Teacher-Brother Dave's initial comments: I am presenting some of my Topical Studies from the fully public domain, 2097 page, Fifth Epochal Revelation of Truth and with my added comments. The Revealed text is free of copyright, so you may freely share individually these supernal quotes with your friends and relatives. But my order of selections, font types for emphasis and my added comments are Copyright 2018 by Dave@PureChristians.org All Rights Reserved. Contact me first about using the whole Study or group of Studies.
[My added comments of explanation below are in these square brackets]
Topical Study 105 "Our Freedoms in Spiritual Liberty”
Compiled May 20, 2019 by Dave@PureChristians.org
[Part 2]
PAPER 14. The Central and Divine Universe
2. Constitution of Havona
[Havona is a high spiritual universe of one billion all perfected Ultimate-Absolute Spheres (Heavens) that circle in seven orbits around the nuclear Isle of Paradise which is the Absolute-Infinite highest and Eternally Perfect Heaven – our final Spiritual Destiny after Havona]
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14:2.9 Havona is a spiritually perfect and physically stable universe. The control and balanced stability of the central universe appear to be perfect. Everything physical or spiritual is perfectly predictable, but mind phenomena and personality volition are not. We do infer that sin can be reckoned as impossible of occurrence, but we do this on the ground that the native freewill creatures of Havona have never been guilty of transgressing the will of Deity. Through all eternity these supernal beings have been consistently loyal to the Eternals of Days. Neither has sin appeared in any creature who has entered Havona as a pilgrim. There has never been an instance of misconduct by any creature of any group of personalities ever created in, or admitted to, the central Havona universe. So perfect and so divine are the methods and means of selection in the universes of time that never in the records of Havona has an error occurred; no mistakes have ever been made; no ascendant soul has ever been prematurely admitted to the central universe.
4. Creatures of the Central Universe
14:4.13 As the worship of the [us human] faith sons of the evolutionary worlds ministers to the satisfaction of the Universal Father’s love, so the exalted adoration of the Havona creatures satiates the perfect ideals of divine beauty and truth. As mortal man strives to do the will of God, these beings of the central universe live to gratify the ideals of the Paradise Trinity. In their very nature they are the will of God. Man rejoices in the goodness of God, Havoners exult in the divine beauty, while you both enjoy the ministry of the liberty of living truth.
PAPER 16. The Seven Master Spirits
6. The Cosmic Mind
16:6.5 The cosmic mind unfailingly responds (recognizes response) on three levels of universe reality. These responses are self-evident to clear-reasoning and deep-thinking minds. These levels of reality are:
16:6.6 #1. Cusation — the reality domain of the physical senses, the scientific realms of logical uniformity, the differentiation of the factual and the nonfactual, reflective conclusions based on cosmic response. This is the mathematical form of the cosmic discrimination.
16:6.7 #2. Duty — the reality domain of morals in the philosophic realm, the arena of reason, the recognition of relative right and wrong. This is the judicial form of the cosmic discrimination.
16:6.8 #3. Worship — the spiritual domain of the reality of religious experience, the personal realization of divine fellowship, the recognition of spirit values, the assurance of eternal survival, the ascent from the status of servants of God to the joy and liberty of the sons of God. This is the highest insight of the cosmic mind, the reverential and worshipful form of the cosmic discrimination.
7. Morals, Virtue, and Personality
16:7.9 Morality can never be advanced by law or by force. It is a personal and freewill matter and must be disseminated by the contagion of the contact of morally fragrant persons with those who are less morally responsive, but who are also in some measure desirous of doing the Father’s will. [Morality cannot be legislated; but ethics must be to preserve society from immoral human actions.]
8. Urantia [the name of our planet, shortened long ago to Urth, now spelled Earth] Personality
16:8.5 Creature personality is distinguished by two self-manifesting and characteristic phenomena of mortal reactive behavior: self-consciousness and associated relative free will.
16:8.6 Self-consciousness consists in intellectual awareness of personality actuality; it includes the ability to recognize the reality of other personalities. It indicates capacity for individualized experience in and with cosmic realities, equivalating to the attainment of identity status in the personality relationships of the universe. Self-consciousness connotes recognition of the actuality of mind ministration and the realization of relative independence of creative and determinative free will.
16:8.7 The relative free will which characterizes the self-consciousness of human personality is involved in:
16:8.8 #1. Moral decision, highest wisdom.
16:8.9 #2. Spiritual choice, truth discernment.
16:8.10 #3. Unselfish love, brotherhood service.
16:8.11 #4. Purposeful co-operation, group loyalty.
16:8.12 #5. Cosmic insight, the grasp of universe meanings.
16:8.13 #6. Personality dedication, wholehearted devotion to doing the Father’s will.
16:8.14 #7. Worship, the sincere pursuit of divine values and the wholehearted love of the divine Value-Giver. [The divine spirit values are: Love, mercy, service ministry, truth, beauty and goodness.]
PAPER 21. The Paradise Creator Sons
3. Local Universe Sovereignty
21:3.3 The fact of creatorship implies the fullness of sovereignty, but the Michaels [Universe Creator Sons, as our Jesus Christ Michael] choose to experientially earn it, thereby retaining the full co-operation of all Paradise personalities attached to the local universe administration. We know of no Michael who ever did otherwise; but they all could, they are truly freewill Sons.
PAPER 27. Ministry of the Primary Supernaphim
[A High, Paradise-level, Primary Supernaphim is now resident on Urantia ! (Earth.) She is in charge of all seraphim angels who minister to all humans. She gave us the three important Papers 82, 83, 84 on Marriage-Family-Home and the two Papers 113 and 114 on the Seraphim.]
4. Directors of Conduct
27:4.3 All Paradise conduct is wholly spontaneous, in every sense natural and free. But there still is a proper and perfect way of doing things on the eternal Isle, and the directors of conduct are ever by the side of the “strangers within the gates” [we new Spirit-perfected residents in Paradise] to instruct them and so guide their steps as to put them at perfect ease and at the same time to enable the pilgrims to avoid that confusion and uncertainty which would otherwise be inevitable. Only by such an arrangement could endless confusion be avoided; and confusion never appears on Paradise. [God and Paradise are spaceless and timeless; we might be that also on Paradise arrival; so much help might be needed in our new adjustment; even though we were gradually Spirit-perfected up through our universe and Havona for possibly over a trillion years ! Probably in Havona, we will begin to transcend time; so that does not seem long – living there with every being and thing all Perfected !]
PAPER 28. Ministering Spirits of the Superuniverses
5. The Secondary Seconaphim
28:5.16 5. The Joy of Existence. By nature these beings are reflectively attuned to the superaphic harmony supervisors above and to certain of the seraphim below, but it is difficult to explain just what the members of this interesting group really do. Their principal activities are directed toward promoting reactions of joy among the various orders of the angelic hosts and the lower will creatures. The Divine Counselors, to whom they are attached, seldom use them for specific joy finding. In a more general manner and in collaboration with the reversion [higher humor] directors, they function as joy clearinghouses, seeking to upstep the pleasure reactions of the realms while trying to improve the humor taste, to develop a superhumor among mortals and angels. They endeavor to demonstrate that there is inherent joy in freewill existence, independent of all extraneous influences; and they are right, although they meet with great difficulty in inculcating this truth in the minds of primitive men. The higher spirit personalities and the angels are more quickly responsive to these educational efforts.
PAPER 30. Personalities of the Grand Universe
1. The Paradise Classification of Living Beings
30:1.99 [Important:] God, as a superperson, eventuates; God, as a person, creates; God, as a preperson, fragments; and such an Adjuster fragment of himself [the will of God living constantly in the minds of each, slightly or better, moral human] evolves the spirit soul upon the material and mortal mind in accordance with the freewill choosing of the personality which has been bestowed upon such a mortal creature by the parental act of God as a Father.
PAPER 34. The Local Universe Mother Spirit
3. The Son and Spirit in Time and Space
34:3.8 When a Creative [Holy] Spirit becomes “space conscious,” she is preparing to recognize a circumscribed “space domain” as hers, a realm in which to be space free in contradistinction to all other space by which she would be conditioned. One is free to choose and act only within the realm of one’s consciousness. [Her space is our whole local universe named Nebadon, co-ruled by our Sovereign Creator Son Jesus Christ Michael. Nebadon was created over 400 billion years ago. It has 570 progressively higher soul-reality Heavens up through which we will ascend; and it has over 3.8 million human-inhabited planets now. At the end of this long Grand Universe Age, Nebadon will have ten million human-inhabited planets. Right now, in the present Grand Universe, there are about six trillion human-inhabited planets, seven trillion at the end of this long, first Supreme-level time-space age.]
7. The Spirit and the Flesh
34:7.6 Notwithstanding this double disaster to man’s nature and his environment, present-day mortals would experience less of this apparent warfare between the flesh and the spirit if they would enter the spirit kingdom, wherein the faith sons of God enjoy comparative deliverance from the slave-bondage of the flesh in the enlightened and liberating service of wholehearted devotion to doing the will of the Father in heaven. Jesus showed mankind the new way of mortal living whereby human beings may very largely escape the dire consequences of the Caligastic rebellion and most effectively compensate for the deprivations resulting from the Adamic default. “The spirit of the life of Christ Jesus has made us free from the law of animal living and the temptations of evil and sin.” “This is the victory that overcomes the flesh, even your faith.”
34:7.7 Those God-knowing men and women who have been born of the Spirit experience no more conflict with their mortal natures than do the inhabitants of the most normal of worlds, planets which have never been tainted with sin nor touched by rebellion. Faith sons work on intellectual levels and live on spiritual planes far above the conflicts produced by unrestrained or unnatural physical desires. The normal urges of animal beings and the natural appetites and impulses of the physical nature are not in conflict with even the highest spiritual attainment except in the minds of ignorant, mistaught, or unfortunately overconscientious persons.
34:7.8 Having started out on the way of life everlasting, having accepted the assignment and received your orders to advance, do not fear the dangers of human forgetfulness and mortal inconstancy, do not be troubled with doubts of failure or by perplexing confusion, do not falter and question your status and standing, for in every dark hour, at every crossroad in the forward struggle, [Jesus here as] the Spirit of Truth will always speak, saying, “This is the way.”
