's soul dealing
with spiritual realities which the mind alone could never discover or
fully fathom."
Jesus, The Urantia Book, (146:3.1)
...religion is always and forever a mode of reacting to the
situations of life; it is a species of conduct. Religion embraces
thinking, feeling, and acting reverently toward some reality which we
deem worthy of universal adoration.
The Urantia Book, (160:5.2)
Religion is the spiritual rhythm of the soul in
time-space harmony with the higher and eternal melody measurements of
Infinity. Religious experience is something in human life which is
truly supermathematical.
The Urantia Book, (195:7.20)
Religion is man's supreme gesture, his magnificent
reach for final reality, his determination to find God and to be like
him.
The Urantia Book, (196:3.27)
Religion and God
The truth and maturity of any religion is directly proportional to its
concept of the infinite personality
of God and to its grasp of the absolute unity of Deity. The idea of a
personal Deity becomes, then, the measure of religious maturity after
religion has first formulated the concept of the unity of God.
The Urantia Book, (1:5.10)
In the physical universe we may see the divine beauty, in the
intellectual world we may discern eternal truth, but the goodness of
God is found only in the spiritual world of personal religious
experience. In its true essence, religion is a faith-trust in the
goodness of God.
The Urantia Book, (2:6.1)
The morality of the religions of evolution drives men forward in the
God quest by the motive power of fear. The religions of revelation
allure men to seek for a God of love because they crave to become like
him. But religion is not merely a passive feeling of "absolute
dependence" and "surety of survival"; it is a living and dynamic
experience of divinity attainment predicated on humanity service.
When religion is divested of a personal God, its prayers
translate to the levels of theology and philosophy. When the highest
God concept of a religion is that of an impersonal Deity, such as in
pantheistic idealism, although affording the basis for certain forms of
mystic communion, it proves fatal to the potency of true prayer, which
always stands for man's communion with a personal and superior being.
The Urantia Book, (91:2.5)
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 Urantia Book, (102:6.1)
Moral worth cannot be derived from mere repression--obeying the
injunction "Thou shalt not." Fear and shame are unworthy motivations
for religious living. Religion is valid only when it reveals the
fatherhood of God and enhances the brotherhood of men.
The Urantia Book, (140:4.7)
Religion is only an exalted humanism until it is made divine by
the discovery of the reality of the presence of God in personal
experience.
The Urantia Book, (195:10.1)
The purpose of religion is not to satisfy curiosity about God but
rather to afford intellectual constancy and philosophic security, to
stabilize and enrich human living by blending the mortal with the
divine, the partial with the perfect, man and God. It is through
religious experience that man's concepts of ideality are endowed with
reality.
The Urantia Book, (101:10.5)
Science is man's effort to solve the apparent riddles of the
material universe. Philosophy is man's attempt at the unification of
human experience. Religion is man's supreme gesture, his magnificent
reach for final reality, his determination to find God and to be like
him.
The Urantia Book, (196:3.27)
The Value of Religion
The great and immediate service of true religion is the
establishment of an enduring unity in human experience, a lasting peace
and a profound assurance.
The Urantia Book, (5:4.1)
The Zoroastrians had a religion of morals; the Hindus a religion of
metaphysics; the Confucianists,
a religion of ethics. Jesus lived a religion of service. All these
religions are of value in that they are valid approaches to the
religion of Jesus. Religion is destined to become the reality of the
spiritual unification of all that is good, beautiful, and true in human
experience.
The Urantia Book, (5:4.7)
During the psychologically unsettled times of the twentieth
century, amid the economic upheavals, the moral crosscurrents, and the
sociologic rip tides of the cyclonic transitions of a scientific era,
thousands upon thousands of men and women have become humanly
dislocated; they are anxious, restless, fearful, uncertain, and
unsettled; as never before in the world's history they need the
consolation and stabilization of sound religion. In the face of
unprecedented scientific achievement and mechanical development there
is spiritual stagnation and philosophic chaos.
The Urantia Book, (99:4.6)
Religion is not a technique for attaining a static and blissful peace
of mind; it is an impulse for organizing the soul
for dynamic service. It is the enlistment of the totality of selfhood
in the loyal service of loving God and serving man. Religion pays any
price essential to the attainment of the supreme goal, the eternal
prize. There is a consecrated completeness in religious loyalty which
is superbly sublime. And these loyalties are socially effective and
spiritually progressive.
