Joined: Sun Mar 25, 2012 5:29 am +0000
Posts: 4776
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Indeed....how long is the material "age"? Is it centuries? Or millennia? Did it start with the Greeks or Romans? Or before? Or is it a more recent "age"? There have always been materialists I presume. But evolutionary religion has always been with us too - since the very first person and in every generation since.
So the "age" of materialism must be a specific season and cycle of evolutionary progress where material life has dominance. Is that pleasure seeking? Property and wealth seeking? Or the function of false liberty? And, of course, there are those who are not materialists even in the materialist age and there are materialists no matter the spirituality or enlightenment of an age or cycle/season.
My opinion is that the age of materialism is a more recent cycle when science and religion became antagonistic toward one another and religious leaders lost control of science and science began to shun the supernatural as nonexistent or irrelevant somehow to reality.
The fact is materialism is reality. So is spirit. Reality is composed of both spirit and material and the forces and physics of reality do not disprove spirit realities. Whenever the one dominates the other, the world is out of balance and fanatics tend to dominate civilization and social evolution.
It is not spiritual to deny the material or to forsake or abandon material realities and demands. That is the problem and great mistake of the so-called religionists who require and demand that science and knowledge are irrelevant to our spiritual nature and progress. Poppycock! They too seek to impose their will and way upon others, embracing false liberty by telling others what they should or should not be doing and claiming superiority over others. Yech...priests!! Far more dangerous than materialism I think.
https://www.urantia.org/urantia-book/se ... &op=Search
https://www.urantia.org/urantia-book/se ... &op=Search
54:1.2 (613.4) 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 (613.5) 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 (613.6) 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 (613.7) 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 (614.1) 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 (614.2) Even wisdom is divine and safe only when it is cosmic in scope and spiritual in motivation.
54:1.8 (614.3) 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 (614.4) 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.
Me here: Our time unit perspective determines our ability to actually discern change, progress, velocity, trajectory, and destiny. Those who constantly carp and complain about the world today and can see no progress and cannot gain perspective of the very obvious progress, velocity, and trajectory of human evolution are blind. Even many of us UB students who know the destiny to come and know the result of evolutionary progress....still...even those who should know better appear blind to the obvious.
Impatience blinds us mortals to the progressive march of evolution. We are here to short of a time to "see" the changes. Of course, the last few centuries have seen a tremendous acceleration of change. Why people today don't see that is truly baffling to me. Paper 81 is a great primer on social evolutionary progress.
118:1.8 (1295. The time unit of immaturity concentrates meaning-value into the present moment in such a way as to divorce the present of its true relationship to the not-present—the past-future. The time unit of maturity is proportioned so to reveal the co-ordinate relationship of past-present-future that the self begins to gain insight into the wholeness of events, begins to view the landscape of time from the panoramic perspective of broadened horizons, begins perhaps to suspect the nonbeginning, nonending eternal continuum, the fragments of which are called time.
81:5.5 (906.3) 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.
81:6.8 (907.5) 3. Scientific knowledge. The material aspects of civilization must always await the accumulation of scientific data. It was a long time after the discovery of the bow and arrow and the utilization of animals for power purposes before man learned how to harness wind and water, to be followed by the employment of steam and electricity. But slowly the tools of civilization improved. Weaving, pottery, the domestication of animals, and metalworking were followed by an age of writing and printing.
81:6.9 (907.6) Knowledge is power. Invention always precedes the acceleration of cultural development on a world-wide scale. Science and invention benefited most of all from the printing press, and the interaction of all these cultural and inventive activities has enormously accelerated the rate of cultural advancement.
81:6.10 (907.7) Science teaches man to speak the new language of mathematics and trains his thoughts along lines of exacting precision. And science also stabilizes philosophy through the elimination of error, while it purifies religion by the destruction of superstition.
81:6.18 (908.7) Language differences have ever been the great barrier to the extension of peace. The conquest of dialects must precede the spread of a culture throughout a race, over a continent, or to a whole world. A universal language promotes peace, insures culture, and augments happiness. Even when the tongues of a world are reduced to a few, the mastery of these by the leading cultural peoples mightily influences the achievement of world-wide peace and prosperity.
81:6.19 (908. While very little progress has been made on Urantia toward developing an international language, much has been accomplished by the establishment of international commercial exchange. And all these international relations should be fostered, whether they involve language, trade, art, science, competitive play, or religion.
81:6.44 (912.1) This is the gist of the long, long struggle of the peoples of earth to establish civilization since the age of Adam. Present-day culture is the net result of this strenuous evolution. Before the discovery of printing, progress was relatively slow since one generation could not so rapidly benefit from the achievements of its predecessors. But now human society is plunging forward under the force of the accumulated momentum of all the ages through which civilization has struggled.
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of trying to copy from the book manually or from memory, which turns out to be bad practice. From now on, I will only copy/paste. I appreciate that fact that forum members are very concerned about exactness. No sloppiness allowed. We're doing precision work here.