PAPER 37. Personalities of the Local Universe
6. Celestial Overseers
37:6.6 The progression of eternity does not consist solely in spiritual development. Intellectual acquisition is also a part of universal education. The experience of the mind is broadened equally with the expansion of the spiritual horizon. Mind and spirit are afforded like opportunities for training and advancement. But in all this superb training of mind and spirit you are forever free from the handicaps of mortal flesh. No longer must you constantly referee the conflicting contentions of your divergent spiritual and material natures. At last you are qualified to enjoy the unified urge of a glorified mind long since divested of primitive animalistic trends towards things material.
PAPER 39. The Seraphic Hosts
3. Supervisor Seraphim
39:3.3 #2. Law Forecasters. The intellectual foundation of justice is law, and in a local universe law originates in the legislative assemblies of the constellations. These deliberative bodies codify and formally promulgate the basic laws of Nebadon, laws designed to afford the greatest possible co-ordination of a whole constellation consistent with the fixed policy of noninfringement of the moral free will of personal creatures. It is the duty of the second order of supervisor seraphim to place before the constellation lawmakers a forecast of how any proposed enactment would affect the lives of freewill creatures. This service they are well qualified to perform by virtue of long experience in the local systems and on the inhabited worlds. These seraphim seek no special favors for one group or another, but they do appear before the celestial lawmakers to speak for those who cannot be present to speak for themselves. Even mortal man may contribute to the evolution of universe law, for these very seraphim do faithfully and fully portray, not necessarily man’s transient and conscious desires, but rather the true longings of the inner man, the evolving morontia soul of the material mortal on the worlds of space. [You are now a higher, more moral, living soul in this first moral life. So, in a time sense, you are a new-born baby soul here. In about one half of a million years you will graduate up through 570 higher soul-reality Heavens in your many higher soul forms to become a “baby” first stage Spirit form and ascend for maybe a trillion more years to finally become all-Spirit-perfected and then a “baby” Eternal Paradise Resident. Spiritual progress and increasing Glory as a Divine Son of God never ends ! Forever is newness of experiences far higher than any human here can begin to comprehend. Amen !]
4. Administrator Seraphim
39:4.10 #4. Quickeners of Morality. On the [first seven of 570] mansion worlds you begin to learn self-government for the benefit of all concerned. Your mind learns co-operation, learns how to plan with other and wiser beings. On the system headquarters the seraphic teachers will further quicken your appreciation of cosmic morality — of the interactions of liberty and loyalty.
39:4.11 What is loyalty? It is the fruit of an intelligent appreciation of universe brotherhood; one could not take so much and give nothing. As you ascend the personality scale, first you learn to be loyal, then to love, then to be filial, [dedicated and faithful as a loving Son of our Father God] and then may you be free; but not until you are a finaliter, not until you have attained perfection of loyalty, can you self-realize finality of liberty.
PAPER 40. The Ascending Sons of God
6. The Faith Sons of God
40:6.7 #4. Of his divine free-willness, the Universal Father has given you your creature personalities. You have been endowed with a measure of that divine spontaneity of freewill action which God shares with all who may become his sons.
7. Father-Fused Mortals
40:7.2 Your own races of surviving mortals belong to this group of the ascending Sons of God. You are now planetary sons, evolutionary creatures derived from the Life Carrier implantations [550 million years ago] and modified by the Adamic-life infusion, [38,000 years ago] hardly yet ascending sons; but you are indeed sons of ascension potential — even to the highest heights of glory and divinity attainment — and this spiritual status of ascending sonship you may attain by faith and by freewill co-operation with the spiritualizing activities of the indwelling Adjuster. When you and your Adjusters are finally and forever fused, when you two are made one, even as in [Jesus] Christ Michael the Son of God and the Son of Man are one, then in fact have you become the ascending sons of God.
PAPER 47. The Seven Mansion Worlds
3. The First Mansion World
47:3.6 From the resurrection halls you proceed to the Melchizedek sector, where you are assigned permanent residence. Then you enter upon ten days of personal liberty. You are free to explore the immediate vicinity of your new home and to familiarize yourself with the program which lies immediately ahead. You also have time to gratify your desire to consult the registry and call upon your loved ones and other earth friends who may have preceded you to these worlds. At the end of your ten-day period of leisure you begin the second step in the Paradise journey, for the mansion worlds are actual training spheres, not merely detention planets.
47:3.12 As you start out on the first mansion world, one Morontia Companion is assigned to each company of one thousand ascending mortals, but you will encounter larger numbers as you progress through the seven mansion spheres. These beautiful and versatile beings are companionable associates and charming guides. They are free to accompany individuals or selected groups to any of the transition-culture spheres, including their satellite worlds. They are the excursion guides and leisure associates of all ascending mortals. They often accompany survivor groups on periodic visits to Jerusem, [the system spiritual headquarters, Paradisiacal level. Not “Jerusalem” a small city on Earth, note the spelling difference] and on any day you are there, you can go to the registry sector of the system capital and meet ascending mortals from all seven of the mansion worlds since they freely journey back and forth between their residential abodes and the system headquarters.
PAPER 48. The Morontia [Soul] Life
3. Morontia Companions
48:3.8 #2. Pilgrim Receivers and Free Associators. These are the social companions of the new arrivals on the mansion worlds. One of them will certainly be on hand to welcome you when you awaken on the initial mansion world from the first transit sleep of time, when you experience the resurrection from the death of the flesh into the morontia life. And from the time you are thus formally welcomed on awakening to that day when you leave the local universe as a first-stage spirit, these Morontia Companions are ever with you.
4. The Reversion Directors
48:4.1 Joyful mirth and the smile-equivalent are as universal as music. There is a morontial and a spiritual equivalent of mirth and laughter. The ascendant life is about equally divided between work and play — freedom from assignment.
6. Morontia World Seraphim—Transition Ministers
48:6.6 You are not given unrestricted choice as to your future course; but you may choose within the limits of that which the transition ministers and their superiors wisely determine to be most suitable for your future spirit attainment. The spirit world is governed on the principle of respecting your freewill choice provided the course you may choose is not detrimental to you or injurious to your fellows.
48:6.35 From them you will learn to let pressure develop stability and certainty; to be faithful and earnest and, withal, cheerful; to accept challenges without complaint and to face difficulties and uncertainties without fear. They will ask: If you fail, will you rise indomitably to try anew? If you succeed, will you maintain a well-balanced poise — a stabilized and spiritualized attitude — throughout every effort in the long struggle to break the fetters of material inertia, to attain the freedom of spirit existence?
7. Morontia Mota [super-human soul philosophy]
48:7.8 #6. To enjoy privilege without abuse, to have liberty without license, to possess power and steadfastly refuse to use it for self-aggrandizement — these are the marks of high civilization.
Topical Study 105 "Our Freedoms in Spiritual Liberty”
Compiled May 22, 2019 by Dave@PureChristians.org
[Part 3]
PAPER 53. The Lucifer Rebellion
[Lucifer was a Son of God who was four levels under our local universe of Nebadon Sovereign Creator Son of God Jesus Christ Michael. Lucifer was in charge of only one ten-thousanth of Nebadon – as a System Sovereign. He rebelled against God the Universal Father and Jesus about 200,000 years ago. Lucifer’s assistant was Satan, and under Satan was Caligastia our former Planetary Prince of Urantia (Earth). They both joined in the rebellion with Lucifer. When Jesus was Incarnate here, in A.D. 30- on, Jesus removed all authority and powers from these three rebels. Lucifer and Satan are now confined up on a spiritual prison world. They can not possess or harm any humans since then.]
4. Outbreak of the Rebellion
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53:4.4 While there had been two previous rebellions in Nebadon, [our local universe made by, and evolving in, Jesus Christ Michael] they were in distant constellations. Lucifer held that these insurrections were unsuccessful because the majority of the intelligences failed to follow their leaders. He contended that “majorities rule,” that “mind is infallible.” The freedom allowed him by the universe rulers apparently sustained many of his nefarious contentions. He defied all his superiors; yet they apparently took no note of his doings. He was given a free hand to prosecute his seductive plan without let or hindrance.
53:4.6 Gabriel [the Chief Executive of Nebadon under our Christ Michael] was personally present throughout all these disloyal proceedings and only announced that he would, in due time, speak for Michael, and that all beings would be left free and unmolested in their choice; that the “government of the Sons for the Father desired only that loyalty and devotion which was voluntary, wholehearted, and sophistry-proof.”
5. Nature of the Conflict
53:5.3 From the outbreak of rebellion to the day of his enthronement as sovereign ruler of Nebadon, [Jesus Christ] Michael never interfered with the rebel forces of Lucifer; they were allowed to run a free course for almost two hundred thousand years of Urantia time. [Earth time.] [Jesus] Christ Michael now has ample power and authority to deal promptly, even summarily, with such outbreaks of disloyalty, but we doubt that this sovereign authority would lead him to act differently if another such upheaval should occur.
PAPER 54. Problems of the Lucifer Rebellion
0. Introduction
54:0.1 EVOLUTIONARY man finds it difficult fully to comprehend the significance and to grasp the meanings of evil, error, sin, and iniquity. Man is slow to perceive that contrastive perfection and imperfection produce potential evil; that conflicting truth and falsehood create confusing error; that the divine endowment of freewill choice eventuates in the divergent realms of sin and righteousness; that the persistent pursuit of divinity leads to the kingdom of God as contrasted with its continuous rejection, which leads to the domains of iniquity.
54:0.2 The Gods [of the Paradise Trinity] neither create evil nor permit sin and rebellion. Potential evil is time-existent in a universe embracing differential levels of perfection meanings and values. Sin is potential in all realms where imperfect beings are endowed with the ability to choose between good and evil. The very conflicting presence of truth and untruth, fact and falsehood, constitutes the potentiality of error. The deliberate choice of evil constitutes sin; the willful rejection of truth is error; the persistent pursuit of sin and error is iniquity.
1. True and False Liberty
54:1.1 Of all the perplexing problems growing out of the Lucifer rebellion, none has occasioned more difficulty than the failure of immature evolutionary mortals to distinguish between true and false liberty.
54:1.2 True liberty is the quest of the ages and the reward of evolutionary progress. False liberty is the subtle deception of the error of time and the evil of space. Enduring liberty is predicated on the reality of justice — intelligence, maturity, fraternity, and equity.
54:1.3 Liberty is a self-destroying technique of cosmic existence when its motivation is unintelligent, unconditioned, and uncontrolled. True liberty is progressively related to reality and is ever regardful of social equity, cosmic fairness, universe fraternity, and divine obligations.