The Urantia Book, (100:3.1)
Religion is the exclusively spiritual experience of the evolving
immortal soul
of the God-knowing man, but moral power and spiritual energy are mighty
forces which may be utilized in dealing with difficult social
situations and in solving intricate economic problems. These moral and
spiritual endowments make all levels of human living richer and more
meaningful.
The Urantia Book, (156:5.10)
Read more about
The Supremacy of Religion
Evolution and Religion
The evolutionary picture of human existence begins and ends with
religion, albeit very different qualities of religion, one evolutional
and biological, the other revelational
and periodical. And so, while religion is normal and natural to man, it
is also optional. Man does not have to be religious against his will.
The Urantia Book, (5:5.5)
The evolution of the religious capacity of receptivity in the
inhabitants of a world largely determines their rate of spiritual
advancement and the extent of religious revelation.
The Urantia Book, (52:2.3)
Your religion is becoming real because it is emerging from the
slavery of fear and the bondage of superstition. Your philosophy
struggles for emancipation from dogma and tradition. Your science is
engaged in the agelong contest between truth and error while it fights
for deliverance from the bondage of abstraction, the slavery of
mathematics, and the relative blindness of mechanistic materialism.
The Urantia Book, (12:9.5)
Religion is the mighty lever that lifts civilization from chaos,
but it is powerless apart from the fulcrum of sound and normal mind
resting securely on sound and normal heredity.
The Urantia Book, (70:8.18)
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.
The Urantia Book, (92:3.3)
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.
The Urantia Book, (92:3.9)
Always is religion the inspiration of man's evolving nature, but it is
not the secret of that evolution.
Religion, the conviction-faith of the personality,
can always triumph over the superficially contradictory logic of
despair born in the unbelieving material mind. There really is a true
and genuine inner voice, that "true light which lights every man who
comes into the world." And this spirit leading is distinct from the
ethical prompting of human conscience.
The feeling of religious assurance is more than an emotional feeling.
The assurance of religion transcends the reason of the mind, even the
logic of philosophy. Religion is faith, trust, and assurance.
The Urantia Book, (101:0.2)
Evolutionary Religion
Evolutionary religion is born of a simple and all-powerful fear,
the fear which surges through the human mind when confronted with the
unknown, the inexplicable, and the incomprehensible. Religion
eventually achieves the profoundly simple realization of an
all-powerful love, the love which sweeps irresistibly through the human
soul
when awakened to the conception of the limitless affection
of the
Universal Father for the sons of the universe. But in between
the beginning and the consummation of religious evolution, there
intervene the long ages of the shamans, who presume to stand between
man and God as intermediaries, interpreters, and intercessors.
The Urantia Book, (90:0.3)
The function of early evolutionary religion is to conserve and
augment the essential social, moral, and spiritual values which are
slowly taking form. This mission of religion is not consciously
observed by mankind, but it is chiefly effected by the function of
prayer.
The Urantia Book, (91:1.1)
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.
The Urantia Book (92:4.3)
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.
The quality of a religion is indicated by:
- Level values--loyalties.
- Depth of meanings--the sensitization of the individual to
the idealistic appreciation of these highest values.
- Consecration intensity--the degree of devotion to these
divine values.
- 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.
The Urantia Book, (92:7.5)
Religion in Society
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.
The Urantia Book, (92:1.3)
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.
The Urantia Book, (92:2.1)
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.
The Urantia Book, (92:7.10)
Religion stands above science, art, philosophy, ethics, and
morals, but not independent of them. They are all indissolubly
interrelated in human experience, personal and social. Religion is
man's supreme experience in the mortal nature, but finite language
makes it forever impossible for theology ever adequately to depict real
religious experience.
The Urantia Book, (196:3.25)
When men react to religion in the tribal, national, or racial
sense, it is because they look upon those without their group as not
being truly human. We always look upon the object of our religious
loyalty as being worthy of the reverence of all men. Religion can never
be a matter of mere intellectual belief or philosophic reasoning;
religion is always and forever a mode of reacting to the situations of
life; it is a species of conduct. Religion embraces thinking, feeling,
and acting reverently toward some reality which we deem worthy of
universal adoration.
