Hi NOD: Again, a deep and meaningful question:
Is it possible (as students of the Urantia Papers) to turn the liberty of true religious living into "a species of ingenious self-deception through resorting to a retreat to the false shelter of stereotyped religious doctrines and dogmas?"
And for me, at least, the answer is a resounding YES.
I look at the teachings, their effects on me and others, and their eventual effect upon the planetary spiritual economy as follows:
If the teachings of the Urantia book are indeed correct, and this is not some sort of grand falsehood played out on a cosmic scale then:
1. there is a vast amount of spiritual growth ahead of every one of us. 2. we are starting out (individually) from zero 3. except for the UB, there are not a lot of factually reliable sources of information readily available to the common person. 4. as creatures of evolutionary will dignity, we simply do not have the capacity to grasp much of the overall scope and grandeur of the message. They gave us the cilff-notes version and we still stumble over the message, time and time again.
And while YES, we can, as the Authors state, “become as replete in our own spheres of living as God is in his” (or something like that) that sphere, cosmically speaking, is about the size of a grain of sand in the midst of the Great Sahara Desert.
So it is NECESSARY that we, as a species practice this version of “ingenious self-deception through resorting to a retreat to the false shelter of stereotyped religious doctrines and dogmas”. We got nothing else. I mean, besides the UB, what else do we got? I’ll tell you what we got: we got a world where:
1. atheistic science, while on the retreat still dominates the conversation of humanity 2. the religious establishment is still trapped in the past and seems more interested in warring with each other than in even looking for the truth. 3. the public is numbed under the deluge of a fire hydrant of information coming from every possible facet of the internet.
And since the common man still has not even heard of the 5th epochal revelation, except for, perhaps, as slandered as the “alien bible”, there is not a lot of visible change in the glacially changing evolutionary landscape.
And really, who are we, the students of the Urantia Book, to be any different than those surrounding us?
Remember the Authors stated that in the beginning, Christianity was dominated by the lowest classes, but over time grew (and became warped to accommodate) the vast majority of Western Civilization.
And this revelation is no different.
We are the spiritual outcasts, the lowest of the low right now (speaking in terms of the established and powerful evolutionary religions of the planet). True, economically, we may not be on the bottom of the ladder, I know I am not, but in terms of the so called “religious world” we’re trash. And, as usual, that is where the brightest and purest lights will shine.
As the revelation grows to encompass the world, it will become weighed down and compromised with the burden of evolutionary baggage. Its words will become twisted, even more than we twist them today, practicing ourselves, individually, our own species ingenious self-deception, based on our life experiences to date. This is the nature of revelation on an evolutionary world, it is expected and I am sure is fully anticipated by those who have watched the spiritual level of this world rise and fall so many times in the past. Watching as wave after wave of spiritual change wash across the planet, each leaving apparent disruption in its wake, then receding and leaving everything pretty much the same as it was, but altered, ever so slightly, for the better.
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