54:1.4 Liberty is suicidal when divorced from material justice, intellectual fairness, social forbearance, moral duty, and spiritual values. Liberty is nonexistent apart from cosmic reality, and all personality reality is proportional to its divinity relationships.
54:1.5 Unbridled self-will and unregulated self-expression equal unmitigated selfishness, the acme of ungodliness. Liberty without the associated and ever-increasing conquest of self is a figment of egoistic mortal imagination. Self-motivated liberty is a conceptual illusion, a cruel deception. License masquerading in the garments of liberty is the forerunner of abject bondage.
54:1.6 True liberty is the associate of genuine self-respect; false liberty is the consort of self-admiration. True liberty is the fruit of self-control; false liberty, the assumption of self-assertion. Self-control leads to altruistic service; self-admiration tends towards the exploitation of others for the selfish aggrandizement of such a mistaken individual as is willing to sacrifice righteous attainment for the sake of possessing unjust power over his fellow beings.
54:1.7 Even wisdom is divine and safe only when it is cosmic in scope and spiritual in motivation.
54:1.8 There is no error greater than that species of self-deception which leads intelligent beings to crave the exercise of power over other beings for the purpose of depriving these persons of their natural liberties. The golden rule of human fairness cries out against all such fraud, unfairness, selfishness, and unrighteousness. Only true and genuine liberty is compatible with the reign of love and the ministry of mercy.
54:1.9 How dare the self-willed creature encroach upon the rights of his fellows in the name of personal liberty when the Supreme Rulers of the universe stand back in merciful respect for these prerogatives of will and potentials of personality! No being, in the exercise of his supposed personal liberty, has a right to deprive any other being of those privileges of existence conferred by the Creators and duly respected by all their loyal associates, subordinates, and subjects.
54:1.10 Evolutionary man may have to contend for his material liberties with tyrants and oppressors on a world of sin and iniquity or during the early times of a primitive evolving sphere, but not so on the morontia worlds [higher soul reality Heavens] or on the [higher] spirit spheres. War is the heritage of early evolutionary man, but on worlds of normal advancing civilization physical combat as a technique of adjusting racial misunderstandings has long since fallen into disrepute.
2. The Theft of Liberty
54:2.1 With the Son and in the Spirit did God project eternal Havona, [One billion high spiritual spheres [Heavens that we will ascend up and through] that orbit around the nuclear Isle of Paradise] and ever since has there obtained the eternal pattern of co-ordinate participation in creation -- sharing. This pattern of sharing is the master design for every one of the Sons and Daughters of God [our Creator Son Jesus and our creative Holy Spirit who co-rule Nebadon] who go out into space to engage in the attempt to duplicate in time the central universe of eternal perfection.
54:2.2 Every creature of every evolving universe who aspires to do the Father’s will is destined to become the partner of the time-space Creators in this magnificent adventure of experiential perfection attainment. Were this not true, the Father would have hardly endowed such creatures with creative free will, neither would he indwell them, actually go into partnership with them by means of his own spirit.
54:2.3 Lucifer’s folly was the attempt to do the nondoable, to short-circuit time in an experiential universe. Lucifer’s crime was the attempted creative disenfranchisement of every personality in [your system of 619 human-inhabited planets,] the unrecognized abridgment of the creature’s personal participation — freewill participation — in the long evolutionary struggle to attain the status of light and life both individually and collectively. In so doing this onetime Sovereign of your system set the temporal purpose of his own will directly athwart the eternal purpose of God’s will as it is revealed in the bestowal of free will upon all personal creatures. The Lucifer rebellion thus threatened the maximum possible infringement of the freewill choice of the ascenders and servers of [your system] — a threat forevermore to deprive every one of these beings of the thrilling experience of contributing something personal and unique to the slowly erecting monument to experiential wisdom which will sometime exist as [your] perfected system. Thus does the Lucifer manifesto, masquerading in the habiliments of liberty, stand forth in the clear light of reason as a monumental threat to consummate the theft of personal liberty and to do it on a scale that has been approached only twice in all the history of Nebadon.
54:2.4 In short, what God had given men and angels Lucifer would have taken away from them, that is, the divine privilege of participating in the creation of their own destinies and of the destiny of this local system of inhabited worlds.
54:2.5 No being in all the universe has the rightful liberty to deprive any other being of true liberty, the right to love and be loved, the privilege of worshiping God and of serving his fellows.
3. The Time Lag of Justice
54:3.1 The moral will creatures of the evolutionary worlds are always bothered with the unthinking question as to why the all-wise Creators permit evil and sin. They fail to comprehend that both are inevitable if the creature is to be truly free. The free will of evolving man or exquisite angel is not a mere philosophic concept, a symbolic ideal. Man’s ability to choose good or evil is a universe reality. This liberty to choose for oneself is an endowment of the Supreme Rulers, and they will not permit any being or group of beings to deprive a single personality in the wide universe of this divinely bestowed liberty — not even to satisfy such misguided and ignorant beings in the enjoyment of this misnamed personal liberty.
4. The Mercy Time Lag
54:4.3 The very fact that an evil-doing creature can actually choose to do wrong — commit sin — establishes the fact of free-willness and fully justifies any length delay in the execution of justice provided the extended mercy might conduce to repentance and rehabilitation. [Our Father God has infinite love and lavish mercy ministry to all humans and all beings !]
54:4.4 Most of the liberties which Lucifer sought he already had; others he was to receive in the future. All these precious endowments were lost by giving way to impatience and yielding to a desire to possess what one craves now and to possess it in defiance of all obligation to respect the rights and liberties of all other beings composing the universe of universes. Ethical obligations are innate, divine, and universal.
54:4.7 The mercy delays of time are by the mandate of the free will of the Creators. There is good to be derived in the universe from this technique of patience in dealing with sinful rebels. While it is all too true that good cannot come of evil to the one who contemplates and performs evil, it is equally true that all things (including evil, potential and manifest) work together for good to all beings who know God, love to do his will, and are ascending Paradiseward according to his eternal plan and divine purpose.
5. The Wisdom of Delay
54:5.9 Reason #8. The Faithful of Days on [our Norlatiadek Constellation spiritual headquarters] Edentia advised the Constellation Fathers to allow the rebels free course to the end that all sympathy for these evildoers should be the sooner uprooted in the hearts of every present and future citizen of Norlatiadek — every mortal, morontia, [soul] or spirit creature.
54:5.10 Reason #9. On Jerusem [our system spiritual headquarters] the personal representative of the Supreme Executive of Orvonton [our superuniverse number 7 of 7] counseled Gabriel [our Nebadon universe Chief Executive under Jesus Christ Michael] to foster full opportunity for every living creature to mature a deliberate choice in those matters involved in the Lucifer Declaration of Liberty. The issues of rebellion having been raised, the Paradise emergency adviser of Gabriel portrayed that, if such full and free opportunity were not given all Norlatiadek creatures, then would the Paradise quarantine against all such possible halfhearted or doubt-stricken creatures be extended in self-protection against the entire constellation. To keep open the Paradise doors of ascension to the beings of Norlatiadek, it was necessary to provide for the full development of rebellion and to insure the complete determination of attitude on the part of all beings in any way concerned therewith.
6. The Triumph of Love
54:6.9 One error of human thinking respecting these problems consists in the idea that all evolutionary mortals on an evolving planet would choose to enter upon the Paradise career if sin had not cursed their world. The ability to decline survival does not date from the times of the Lucifer rebellion. Mortal man has always possessed the endowment of freewill choice regarding the Paradise career. [It is totally your God-given freewill decision of Eternal Import: To Be an ascending Eternalized Son of God, or to be not. There is no sub-human, barbaric “hell”.]
PAPER 66. The Planetary Prince of Urantia
8. Misfortunes of Caligastia
66:8.2 It should be noted that both Lucifer and Caligastia had been patiently instructed and lovingly warned respecting their critical tendencies and the subtle development of their pride of self and its associated exaggeration of the feeling of self-importance. But all of these attempts to help had been misconstrued as unwarranted criticism and as unjustified interference with personal liberties. Both Caligastia [our former Planetary Prince of Urantia, now deposed and replaced by Jesus] and Lucifer judged their friendly advisers as being actuated by the very reprehensible motives which were beginning to dominate their own distorted thinking and misguided planning. They judged their unselfish advisers by their own evolving selfishness.
66:8.6 The doctrine of a personal devil on Urantia, though it had some foundation in the planetary presence of the traitorous and iniquitous Caligastia, was nevertheless wholly fictitious in its teachings that such a “devil” could influence the normal human mind against its free and natural choosing. Even before [Jesus Christ] Michael’s bestowal on Urantia, neither Caligastia nor [his assistant] Daligastia was ever able to oppress mortals or to coerce any normal individual into doing anything against the human will. The free will of man is supreme in moral affairs; even the indwelling Thought Adjuster [God’s Spirit will within you] refuses to compel man to think a single thought or to perform a single act against the choosing of man’s own will.
PAPER 67. The Planetary Rebellion
1. The Caligastia Betrayal
67:1.2 In the course of this inspection Satan informed Caligastia of Lucifer’s then proposed “Declaration of Liberty,” and as we now know, the Prince agreed to betray the planet upon the announcement of the rebellion. The loyal universe personalities look with peculiar disdain upon Prince Caligastia because of this premeditated betrayal of trust. The Creator Son [Jesus] voiced this contempt when he said: “You are like your leader, Lucifer, and you have sinfully perpetuated his iniquity. He was a falsifier from the beginning of his self-exaltation because he abode not in the truth.”
5. Immediate Results of Rebellion
67:5.1 Great confusion reigned in Dalamatia [the city headquarters of the former Planetary Prince] and thereabout for almost fifty years after the instigation of rebellion. The complete and radical reorganization of the whole world was attempted; revolution displaced evolution as the policy of cultural advancement and racial improvement. Among the superior and partially trained sojourners in and near Dalamatia there appeared a sudden advancement in cultural status, but when these new and radical methods were attempted on the outlying peoples, indescribable confusion and racial pandemonium was the immediate result. Liberty was quickly translated into license by the half-evolved primitive men of those days.