If something has become a religion in your experience, it is
self-evident that you already have become an active evangel of that
religion since you deem the supreme concept of your religion as being
worthy of the worship of all mankind, all universe intelligences. If
you are not a positive and missionary evangel of your religion, you are
self-deceived in that what you call a religion is only a traditional
belief or a mere system of intellectual philosophy. If your religion is
a spiritual experience, your object of worship must be the universal
spirit reality and ideal of all your spiritualized concepts. All
religions based on fear, emotion, tradition, and philosophy I term the
intellectual religions, while those based on true spirit experience I
would term the true religions. The object of religious devotion may be
material or spiritual, true or false, real or unreal, human or divine.
Religions can therefore be either good or evil.
The Urantia Book, (160:5.2)
Learn about the Religion of the Ideal
The Christian Religion
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.
The Urantia Book, (92:6.7)
Christianity
has indeed done a great service for this world, but what is now most
needed is Jesus. The world needs to see Jesus living again on earth in
the experience of spirit-born mortals who effectively reveal the Master
to all men.
The Urantia Book, (195:10.1)
Institutional Religion
A godless humanitarianism is, humanly speaking, a noble gesture,
but true religion is the only power which can lastingly increase the
responsiveness of one social group to the needs and sufferings of other
groups. In the past, institutional religion could remain passive while
the upper strata of society turned a deaf ear to the sufferings and
oppression of the helpless lower strata, but in modern times these
lower social orders are no longer so abjectly ignorant nor so
politically helpless.
Religion must not become organically involved in the secular work
of social reconstruction and economic reorganization. But it must
actively keep pace with all these advances in civilization by making
clear-cut and vigorous restatements of its moral mandates and spiritual
precepts, its progressive philosophy of human living and transcendent
survival. The spirit of religion is eternal, but the form of its
expression must be restated every time the dictionary of human language
is revised.
The Urantia Book, (99:1.5)
Institutional religion is now caught in the stalemate of a vicious
circle. It cannot reconstruct society without first reconstructing
itself; and being so much an integral part of the established order, it
cannot reconstruct itself until society has been radically
reconstructed.
The Urantia Book, (99:2.2)
True Religion
Social leadership is transformed by spiritual insight; religion
prevents all collective movements from losing sight of their true
objectives. Together with children, religion is the great unifier of family
life,
provided it is a living and growing faith. Family life cannot be had
without children; it can be lived without religion, but such a handicap
enormously multiplies the difficulties of this intimate human
association. During the early decades of the twentieth century, family
life, next to personal religious experience, suffers most from the
decadence consequent upon the transition from old religious loyalties
to the emerging new meanings and values.
True religion is a meaningful way of living dynamically face to
face with the commonplace realities of everyday life. But if religion
is to stimulate individual development of character and augment
integration of personality,
it must not be standardized. If it is to stimulate evaluation of
experience and serve as a value-lure, it must not be stereotyped. If
religion is to promote supreme loyalties, it must not be formalized.
No matter what upheavals may attend the social and economic growth
of civilization, religion is genuine and worth while if it fosters in
the individual an experience in which the sovereignty of truth, beauty,
and goodness prevails, for such is the true spiritual concept of
supreme reality. And through love and worship this becomes meaningful
as fellowship with man and sonship with God.
After all, it is what one believes rather than what one knows that
determines conduct and dominates personal performances. Purely factual
knowledge exerts very little influence upon the average man unless it
becomes emotionally activated. But the activation of religion is
superemotional, unifying the entire human experience on transcendent
levels through contact with, and release of, spiritual energies in the
mortal life.
The Urantia Book, (99:4.2)
Evolutionary religions and revelatory religions may differ
markedly in method, but in motive there is great similarity. Religion
is not a specific function of life; rather is it a mode of living. True
religion is a wholehearted
devotion to some reality which the
religionist deems to be of supreme value to himself and for all
mankind. And the outstanding characteristics of all religions are:
unquestioning loyalty and wholehearted devotion to supreme values. This
religious devotion to supreme values is shown in the relation of the
supposedly irreligious mother to her child and in the fervent loyalty
of nonreligionists to an espoused cause.
The accepted supreme value of the religionist may be base or even
false, but it is nevertheless religious. A religion is genuine to just
the extent that the value which is held to be supreme is truly a cosmic
reality of genuine spiritual worth.
The Urantia Book, (100:6.1)
But true religion is a living love, a life of service. The
religionist's detachment from much that is purely temporal and trivial
never leads to social isolation, and it should not destroy the sense of
humor. Genuine religion takes nothing away from human existence, but it
does add new meanings to all of life; it generates new types of
enthusiasm, zeal, and courage. It may even engender the spirit of the
crusader, which is more than dangerous if not controlled by spiritual
insight and loyal devotion to the commonplace social obligations of
human loyalties.