67:5.2 Very soon after the rebellion the entire staff of sedition were engaged in energetic defense of the city against the hordes of semisavages who besieged its walls as a result of the doctrines of liberty which had been prematurely taught them. And years before the beautiful headquarters went down beneath the southern waves, the misled and mistaught tribes of the Dalamatia hinterland had already swept down in semisavage assault on the splendid city, driving the secession staff and their associates northward.
67:5.3 The Caligastia scheme for the immediate reconstruction of human society in accordance with his ideas of individual freedom and group liberties, proved a swift and more or less complete failure. Society quickly sank back to its old biologic level, and the forward struggle began all over, starting not very far in advance of where it was at the beginning of the Caligastia regime, this upheaval having left the world in confusion worse confounded.
PAPER 68. The Dawn of Civilization
4. Evolution of the Mores
68:4.4 Prior to the liberating and liberalizing instruction of the Dalamatia teachers, ancient man was held a helpless victim of the ritual of the mores; the primitive savage was hedged about by an endless ceremonial. Everything he did from the time of awakening in the morning to the moment he fell asleep in his cave at night had to be done just so — in accordance with the folkways of the tribe. He was a slave to the tyranny of usage; his life contained nothing free, spontaneous, or original. There was no natural progress toward a higher mental, moral, or social existence.
5. Land Techniques—Maintenance Arts
68:5.4 2. The hunting stage. The invention of weapon tools enabled man to become a hunter and thus to gain considerable freedom from food slavery. A thoughtful Andonite who had severely bruised his fist in a serious combat rediscovered the idea of using a long stick for his arm and a piece of hard flint, bound on the end with sinews, for his fist. Many tribes made independent discoveries of this sort, and these various forms of hammers represented one of the great forward steps in human civilization. Today some Australian natives have progressed little beyond this stage.
PAPER 69. Primitive Human Institutions
5. The Beginnings of Capital
69:5.15 Though capital has tended to liberate man, it has greatly complicated his social and industrial organization. The abuse of capital by unfair capitalists does not destroy the fact that it is the basis of modern industrial society. Through capital and invention the present generation enjoys a higher degree of freedom than any that ever preceded it on earth. This is placed on record as a fact and not in justification of the many misuses of capital by thoughtless and selfish custodians.
8. Slavery as a Factor in Civilization
69:8.11 While the ideal of society is universal freedom, idleness should never be tolerated. All able-bodied persons should be compelled to do at least a self-sustaining amount of work.
9. Private Property
69:9.7 In earliest times women were the property of the community, and the mother dominated the family. The early chiefs owned all the land and were proprietors of all the women; marriage required the consent of the tribal ruler. With the passing of communism, women were held individually, and the father gradually assumed domestic control. Thus the home had its beginning, and the prevailing polygamous customs were gradually displaced by monogamy. (Polygamy is the survival of the female-slavery element in marriage. Monogamy is the slave-free ideal of the matchless association of one man and one woman in the exquisite enterprise of home building, offspring rearing, mutual culture, and self-improvement.)
69:9.16 Private ownership brought increased liberty and enhanced stability; but private ownership of land was given social sanction only after communal control and direction had failed, and it was soon followed by a succession of slaves, serfs, and landless classes. But improved machinery is gradually setting men free from slavish toil.
Topical Study 105 "Our Freedoms in Spiritual Liberty”
Compiled May 27, 2019 by Dave@PureChristians.org
[Part 4]
PAPER 70. The Evolution of Human Government
7. Primitive Clubs and Secret Societies
[Paper:Section.Paragraph numbers]
70:7.9 Commercialized prostitution began when these men’s clubs paid money for the use of women from other tribes. But the earlier groups were remarkably free from sex laxity.
70:7.12 Following these years of rigorous discipline and training and just before marriage, the young men were usually released for a short period of leisure and freedom, after which they returned to marry and to submit to lifelong subjection to the tribal taboos. And this ancient custom has continued down to modern times as the foolish notion of “sowing wild oats.” [and today, more deadly venereal diseases are proliferating to improve the human gene pool. Survival of the fittest: at first physically, then intellectually,, then morally, then spiritually, to achieve complete perfection on all levels of reality.]
9. Human Rights
70:9.12 #10. The guarantee of the freedom of religious practices to the end that all of these other social activities may be exalted by becoming spiritually motivated.
11. Laws and Courts
70:11.2 Law is always at first negative and prohibitive; in advancing civilizations it becomes increasingly positive and directive. Early society operated negatively, granting the individual the right to live by imposing upon all others the command, “you shall not kill.” Every grant of rights or liberty to the individual involves curtailment of the liberties of all others, and this is effected by the taboo, primitive law. The whole idea of the taboo is inherently negative, for primitive society was wholly negative in its organization, and the early administration of justice consisted in the enforcement of the taboos. But originally these laws applied only to fellow tribesmen, as is illustrated by the later-day Hebrews, who had a different code of ethics for dealing with the Gentiles.
12. Allocation of Civil Authority
70:12.5 Urantia [Earth] mortals are entitled to liberty; they should create their systems of government; they should adopt their constitutions or other charters of civil authority and administrative procedure. And having done this, they should select their most competent and worthy fellows as chief executives. For representatives in the legislative branch they should elect only those who are qualified intellectually and morally to fulfill such sacred responsibilities. As judges of their high and supreme tribunals only those who are endowed with natural ability and who have been made wise by replete experience should be chosen. [If dumb, immoral and corrupt humans are allowed to vote, they will choose dumb, corrupt and immoral politicians; and that nation will soon be destroyed. Voter qualification tests are now urgently needed to prevent the dominance of mediocrity.]
70:12.6 If men would maintain their freedom, they must, after having chosen their charter of liberty, provide for its wise, intelligent, and fearless interpretation to the end that there may be prevented:
70:12.7 1. Usurpation of unwarranted power by either the executive or legislative branches. [Judges should never legislate – never change laws !]
70:12.8 2. Machinations of ignorant and superstitious agitators.
70:12.9 3. Retardation of scientific progress. [More science and math education, 16 years minimum public education. Free college courses online.]
70:12.10 4. Stalemate of the dominance of mediocrity. [We must have systems of meritocracy soon, or collapse.]
70:12.11 5. Domination by vicious minorities.
70:12.12 6. Control by ambitious and clever would-be dictators.
70:12.13 7. Disastrous disruption of panics. [Note the current illogical, unscientific fear that global warming will destroy the planet in twelve or less years ! Ha ! Study real science and you will know that we are in a normal cycle of global cooling for about 25 years so far. This is because the sun has far less sunspots on it surface and thus less heat output. A NASA scientist has stated that we may have a mini-ice-age beginning. That would be good, as humans think better and become more creative in colder climates. Mush ! Ha ha]
70:12.14 8. Exploitation by the unscrupulous.
70:12.15 9. Taxation enslavement of the citizenry by the state. [Demand less government. less debt, less taxes.]
70:12.16 10. Failure of social and economic fairness.
70:12.17 11. Union of church and state. [Trans-ecclesiastical, home-based religious-spiritual study and fellowship groups are coming soon.]
70:12.18 12. Loss of personal liberty. [Spiritual liberty is most important, then intellectual and social liberty.]
70:12.19 These are the purposes and aims of constitutional tribunals acting as governors upon the engines of representative government on an evolutionary world.
70:12.20 Mankind’s struggle to perfect government on Urantia has to do with perfecting channels of administration, with adapting them to ever-changing current needs, with improving power distribution within government, and then with selecting such administrative leaders as are truly wise. While there is a divine and ideal form of government, such cannot be revealed but must be slowly and laboriously discovered by the men and women of each planet throughout the universes of time and space.
70:12.21 [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]
PAPER 71. Development of the State
1. The Embryonic State
71:1.22 The great weakness in Roman civilization, and a factor in the ultimate collapse of the empire, was the supposed liberal and advanced provision for the emancipation of the boy at twenty-one and the unconditional release of the girl so that she was at liberty to marry a man of her own choosing or to go abroad in the land to become immoral. The harm to society consisted not in these reforms themselves but rather in the sudden and extensive manner of their adoption. The collapse of Rome indicates what may be expected when a state undergoes too rapid extension associated with internal degeneration.
2. The Evolution of Representative Government
71:2.10 #1. Freedom of the person. Slavery, serfdom, and all forms of human bondage must disappear.
71:2.11 #2. Freedom of the mind. Unless a free people are educated — taught to think intelligently and plan wisely — freedom usually does more harm than good.
71:2.12 #3. The reign of law. Liberty can be enjoyed only when the will and whims of human rulers are replaced by legislative enactments in accordance with accepted fundamental law.
71:2.13 #4. Freedom of speech. Representative government is unthinkable without freedom of all forms of expression for human aspirations and opinions.
71:2.14 #5. Security of property. No government can long endure if it fails to provide for the right to enjoy personal property in some form. Man craves the right to use, control, bestow, sell, lease, and bequeath his personal property. [No socialism, no communism]
71:2.15 #6. The right of petition. Representative government assumes the right of citizens to be heard. The privilege of petition is inherent in free citizenship.
71:2.16 #7. The right to rule. It is not enough to be heard; the power of petition must progress to the actual management of the government.
71:2.17 #8. Universal suffrage. Representative government presupposes an intelligent, efficient, and universal electorate. The character of such a government will ever be determined by the character and caliber of those who compose it. As civilization progresses, suffrage, while remaining universal for both sexes, will be effectively modified, regrouped, and otherwise differentiated. [soon, each voter will have 1 to 10 votes according to merit testing. Criminals and the insane will have zero votes.]
71:2.18 #9. Control of public servants. No civil government will be serviceable and effective unless the citizenry possess and use wise techniques of guiding and controlling officeholders and public servants.
71:2.19 #10. Intelligent and trained representation. [very important:] The survival of democracy is dependent on successful representative government; and that is conditioned upon the practice of electing to public offices only those individuals who are technically trained, intellectually competent, socially loyal, and morally fit. Only by such provisions can government of the people, by the people, and for the people be preserved.
3. The Ideals of Statehood
71:3.1 The political or administrative form of a government is of little consequence provided it affords the essentials of civil progress — liberty, security, education, and social co-ordination. It is not what a state is but what it does that determines the course of social evolution. And after all, no state can transcend the moral values of its citizenry as exemplified in their chosen leaders. Ignorance and selfishness will insure the downfall of even the highest type of government.
71:3.7 The laws of the ideal state are few in number, and they have passed out of the negativistic taboo age into the era of the positive progress of individual liberty consequent upon enhanced self-control. The exalted state not only compels its citizens to work but also entices them into profitable and uplifting utilization of the increasing leisure which results from toil liberation by the advancing machine age. Leisure must produce as well as consume.
4. Progressive Civilization
71:4.1 Economics, society, and government must evolve if they are to remain. Static conditions on an evolutionary world are indicative of decay; only those institutions which move forward with the evolutionary stream persist.
71:4.2 The progressive program of an expanding civilization embraces:
71:4.3 #1. Preservation of individual liberties.
71:4.4 2. Protection of the home. [the foundational unit of society. The normal nuclear family is vital to survival of civilization. See the last paragraph in Paper 84 !]
71:4.5 3. Promotion of economic security.
71:4.6 4. Prevention of disease.
71:4.7 5. Compulsory education.
71:4.8 6. Compulsory employment.
71:4.9 7. Profitable utilization of leisure.
71:4.10 8. Care of the unfortunate.
71:4.11 9. Race improvement. [Positive eugenics]
71:4.12 10. Promotion of science and art.
71:4.13 11. Promotion of philosophy — wisdom.
71:4.14 12. Augmentation of cosmic insight — spirituality.
71:4.15 And this progress in the arts of civilization leads directly to the realization of the highest human and divine goals of mortal endeavor — the social achievement of the brotherhood of man and the personal status of God-consciousness, which becomes revealed in the supreme desire of every individual to do the will of the Father in heaven.
71:4.16 The appearance of genuine brotherhood signifies that a social order has arrived in which all men delight in bearing one another’s burdens; they actually desire to practice the golden rule. But such an ideal society cannot be realized when either the weak or the wicked lie in wait to take unfair and unholy advantage of those who are chiefly actuated by devotion to the service of truth, beauty, and goodness. In such a situation only one course is practical: The “golden rulers” may establish a progressive society in which they live according to their ideals while maintaining an adequate defense against their benighted [degenerate, ungodly] fellows who might seek either to exploit their pacific predilections or to destroy their advancing civilization.
71:4.17 Idealism can never survive on an evolving planet if the idealists in each generation permit themselves to be exterminated by the baser orders of humanity. And here is the great test of idealism: Can an advanced society maintain that military preparedness which renders it secure from all attack by its war-loving neighbors without yielding to the temptation to employ this military strength in offensive operations against other peoples for purposes of selfish gain or national aggrandizement? National survival demands preparedness, and religious idealism alone can prevent the prostitution of preparedness into aggression. Only love, brotherhood, can prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.
5. The Evolution of Competition
71:5.4 True, competition in industry is exceedingly wasteful and highly ineffective, but no attempt to eliminate this economic lost motion should be countenanced if such adjustments entail even the slightest abrogation of any of the basic liberties of the individual.
7. Education
71:7.4 Education recently passed from the control of the clergy to that of lawyers and businessmen. Eventually it must be given over to the philosophers and the scientists. Teachers must be free beings, real leaders, to the end that philosophy, the search for wisdom, may become the chief educational pursuit. [Education should strive to make human personality well-balanced with science, philosophy, and religion; not over-specialized.]
8. The Character of Statehood
71:8.1 The only sacred feature of any human government is the division of statehood into the three domains of executive, legislative, and judicial functions. The universe is administered in accordance with such a plan of segregation of functions and authority. Aside from this divine concept of effective social regulation or civil government, it matters little what form of state a people may elect to have provided the citizenry is ever progressing toward the goal of augmented self-control and increased social service. The intellectual keenness, economic wisdom, social cleverness, and moral stamina of a people are all faithfully reflected in statehood.
71:8.2 The evolution of statehood entails progress from level to level, as follows:
71:8.3 #1. The creation of a threefold government of executive, legislative, and judicial branches.
71:8.4 2. The freedom of social, political, and religious activities.
71:8.5 3. The abolition of all forms of slavery and human bondage.
71:8.6 4. The ability of the citizenry to control the levying of taxes.
71:8.7 5. The establishment of universal education — learning extended from the cradle to the grave.
71:8.8 6. The proper adjustment between local and national governments.
71:8.9 7. The fostering of science and the conquest of disease.
71:8.10 8. The due recognition of sex equality and the co-ordinated functioning of men and women in the home, school, and church, with specialized service of women in industry and government. [Men and Women are forever made different by God; unisex is a delusion. All children need to be raised in a stable home with the different but needed guiding influences of one man and one woman, married and desiring to co-create more sons of God for our Father God. Note that both males and females are equally spiritually classified as sons of God ; the daughters of God are the many levels of angels and super-angels.]
71:8.11 9. The elimination of toiling slavery by machine invention and the subsequent mastery of the machine age. [Fear not ! So-called “artificial intelligence” is a delusion. The seven types of mindal energies transmitted by our Holy Creative Mother Spirit, Who co-rules with our Sovereign Creator Son of God Jesus, can only be transmitted into LIVING animals or human beings ! No machine or computer can think, understand, reason, or be creative, or have sacred freewill, or have unique God-Given Personality: I am of I AM]
71:8.12 10. The conquest of dialects — the triumph of a universal language. [American English with new words continually being added in less than 100 more years]
71:8.13 11. The ending of war — international adjudication of national and racial differences by continental courts of nations presided over by a supreme planetary tribunal automatically recruited from the periodically retiring heads of the continental courts. The continental courts are authoritative; the world court is advisory — moral.
71:8.14 12. The world-wide vogue of the pursuit of wisdom — the exaltation of philosophy. The evolution of a world religion, which will presage the entrance of the planet upon the earlier phases of settlement in light and life. [The future one world religion will be Spirit-led Jesusonian Christianity that is home-based and not by church authorities.]
71:8.15 These are the prerequisites of progressive government and the earmarks of ideal statehood. Urantia is far from the realization of these exalted ideals, but the civilized races have made a beginning — mankind is on the march toward higher evolutionary destinies.
71:8.16 {Sponsored by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.} [Melchizedeks are high Sons of God, just one level under our Nebadon local universe Sovereign Creator Jesus Christ Michael. Nebadon now has 570 progressively higher soul-level heavens and over 3.8 million human-inhabited planets. There are 700,000 local universes in this first Grand Universe (space-time Supreme level age) Thus seven trillion human-inhabited planets at the end of this first age. Now there are roughly just six trillion of these planets. About ten billion humans per planet on average. I have good reason to believe that Paradise -Unqualified can, and maybe does now, have an infinite number of Beings and Patterns of Eternal Reality.]
Topical Study 105 "Our Freedoms in Spiritual Liberty”
Compiled May 29, 2019 by Dave@PureChristians.org
[Part 5]
PAPER 72. Government on a Neighboring Planet
[Revealed because of great similarity to the present state of our world, and to prevent our further moral and social decline]
1. The Continental Nation [similar to our USA]
[Paper:Section.Paragraph numbers]
72:1.4 This continental nation, in general, followed the evolutionary trend of the planet: The development from the tribal stage to the appearance of strong rulers and kings occupied thousands of years. The unconditional monarchs were succeeded by many different orders of government — abortive republics, communal states, and dictators came and went in endless profusion. This growth continued until about five hundred years ago when, during a politically fermenting period, one of the nation’s powerful dictator-triumvirs had a change of heart. He volunteered to abdicate upon condition that one of the other rulers, the baser of the remaining two, also vacate his dictatorship. Thus was the sovereignty of the continent placed in the hands of one ruler. The unified state progressed under strong monarchial rule for over one hundred years, during which there evolved a masterful charter of liberty.
2. Political Organization
72:2.1 This continental nation now [as of A.D. 1934-1935 when revealed] has a representative government with a centrally located national capital. The central government consists of a strong federation of one hundred comparatively free states. These states elect their governors and legislators for ten years, and none are eligible for re-election. State judges are appointed for life by the governors and confirmed by their legislatures, which consist of one representative for each one hundred thousand citizens.
72:2.11 #2. State supreme courts, whose decisions are final in all matters not involving the federal government or jeopardy of citizenship rights and liberties. The regional executives are empowered to bring any case at once to the bar of the federal supreme court.
3. The Home Life
72:3.1 On this continent it is against the law for two families to live under the same roof. And since group dwellings have been outlawed, most of the tenement type of buildings have been demolished. But the unmarried still live in clubs, hotels, and other group dwellings. The smallest homesite permitted must provide fifty thousand square feet of land. All land and other property used for home purposes are free from taxation up to ten times the minimum homesite allotment.
5. Industrial Organization
72:5.12 These people are also beginning to foster a new form of social disgust — disgust for both idleness and unearned wealth. Slowly but certainly they are conquering their machines. Once they, too, struggled for political liberty and subsequently for economic freedom. Now are they entering upon the enjoyment of both while in addition they are beginning to appreciate their well-earned leisure, which can be devoted to increased self-realization.
7. Taxation
72:7.6 There is little or no uniformity among the taxation schemes of the one hundred comparatively free and sovereign states as economic and other conditions vary greatly in different sections of the continent. Every state has ten basic constitutional provisions which cannot be modified except by consent of the federal supreme court, and one of these articles prevents levying a tax of more than one per cent on the value of any property in any one year, homesites, whether in city or country, being exempted. [from taxation. We need to greatly reduce taxes here !]
9. The Plan of Universal Suffrage [one to ten votes per person after qualifying]
72:9.7 Thus, except in the election of the chief executive, suffrage is exercised by economic, professional, intellectual, and social groupings of the citizenry. The ideal state is organic, and every free and intelligent group of citizens represents a vital and functioning organ within the larger governmental organism.
PAPER 77. The Midway Creatures
7. The Rebel Midwayers
77:7.7 Even prior to Pentecost [May 18, A.D. 30 - on] no rebel spirit could dominate a normal human mind, and since that day even the weak minds of inferior mortals are free from such possibilities. The supposed casting out of devils since the arrival of the Spirit of Truth [Jesus here in Spirit !] has been a matter of confounding a belief in demoniacal possession with hysteria, insanity, and feeble-mindedness. But just because [Jesus Christ] Michael’s bestowal has forever liberated all human minds on Urantia from the possibility of demoniacal possession, do not imagine that such was not a reality in former ages. [Demoniacal possession was a possibility here for about 200,000 years before Jesus incarnated here.]