The Urantia Book, (100:6.5)
True religion is not a system of philosophic belief which can be
reasoned out and substantiated by natural proofs, neither is it a
fantastic and mystic experience of indescribable feelings of ecstasy
which can be enjoyed only by the romantic devotees of mysticism.
Religion is not the product of reason, but viewed from within, it is
altogether reasonable. Religion is not derived from the logic of human
philosophy, but as a mortal experience it is altogether logical.
Religion is the experiencing of divinity in the consciousness of a
moral being of evolutionary origin; it represents true experience with
eternal realities in time, the realization of spiritual satisfactions
while yet in the flesh.
The Urantia Book, (101:1.1)
True religion is an insight into reality, the faith-child of the
moral consciousness, and not a mere intellectual assent to any body of
dogmatic doctrines. True religion consists in the experience that "the
Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of
God." Religion consists not in theologic propositions but in spiritual
insight and the sublimity of the soul's
trust.
Your deepest nature--the divine Adjuster--creates within you a
hunger and thirst for righteousness, a certain craving for divine
perfection. Religion is the faith act of the recognition of this inner
urge to divine attainment; and thus is brought about that soul
trust and assurance of which you become conscious as the way of
salvation, the technique of the survival of personality
and all those values which you have come to look upon as being true and
good.
The Urantia Book, (101:2.11)
True religion is the act of an individual soul
in its
self-conscious relations with the Creator; organized religion is man's
attempt to socialize the worship of individual religionists.
The Urantia Book, (143:7.2)
The consciousness of the impulse to be like God is not true
religion. The feelings of the emotion to worship God are not true
religion. The knowledge of the conviction to forsake self and serve God
is not true religion. The wisdom of the reasoning that this religion is
the best of all is not religion as a personal and spiritual experience.
True religion has reference to destiny and reality of attainment as
well as to the reality and idealism of that which is wholeheartedly
faith-accepted. And all of this must be made personal to us by the revelation
of the Spirit of Truth.
The Urantia Book, (160:5.13)
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
The Urantia Book, (102:2.7)
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.
The Urantia Book, (102:8.7)
Faith leads to knowing God, not merely to a mystical feeling of
the divine presence. Faith must not be overmuch influenced by its
emotional consequences. True religion is an experience of believing and
knowing as well as a satisfaction of feeling.
The Urantia Book, (103:9.11)
Learn more about
True Religion
Read Jesus' Discourse On True Religion
Problems of Religion
Transition is always accompanied by confusion, and there will be
little tranquillity in the religious world until the great struggle
between the three contending philosophies of religion is ended:
1. The spiritistic belief (in a providential Deity) of many religions.
2. The humanistic and idealistic belief of many philosophies.
3. The mechanistic and naturalistic conceptions of many sciences.
The Urantia Book, (99:4.9)
Religion and Social Service
While religion is exclusively a personal spiritual
experience--knowing God as a Father--the corollary of this
experience--knowing man as a brother--entails the adjustment of the
self to other selves, and that involves the social or group aspect of
religious life. Religion is first an inner or personal adjustment, and
then it becomes a matter of social service or group adjustment.
Always keep in mind: True religion is to know God as your Father
and man as your brother. Religion is not a slavish belief in threats of
punishment or magical promises of future mystical rewards. The Urantia
Book, Page 1090 (99:5.1)
Just as certainly as men share their religious beliefs, they
create a religious group of some sort which eventually creates common
goals. Someday religionists will get together and actually effect
co-operation on the basis of unity of ideals and purposes rather than
attempting to do so on the basis of psychological opinions and
theological beliefs. Goals rather than creeds should unify
religionists. Since true religion is a matter of personal spiritual
experience, it is inevitable that each individual religionist must have
his own and personal interpretation of the realization of that
spiritual experience. Let the term "faith" stand for the individual's
relation to God rather than for the creedal formulation of what some
group of mortals have been able to agree upon as a common religious
attitude. "Have you faith? Then have it to yourself."
The Urantia Book, (99:5.7)
The intellectual earmark of religion is certainty; the
philosophical characteristic is consistency; the social fruits are love
and service.