PAPER 81. Development of Modern Civilization
2. The Tools of Civilization
81:2.14 The savage is a slave to nature, but scientific civilization is slowly conferring increasing liberty on mankind. Through animals, fire, wind, water, electricity, and other undiscovered sources of energy, [our scientists know somewhat only four basic forces: strong and weak nuclear, electromagnetism, linear gravity. There are 23 more forces here to be discovered !] man has liberated, and will continue to liberate, himself from the necessity for unremitting toil. Regardless of the transient trouble produced by the prolific invention of machinery, the ultimate benefits to be derived from such mechanical inventions are inestimable. Civilization can never flourish, much less be established, until man has leisure to think, to plan, to imagine new and better ways of doing things. [Don’t be an anti-technology Luddite ! Ha ha]
5. Cultural Society
81:5.4 Social association is a form of survival insurance which human beings have learned is profitable; therefore are most individuals willing to pay those premiums of self-sacrifice and personal-liberty curtailment which society exacts from its members in return for this enhanced group protection. In short, the present-day social mechanism is a trial-and-error insurance plan designed to afford some degree of assurance and protection against a return to the terrible and antisocial conditions which characterized the early experiences of the human race.
81:5.5 Society thus becomes a co-operative scheme for securing civil freedom through institutions, economic freedom through capital and invention, social liberty through culture, and freedom from violence through police regulation.
81:5.6 Might does not make right, but it does enforce the commonly recognized rights of each succeeding generation. The prime mission of government is the definition of the right, the just and fair regulation of class differences, and the enforcement of equality of opportunity under the rules of law. Every human right is associated with a social duty; group privilege is an insurance mechanism which unfailingly demands the full payment of the exacting premiums of group service. And group rights, as well as those of the individual, must be protected, including the regulation of the sex propensity. [Rape is a serious crime. Adultery and infidelity should also be crimes.]
81:5.7 Liberty subject to group regulation is the legitimate goal of social evolution. Liberty without restrictions is the vain and fanciful dream of unstable and flighty human minds. [There is Godly true liberty and the false liberty of anarchy and atheism.]
PAPER 82. The Evolution of Marriage
[This next section will be very dull and boring; but please try to stay awake:]
1. The Mating Instinct [ha ha!]
82:1.2 Sex interest and desire were not dominating passions in primitive peoples; they simply took them for granted. The entire reproductive experience was free from imaginative embellishment. The all-absorbing sex passion of the more highly civilized peoples is chiefly due to race mixtures, especially where the evolutionary nature has been stimulated by the associative imagination and beauty appreciation of the Nodites and Adamites. [Humans were partly biologically uplifted by mating with the progeny of Adam and Eve who came down from a higher Heaven to mate with selected humans to biologically uplift them, about 38,000 years ago. Andon and Fonta were the first humans here 993,504 years ago. Around 37,000 years ago was the sudden appearance of “modern man” superior to early man] But this [later, mixed] Andite inheritance was absorbed by the evolutionary races in such limited amounts as to fail to provide sufficient self-control for the animal passions thus quickened and aroused by the endowment of keener sex consciousness and stronger mating urges. Of the evolutionary races, the red man had the highest sex code.
82:1.7 The mating instinct is one of the dominant physical driving forces of human beings; it is the one emotion which, in the guise of individual gratification, effectively tricks selfish man into putting race welfare and perpetuation high above individual ease and personal freedom from responsibility.
2. The Restrictive Taboos
82:2.3 Free love, however, has never been in good standing above the scale of rank savagery. The moment societal groups began to form, marriage codes and marital restrictions began to develop. Mating has thus progressed through a multitude of transitions from a state of almost complete sex license to the twentieth-century standards of relatively complete sex restriction. [That was stated in A.D. 1934-1935. Today there is a short-term degeneration back to more free sex license; and more deadly and prolific venereal diseases will soon curtail that again. The human gene pool will thus continue to improve.]
82:2.4 In the earliest stages of tribal development the mores and restrictive taboos were very crude, but they did keep the sexes apart — this favored quiet, order, and industry — and the long evolution of marriage and the home had begun. The sex customs of dress, adornment, and religious practices had their origin in these early taboos which defined the range of sex liberties and thus eventually created concepts of vice, crime, and sin. But it was long the practice to suspend all sex regulations on high festival days, especially May Day.
82:2.5 Women have always been subject to more restrictive taboos than men. The early mores granted the same degree of sex liberty to unmarried women as to men, but it has always been required of wives that they be faithful to their husbands. Primitive marriage did not much curtail man’s sex liberties, but it did render further sex license taboo to the wife. Married women have always borne some mark which set them apart as a class by themselves, such as hairdress, clothing, veil, seclusion, ornamentation, and rings. [Wearing a wedding ring states: I don’t have enough self-control, so my marriage partner makes me wear this to restrain me from committing adultery. Ha ha]
3. Early Marriage Mores
82:3.15 These primitive trial marriages were entirely free from all semblance of license; they were simply sincere tests of fecundity. The contracting individuals married permanently just as soon as fertility was established. When modern couples marry with the thought of convenient divorce in the background of their minds if they are not wholly pleased with their married life, they are in reality entering upon a form of trial marriage and one that is far beneath the status of the honest adventures of their less civilized ancestors.
5. Endogamy and Exogamy
[Marrying someone in your group, or marrying someone outside your group]
82:5.6 Outmarriage finally dominated because it was favored by the man; to get a wife from the outside insured greater freedom from in-laws. Familiarity breeds contempt; so, as the element of individual choice began to dominate mating, it became the custom to choose partners from outside the tribe. [The grass is greener on the other side of the fence, ha ha]
PAPER 83. The Marriage Institution
2. Courtship and Betrothal
83:2.1 Primitive marriages were always planned by the parents of the boy and girl. The transition stage between this custom and the times of free choosing was occupied by the marriage broker or professional matchmaker. These matchmakers were at first the barbers; later, the priests. Marriage was originally a group affair; then a family matter; only recently has it become an individual adventure.
7. The Ideals of Family Life
83:7.4 The social pressure of community standing and property privileges has always been potent in the maintenance of the marriage taboos and mores. Down through the ages marriage has made steady progress and stands on advanced ground in the modern world, notwithstanding that it is threateningly assailed by widespread dissatisfaction among those peoples where individual choice — a new liberty — figures most largely. While these upheavals of adjustment appear among the more progressive races as a result of suddenly accelerated social evolution, among the less advanced peoples marriage continues to thrive and slowly improve under the guidance of the older mores.
83:7.7 The high degree of imagination and fantastic romance entering into courtship is largely responsible for the increasing divorce tendencies among modern Occidental peoples, all of which is further complicated by woman’s greater personal freedom and increased economic liberty. Easy divorce, when the result of lack of self-control or failure of normal personality adjustment, only leads directly back to those crude societal stages from which man has emerged so recently and as the result of so much personal anguish and racial suffering.
8. The Idealization of Marriage
83:8.9 Twentieth-century marriages stand high in comparison with those of past ages, notwithstanding that the home institution is now undergoing a serious testing because of the problems so suddenly thrust upon the social organization by the precipitate augmentation of woman’s liberties, rights so long denied her in the tardy evolution of the mores of past generations.
PAPER 84. Marriage and Family Life
3. The Family under Father Dominance
84:3.7 Woman has always had to work; at least right up to modern times the female has been a real producer. Man has usually chosen the easier path, and this inequality has existed throughout the entire history of the human race. Woman has always been the burden bearer, carrying the family property and tending the children, thus leaving the man’s hands free for fighting or hunting.
4. Woman's Status in Early Society
84:4.10 A great advance was made when a man was denied the right to kill his wife at will. [Mankind is slowly progressing from early barbaric savagery.] Likewise, it was a forward step when a woman could own the wedding gifts. Later, she gained the legal right to own, control, and even dispose of property, but she was long deprived of the right to hold office in either church or state. Woman has always been treated more or less as property, right up to and in the twentieth century after Christ. She has not yet gained world-wide freedom from seclusion under man’s control. Even among advanced peoples, man’s attempt to protect woman has always been a tacit assertion of superiority.
5. Woman under the Developing Mores
84:5.7 Science, not religion, really emancipated woman; it was the modern factory which largely set her free from the confines of the home. Man’s physical abilities became no longer a vital essential in the new maintenance mechanism; science so changed the conditions of living that man power was no longer so superior to woman power.
84:5.8 These changes have tended toward woman’s liberation from domestic slavery and have brought about such a modification of her status that she now enjoys a degree of personal liberty and sex determination that practically equals man’s. Once a woman’s value consisted in her food-producing ability, but invention and wealth have enabled her to create a new world in which to function — spheres of grace and charm. Thus has industry won its unconscious and unintended fight for woman’s social and economic emancipation. And again has evolution succeeded in doing what even revelation failed to accomplish.
PAPER 89. Sin, Sacrifice, and Atonement
3. Renunciation and Humiliation
89:3.7 Someday man should learn how to enjoy liberty without license, nourishment without gluttony, and pleasure without debauchery. Self-control is a better human policy of behavior regulation than is extreme self-denial. Nor did Jesus ever teach these unreasonable views to his followers.
PAPER 92. The Later Evolution of Religion
4. The Gift of Revelation
92:4.8 #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.
PAPER 93. Machiventa Melchizedek
[He was a high Son of God, just one level under Jesus Christ Michael. He came to earth, about 4,000 years ago, to the city of Salem which was later named Jerusalem, to keep the Light of Truth alive, and to prepare the way for the future bestowal of our Paradise Creator Son, Jesus Christ Michael.]
4. The Salem Religion
[This is important, so all 16 paragraphs will be presented here now:]
93:4.1 The ceremonies of the Salem worship were very simple. Every person who signed or marked the clay-tablet rolls of the Melchizedek church committed to memory, and subscribed to, the following belief:
93:4.2 1. I believe in El Elyon, the Most High God, the only Universal Father and Creator of all things.
93:4.3 2. I accept the Melchizedek covenant with the Most High, which bestows the favor of God on my faith, not on sacrifices and burnt offerings.
93:4.4 3. I promise to obey the seven commandments of Melchizedek and to tell the good news of this covenant with the Most High to all men.
93:4.5 And that was the whole of the creed of the Salem colony. But even such a short and simple declaration of faith was altogether too much and too advanced for the men of those days. They simply could not grasp the idea of getting divine favor for nothing — by faith. They were too deeply confirmed in the belief that man was born under forfeit to the gods. Too long and too earnestly had they sacrificed and made gifts to the priests to be able to comprehend the good news that salvation, divine favor, was a free gift to all who would believe in the Melchizedek covenant. But Abraham did believe halfheartedly, and even that was “counted for righteousness.”
93:4.6 The seven commandments promulgated by Melchizedek were patterned along the lines of the ancient Dalamatian supreme law and very much resembled the seven commands taught in the first and second Edens. These commands of the Salem religion were:
93:4.7 1. You shall not serve any God but the Most High Creator of heaven and earth.
93:4.8 2. You shall not doubt that faith is the only requirement for eternal salvation.
93:4.9 3. You shall not bear false witness.
93:4.10 4. You shall not kill.
93:4.11 5. You shall not steal.
93:4.12 6. You shall not commit adultery.
93:4.13 7. You shall not show disrespect for your parents and elders.
[Note that these seven commandments are much better than the later human-altered ten commandments.]
93:4.14 While no sacrifices were permitted within the colony, Melchizedek well knew how difficult it is to suddenly uproot long-established customs and accordingly had wisely offered these people the substitute of a sacrament of bread and wine for the older sacrifice of flesh and blood. It is of record, “Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought forth bread and wine.” But even this cautious innovation was not altogether successful; the various tribes all maintained auxiliary centers on the outskirts of Salem where they offered sacrifices and burnt offerings. Even Abraham resorted to this barbarous practice after his victory over Chedorlaomer; he simply did not feel quite at ease until he had offered a conventional sacrifice. And Melchizedek never did succeed in fully eradicating this proclivity to sacrifice from the religious practices of his followers, even of Abraham.
93:4.15 Like Jesus, Melchizedek attended strictly to the fulfillment of the mission of his bestowal. He did not attempt to reform the mores, to change the habits of the world, nor to promulgate even advanced sanitary practices or scientific truths. He came to achieve two tasks: to keep alive on earth the truth of the one God and to prepare the way for the subsequent mortal bestowal of [Jesus Christ Michael] a Paradise Son of that Universal Father.
93:4.16 Melchizedek taught elementary revealed truth at Salem for ninety-four years, and during this time Abraham attended the Salem school three different times. He finally became a convert to the Salem teachings, becoming one of Melchizedek’s most brilliant pupils and chief supporters. [the disciples of Abraham went to the East and taught some of Melchizedek’s advanced teachings. So the various Eastern religions today do have some truths similar to the Christian Bible’s partial truths.]
Topical Study 105 "Our Freedoms in Spiritual Liberty”
Compiled May 31, 2019 by Dave@PureChristians.org
[Part 6]
PAPER 94. The Melchizedek Teachings in the Orient
7. Gautama Siddhartha
[Paper:Section.Paragraph numbers]
94:7.5 At Benares Gautama [Siddhartha, later called the Buddha] ] founded his school, and it was during its second year that a pupil, Bautan, imparted to his teacher the traditions of the Salem missionaries about the Melchizedek covenant with Abraham; and while Siddhartha did not have a very clear concept of the Universal Father, he took an advanced stand on salvation through faith — simple belief. He so declared himself before his followers and began sending his students out in groups of sixty to proclaim to the people of India “the glad tidings of free salvation; that all men, high and low, can attain bliss by faith in righteousness and justice.” [But, that was just a Godless philosophy. No mention of our loving Father God and our sonship in His Family of God.]
94:7.6 Gautama’s wife believed her husband’s gospel and was the founder of an order of nuns. His son became his successor and greatly extended the cult; he grasped the new idea of salvation through faith but in his later years wavered regarding the Salem gospel of divine favor through faith alone, and in his old age his dying words were, “Work out your own salvation.”
94:7.7 When proclaimed at its best, Gautama’s gospel of universal salvation, free from sacrifice, torture, ritual, and priests, was a revolutionary and amazing doctrine for its time. And it came surprisingly near to being a revival of the Salem gospel. It brought succor to millions of despairing souls, and notwithstanding its grotesque perversion during later centuries, it still persists as the hope of millions of human beings.
8. The Buddhist Faith
94:8.16 Siddhartha hardly believed in the immortality of the human personality; his philosophy only provided for a sort of functional continuity. He never clearly defined what he meant to include in the doctrine of Nirvana. The fact that it could theoretically be experienced during mortal existence would indicate that it was not viewed as a state of complete annihilation. It implied a condition of supreme enlightenment and supernal bliss wherein all fetters binding man to the material world had been broken; there was freedom from the desires of mortal life and deliverance from all danger of ever again experiencing incarnation. [Thank our Father God that there is no barbaric retrogressions of “reincarnation”. God has given His Eternal, Loving Invitation-Command: “Be You Perfect; even as I AM Perfect.” Amen !]
12. The God Concept of Buddhism
[all paragraphs]
94:12.1 The great weakness in the cosmology of Buddhism was twofold: its contamination with many of the superstitions of India and China and its sublimation of Gautama, first as the enlightened one, and then as the Eternal Buddha. [Some Christians today still think that their “Pope” is “Father God on earth” !] Just as Christianity has suffered from the absorption of much erroneous human philosophy, so does Buddhism bear its human birthmark. But the teachings of Gautama have continued to evolve during the past two and one-half millenniums. The concept of Buddha, to an enlightened Buddhist, is no more the human personality of Gautama than the concept of Jehovah is identical with the spirit demon of Horeb to an enlightened Christian. Paucity of terminology, together with the sentimental retention of olden nomenclature, is often provocative of the failure to understand the true significance of the evolution of religious concepts.
94:12.2 Gradually the concept of God, as contrasted with the Absolute, began to appear in Buddhism. Its sources are back in the early days of this differentiation of the followers of the Lesser Road and the Greater Road. It was among the latter division of Buddhism that the dual conception of God and the Absolute finally matured. Step by step, century by century, the God concept has evolved until, with the teachings of Ryonin, Honen Shonin, and Shinran in Japan, this concept finally came to fruit in the belief in Amida Buddha.
94:12.3 Among these believers it is taught that the soul, upon experiencing death, may elect to enjoy a sojourn in Paradise prior to entering Nirvana, the ultimate of existence. It is proclaimed that this new salvation is attained by faith in the divine mercies and loving care of Amida, God of the Paradise in the west. In their philosophy, the Amidists hold to an Infinite Reality which is beyond all finite mortal comprehension; in their religion, they cling to faith in the all-merciful Amida, who so loves the world that he will not suffer one mortal who calls on his name in true faith and with a pure heart to fail in the attainment of the supernal happiness of Paradise.
94:12.4 The great strength of Buddhism is that its adherents are free to choose truth from all religions; such freedom of choice has seldom characterized a Urantian faith. In this respect the Shin sect of Japan has become one of the most progressive religious groups in the world; it has revived the ancient missionary spirit of Gautama’s followers and has begun to send teachers to other peoples. This willingness to appropriate truth from any and all sources is indeed a commendable tendency to appear among religious believers during the first half of the twentieth century after Christ.
94:12.5 Buddhism itself is undergoing a twentieth-century renaissance. Through contact with Christianity the social aspects of Buddhism have been greatly enhanced. The desire to learn has been rekindled in the hearts of the monk priests of the brotherhood, and the spread of education throughout this faith will be certainly provocative of new advances in religious evolution.
94:12.6 At the time of this writing, [A.D. 1934] much of Asia rests its hope in Buddhism. Will this noble faith, that has so valiantly carried on through the dark ages of the past, once again receive the truth of expanded cosmic realities even as the disciples of the great teacher in India once listened to his proclamation of new truth? Will this ancient faith respond once more to the invigorating stimulus of the presentation of new concepts of God and the Absolute for which it has so long searched?
94:12.7 All Urantia is waiting for the proclamation of the ennobling message of [Jesus Christ] Michael, unencumbered by the accumulated doctrines and dogmas of nineteen centuries of contact with the religions of evolutionary origin. The hour is striking for presenting to Buddhism, to Christianity, to Hinduism, even to the peoples of all faiths, not the gospel about Jesus, but the living, spiritual reality of the gospel of Jesus.
94:12.8 [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]
PAPER 96. Yahweh—God of the Hebrews
3. The Matchless Moses
96:3.1 The beginning of the evolution of the Hebraic concepts and ideals of a Supreme Creator dates from the departure of the Semites from Egypt under that great leader, teacher, and organizer, Moses. His mother was of the royal family of Egypt; his father was a Semitic liaison officer between the government and the Bedouin captives. Moses thus possessed qualities derived from superior racial sources; his ancestry was so highly blended that it is impossible to classify him in any one racial group. Had he not been of this mixed type, he would never have displayed that unusual versatility and adaptability which enabled him to manage the diversified horde which eventually became associated with those Bedouin Semites who fled from Egypt to the Arabian Desert under his leadership.
96:3.2 Despite the enticements of the culture of the Nile kingdom, Moses elected to cast his lot with the people of his father. At the time this great organizer was formulating his plans for the eventual freeing of his father’s people, the Bedouin captives hardly had a religion worthy of the name; they were virtually without a true concept of God and without hope in the world.
96:3.3 No leader ever undertook to reform and uplift a more forlorn, downcast, dejected, and ignorant group of human beings. But these slaves carried latent possibilities of development in their hereditary strains, and there were a sufficient number of educated leaders who had been coached by Moses in preparation for the day of revolt and the strike for liberty to constitute a corps of efficient organizers. These superior men had been employed as native overseers of their people; they had received some education because of Moses’ influence with the Egyptian rulers.
96:3.4 Moses endeavored to negotiate diplomatically for the freedom of his fellow Semites. He and his brother entered into a compact with the king of Egypt whereby they were granted permission peaceably to leave the valley of the Nile for the Arabian Desert. They were to receive a modest payment of money and goods in token of their long service in Egypt. The Hebrews for their part entered into an agreement to maintain friendly relations with the Pharaohs and not to join in any alliance against Egypt. But the king later saw fit to repudiate this treaty, giving as his reason the excuse that his spies had discovered disloyalty among the Bedouin slaves. He claimed they sought freedom for the purpose of going into the desert to organize the nomads against Egypt.