The Urantia Book, (102:7.5)
Jesus offered no rules for social advancement; his was a religious
mission, and religion is an exclusively individual experience. The
ultimate goal of society's most advanced achievement can never hope to
transcend Jesus' brotherhood of men based on the recognition of the
fatherhood of God. The ideal of all social attainment can be realized
only in the coming of this divine kingdom.
The Urantia Book, (196:2.11)
Revelatory Religion
Even evolutionary religion is all of this in loyalty and grandeur
because it is a genuine experience. But revelatory religion is
excellent as well as genuine. The new loyalties of enlarged spiritual
vision create new levels of love and
devotion, of service and
fellowship; and all this enhanced social outlook produces an enlarged
consciousness of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood
of man.
The characteristic difference between evolved and revealed
religion is a new quality of divine wisdom which is added to purely
experiential human wisdom. But it is experience in and with the human
religions that develops the capacity for subsequent reception of
increased bestowals of divine wisdom and cosmic insight.
The Urantia Book, (100:6.8)
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.
The Urantia Book, (102:4.6)
Religion and the Thought Adjuster
While religion is not the product of the rationalistic
speculations of a material cosmology, it is, nonetheless, the creation
of a wholly rational insight which originates in man's mind-experience.
Religion is born neither of mystic meditations nor of isolated
contemplations, albeit it is ever more or less mysterious and always
indefinable and inexplicable in terms of purely intellectual reason and
philosophic logic. The germs of true religion originate in the domain
of man's moral consciousness, and they are revealed in the growth of
man's spiritual insight, that faculty of human personality
which accrues as a consequence of the presence of the God-revealing
Thought Adjuster in the God-hungry mortal mind.
The Urantia Book, (101:1.5)
Religion is so vital that it persists in the absence of learning.
It lives in spite of its contamination with erroneous cosmologies and
false philosophies; it survives even the confusion of metaphysics. In
and through all the historic vicissitudes of religion there ever
persists that which is indispensable to human progress and survival:
the ethical conscience
and the moral consciousness.
The Urantia Book, (101:3.1)
In the last analysis, religion is to be judged by its fruits,
according to the manner and the extent to which it exhibits its own
inherent and divine excellence.
The Urantia Book, (101:4.4)
Science deals with facts; religion is concerned only with values.
Through enlightened philosophy the mind endeavors to unite the meanings
of both facts and values, thereby arriving at a concept of complete
reality.
The Urantia Book, (101:5.2)
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.
The Urantia Book, (102:2.1)
Religion is functional in the human mind and has been realized in
experience prior to its appearance in human consciousness. A child has
been in existence about nine months before it experiences birth. But
the "birth" of religion is not sudden; it is rather a gradual
emergence. Nevertheless, sooner or later there is a "birth day." You do
not enter the kingdom
of heaven unless you have been "born again"--born
of the spirit.
Many spiritual births are accompanied by much anguish of spirit and
marked psychological perturbations, as many physical births are
characterized by a "stormy labor" and other abnormalities of
"delivery."
The Urantia Book, (103:2.1)
The Religion of Jesus
Jesus did not teach his apostles that religion is man's only earthly pursuit; that was the Jewish idea of serving God. But he did insist that religion was the exclusive business of the twelve. Jesus taught nothing to deter his believers from the pursuit of genuine culture; he only detracted from the tradition-bound religious schools of Jerusalem. He was liberal, bighearted, learned, and tolerant. Self-conscious piety had no place in his philosophy of righteous living.
The Urantia Book, (140:8.30)
This sermon was an effort on Jesus' part to make clear the fact that religion is a personal experience. Among other things, the Master said: "You well know that, while a kindhearted father loves his family as a whole, he so regards them as a group because of his strong affection for each individual member of that family. No longer must you approach the Father in heaven as a child of Israel but as a child of God. As a group, you are indeed the children of Israel, but as individuals, each one of you is a child of God. I have
come, not to reveal the Father to the children of Israel, but rather to bring this knowledge of God and the revelation of his love and mercy to the individual believer as a genuine personal experience. The prophets have all taught you that Yahweh cares for his people, that God loves Israel. But I have come among you to proclaim a greater truth, one which many of the later prophets also grasped, that God loves you--every one of you--as individuals. All these generations
have you had a national or racial religion; now have I come to give you a personal religion."
Jesus, The Urantia Book, (145:2.3)
"Religion is a revelation
to man's soul
dealing with spiritual realities which the mind alone could never
discover or fully fathom. Intellectual strivings may reveal the facts
of life, but the gospel of the kingdom unfolds the truths of being."
Jesus, The Urantia Book,
(146:3.1)
"You shall not portray your teacher
as a man of sorrows. Future
generations shall know also the radiance of our joy, the buoyance of
our good will, and the inspiration of our good humor. We proclaim a
message of good news which is infectious in its transforming power. Our
religion is throbbing with new life and new meanings. Those who accept
this teaching are filled with joy and in their hearts are constrained
to rejoice evermore. Increasing happiness is always the experience of
all who are certain about God.”
Jesus, The Urantia Book, (159:3.10)
The religions of pessimistic despair seek to obtain release from
the burdens of life; they crave extinction in endless slumber and rest.
These are the religions of primitive fear and dread. The religion of
Jesus is a new gospel of faith to be proclaimed to struggling humanity.
This new religion is founded on faith, hope, and love.
The Urantia Book, (194:3.2)
If religion is an opiate to the people, it is not the religion of
Jesus. On the cross he refused to drink the deadening drug, and his
spirit, poured out upon all flesh, is a mighty world influence which
leads man upward and urges him onward. The spiritual forward urge is
the most powerful driving force present in this world; the
truth-learning believer is the one progressive and aggressive soul
on earth.
The Urantia Book, (194:3.4)
No matter what the apparent conflict between materialism and the
teachings of Jesus may be, you can rest assured that, in the ages to
come, the teachings of the Master will fully triumph. In reality, true
religion cannot become involved in any controversy with science; it is
in no way concerned with material things. Religion is simply
indifferent to, but sympathetic with, science, while it supremely
concerns itself with the scientist.
The Urantia Book, (195:6.2)
Learn more about The
Religion of Jesus
Read about The Positive Nature of Jesus' Religion
Religion As A Personal Experience
Religion is the revelation
to man of his divine and eternal destiny. Religion is a purely personal
and spiritual experience and must forever be distinguished from man's
other high forms of thought, such as:
1. Man's logical attitude toward the things of material reality.
2. Man's aesthetic appreciation of beauty contrasted with ugliness.
3. Man's ethical recognition of social obligations and political duty.
4. Even man's sense of human morality is not, in and of itself,
religious.
The Urantia Book, (195:5.3)
Religion is designed to find those values in the universe which
call forth faith, trust, and assurance; religion culminates in worship.
Religion discovers for the soul
those supreme values which are in contrast with the relative values
discovered by the mind. Such superhuman insight can be had only through
genuine religious experience.
The Urantia Book, (195:5.8)
While your religion is a matter of personal experience, it is most
important that you should be exposed to the knowledge of a vast number
of other religious experiences (the diverse interpretations of other
and diverse mortals) to the end that you may prevent your religious
life from becoming egocentric--circumscribed, selfish, and unsocial.
Rationalism is wrong when it assumes that religion is at first a
primitive belief in something which is then followed by the pursuit of
values. Religion is primarily a pursuit of values, and then there
formulates a system of interpretative beliefs. It is much easier for
men to agree on religious values--goals--than on
beliefs--interpretations. And this explains how religion can agree on
values and goals while exhibiting the confusing phenomenon of
maintaining a belief in hundreds of conflicting beliefs--creeds. This
also explains why a given person can maintain his religious experience
in the face of giving up or changing many of his religious beliefs.
Religion persists in spite of revolutionary changes in religious
beliefs. Theology does not produce religion; it is religion that
produces theologic philosophy.
That religionists have believed so much that was false does not
invalidate religion because religion is founded on the recognition of
values and is validated by the faith of personal religious experience.
Religion, then, is based on experience and religious thought; theology,
the philosophy of religion, is an honest attempt to interpret that
experience. Such interpretative beliefs may be right or wrong, or a
mixture of truth and error.
The Urantia Book, (103:1.3)
Every time man makes a reflective moral choice, he immediately
experiences a new divine invasion of his soul.
Moral
choosing constitutes religion as the motive of inner response to outer
conditions. But such a real religion is not a purely subjective
experience. It signifies the whole of the subjectivity of the
individual engaged in a meaningful and intelligent response to total
objectivity--the universe and its Maker.
The Urantia Book, (196:3.17)
This first missionary tour of the six was eminently successful.
They all discovered the great value of direct and personal contact with
men. They returned to Jesus more fully realizing that, after all,
religion is purely and wholly a matter of personal experience.
The Urantia Book, (138:2.1)
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