96:3.5 But Moses was not discouraged; he bided his time, and in less than a year, when the Egyptian military forces were fully occupied in resisting the simultaneous onslaughts of a strong Libyan thrust from the south and a Greek naval invasion from the north, this intrepid organizer led his compatriots out of Egypt in a spectacular night flight. This dash for liberty was carefully planned and skillfully executed. And they were successful, notwithstanding that they were hotly pursued by Pharaoh and a small body of Egyptians, who all fell before the fugitives’ defense, yielding much booty, all of which was augmented by the loot of the advancing host of escaping slaves as they marched on toward their ancestral desert home. [Note: The fantastic Bible story that Moses had God part the Red Sea to allow the Hebrews to cross; and then God drowned the pursuing Egyptians is false. There were only a small number of Egyptians that were easily killed by Moses and the fleeing Hebrew fugitives. God loves all humans and races equally; He is not a racist; He has no so-called “chosen race”. Jesus taught his parable of the Good Samaritan to try to counter overt Jewish racism.]
PAPER 97. Evolution of the God Concept among the Hebrews
5. The First Isaiah and Micah
97:5.3 Speaking to the fear-ridden and soul-hungry Hebrews, this prophet [Isaiah the first] said: “Arise and shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.” “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good tidings to the meek; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.” “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation and has covered me with his robe of righteousness.” “In all their afflictions he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them. In his love and in his pity he redeemed them.” [Isa 60.1 to 63.9]
97:5.5 Micah denounced “the rulers who judge for reward and the priests who teach for hire and the prophets who divine for money.” [Micah 3:11] He taught of a day of freedom from superstition and priestcraft, saying: “But every man shall sit under his own vine, and no one shall make him afraid, for all people will live, each one according to his understanding of God.” [Micah 4:4-5]
10. The Hebrew Religion
97:10.2 When the Jews had been freed by the Persians, they returned to Palestine only to fall into bondage to their own priest-ridden code of laws, sacrifices, and rituals. And as the Hebrew clans rejected the wonderful story of God presented in the farewell oration of Moses for the rituals of sacrifice and penance, so did these remnants of the Hebrew nation reject the magnificent concept of the second Isaiah for the rules, regulations, and rituals of their growing priesthood.
PAPER 98. The Melchizedek Teachings in the Occident [the West]
2. Greek Philosophic Thought
98:2.7 The evolution of religious philosophy among the Hellenic and Hebrew peoples affords a contrastive illustration of the function of the church as an institution in the shaping of cultural progress. In Palestine, human thought was so priest-controlled and scripture-directed that philosophy and aesthetics were entirely submerged in religion and morality. In Greece, the almost complete absence of priests and “sacred scriptures” left the human mind free and unfettered, resulting in a startling development in depth of thought. But religion as a personal experience failed to keep pace with the intellectual probings into the nature and reality of the cosmos.
PAPER 99. The Social Problems of Religion
3. Religion and the Religionist
99:3.1 Early Christianity was entirely free from all civil entanglements, social commitments, and economic alliances. Only did later institutionalized Christianity become an organic part of the political and social structure of Occidental civilization.
99:3.2 The kingdom of heaven is neither a social nor economic order; it is an exclusively spiritual brotherhood of God-knowing individuals. True, such a brotherhood is in itself a new and amazing social phenomenon attended by astounding political and economic repercussions.
99:3.9 Religion can be kept free from unholy secular alliances only by:
99:3.10 #1. A critically corrective philosophy.
99:3.11 #2. Freedom from all social, economic, and political alliances.
99:3.12 #3. Creative, comforting, and love-expanding fellowships.
99:3.13 #4. Progressive enhancement of spiritual insight and the appreciation of cosmic values.
99:3.14 #5. Prevention of fanaticism by the compensations of the scientific mental attitude.
99:3.15 Religionists, as a group, must never concern themselves with anything but religion, albeit any one such religionist, as an individual citizen, may become the outstanding leader of some social, economic, or political reconstruction movement.
99:3.16 It is the business of religion to create, sustain, and inspire such a cosmic loyalty in the individual citizen as will direct him to the achievement of success in the advancement of all these difficult but desirable social services.
PAPER 100. Religion in Human Experience
5. Conversion and Mysticism
100:5.2 The progression of religious growth leads from stagnation through conflict to co-ordination, from insecurity to undoubting faith, from confusion of cosmic consciousness to unification of personality, from the temporal objective to the eternal, from the bondage of fear to the liberty of divine sonship.
7. The Acme of Religious Living – Jesus
100:7.2 The unfailing kindness of Jesus touched the hearts of men, but his stalwart strength of character amazed his followers. He was truly sincere; there was nothing of the hypocrite in him. He was free from affectation; he was always so refreshingly genuine. He never stooped to pretense, and he never resorted to shamming. He lived the truth, even as he taught it. He was the truth. He was constrained to proclaim saving truth to his generation, even though such sincerity sometimes caused pain. He was unquestioningly loyal to all truth.
100:7.3 But the Master was so reasonable, so approachable. He was so practical in all his ministry, while all his plans were characterized by such sanctified common sense. He was so free from all freakish, erratic, and eccentric tendencies. He was never capricious, whimsical, or hysterical. In all his teaching and in everything he did there was always an exquisite discrimination associated with an extraordinary sense of propriety.
100:7.6 Jesus was very broad in his outlook. He exhorted his followers to preach the gospel to all peoples. He was free from all narrow-mindedness. His sympathetic heart embraced all mankind, even a universe. Always his invitation was, “Whosoever will, let him come.”
PAPER 101. The Real Nature of Religion
0. Introduction
101:0.1 RELIGION, as a human experience, ranges from the primitive fear slavery of the evolving savage up to the sublime and magnificent faith liberty of those civilized mortals who are superbly conscious of sonship with the eternal God.
4. The Limitations of Revelation [Important]
101:4.2 Mankind should understand that we who participate in the revelation of truth are very rigorously limited by the instructions of our superiors. We are not at liberty to anticipate the scientific discoveries of a thousand years. Revelators must act in accordance with the instructions which form a part of the revelation mandate. We see no way of overcoming this difficulty, either now or at any future time. We full well know that, while the historic facts and religious truths of this series of revelatory presentations will stand on the records of the ages to come, within a few short years many of our statements regarding the physical sciences will stand in need of revision in consequence of additional scientific developments and new discoveries. These new developments we even now foresee, but we are forbidden to include such humanly undiscovered facts in the revelatory records. Let it be made clear that revelations are not necessarily inspired. The cosmology of these revelations is not inspired. [Cosmology is the study of the deeper meanings and realities of the universe; it is not just physical astronomy.] It is limited by our permission for the co-ordination and sorting of present-day knowledge. While divine or spiritual insight is a gift, human wisdom must evolve.
6. Progressive Religious Experience
101:6.8 The teachings of Jesus constituted the first Urantian religion which so fully embraced a harmonious co-ordination of knowledge, wisdom, faith, truth, and love as completely and simultaneously to provide temporal tranquillity, intellectual certainty, moral enlightenment, philosophic stability, ethical sensitivity, God-consciousness, and the positive assurance of personal survival. The faith of Jesus pointed the way to finality of human salvation, to the ultimate of mortal universe attainment, since it provided for:
101:6.9 #1. Salvation from material fetters in the personal realization of sonship with God, who is spirit.
101:6.10 #2. Salvation from intellectual bondage: man shall know the truth, and the truth shall set him free.
101:6.11 #3. Salvation from spiritual blindness, the human realization of the fraternity of mortal beings and the morontian awareness of the brotherhood of all universe creatures; the service-discovery of spiritual reality and the ministry-revelation of the goodness of spirit values.
101:6.12 #4. Salvation from incompleteness of self through the attainment of the spirit levels of the universe and through the eventual realization of the harmony of Havona and the perfection of Paradise.
101:6.13 #5. Salvation from self, deliverance from the limitations of self-consciousness through the attainment of the cosmic levels of the Supreme mind and by co-ordination with the attainments of all other self-conscious beings.
101:6.14 #6. Salvation from time, the achievement of an eternal life of unending progression in God-recognition and God-service.
101:6.15 #7. Salvation from the finite, the perfected oneness with Deity in and through the Supreme by which the creature attempts the transcendental discovery of the Ultimate on the postfinaliter levels of the absonite. [After we are Spirit-perfected and Eternal Paradise residents, we will go out with our Sovereign Universe Creator Son of God Jesus Christ Michael into the higher transcendental-absonite Master Universe. Jesus Christ Michael is already a Member.]
101:6.16 Such a sevenfold salvation is the equivalent of the completeness and perfection of the realization of the ultimate experience of the Universal Father. And all this, in potential, is contained within the reality of the faith of the human experience of religion. And it can be so contained since the faith of Jesus was nourished by, and was revelatory of, even realities beyond the ultimate; the faith of Jesus approached the status of a universe absolute in so far as such is possible of manifestation in the evolving cosmos of time and space.
101:6.17 Through the appropriation of the faith of Jesus, mortal man can foretaste in time the realities of eternity. Jesus made the discovery, in human experience, of the Final Father, and his brothers in the flesh of mortal life can follow him along this same experience of Father discovery. They can even attain, as they are, the same satisfaction in this experience with the Father as did Jesus as he was. New potentials were actualized in the universe of Nebadon consequent upon the terminal bestowal of Michael, and one of these was the new illumination of the path of eternity that leads to the Father of all, and which can be traversed even by the mortals of material flesh and blood in the initial life on the planets of space. Jesus was and is the new and living way whereby man can come into the divine inheritance which the Father has decreed shall be his for but the asking. In Jesus there is abundantly demonstrated both the beginnings and endings of the faith experience of humanity, even of divine humanity.
7. A Personal Philosophy of Religion
101:7.4 The great difference between a religious and a nonreligious philosophy of living consists in the nature and level of recognized values and in the object of loyalties. There are four phases in the evolution of religious philosophy: Such an experience may become merely conformative, resigned to submission to tradition and [ecclesiastical] authority. Or it may be satisfied with slight attainments, just enough to stabilize the daily living, and therefore becomes early arrested on such an adventitious level. Such mortals believe in letting well enough alone. A third group progress to the level of logical intellectuality but there stagnate in consequence of cultural slavery. It is indeed pitiful to behold giant intellects held so securely within the cruel grasp of cultural bondage. [Now there is the slavery of “political correctness”] It is equally pathetic to observe those who trade their cultural bondage for the materialistic fetters of a science, falsely so called. The fourth level of philosophy attains freedom from all conventional and traditional handicaps and dares to think, act, and live honestly, loyally, fearlessly, and truthfully.
