Individually, I believe evolutionary religion tends to become secondary to the emergence of revelatory religion. Once the Adjuster is endowed within mind and in ministry to mind, then personal revelation by the Adjuster and by the Son's Spirit of Truth begins a more direct and personalized communication of truth and truth assurance which is also an evolutionary and progressive step beyond the faith experience of evolutionary religion as facilitated by the higher adjutants and the Holy Spirit - these are progressive layers of religious experience.
But on a planetary basis, this additional form of religious experience by personal revelation is still a element of "evolutionary religion". All personal religious experience contributes to the evolution of planetary progress and the evolved religions of humanity which tend toward organization, doctrines, creeds, community/congregational beliefs and practices. And this is one of the primary topics of this subject and examination - how religion progresses socially through the mortal epochs of time and the profound effects on culture and planetary progress that socialized, evolutionary religion has on our progress as a whole population. This form of evolutionary religion includes personal revelation AND epochal revelation - the entirety of all Spirit ministries to deliver religious experience in the individual acts also to effect the religious experience of the entire population through the Mortal Epochs. Religion evolves socially. During this evolutionary process, human religions and their development deliver profound influences and effects on the socialization of human beings. This is not accidental or haphazard or without intentional results.
Secular culture and science can only progress as much as and as fast as evolutionary religion allows. Interestingly, I believe that progressive secular culture and science likewise only allows evolutionary religion a limited range of progress. These associated limits are not so functional in individuals I do not think as they are in the shared, social experience of planetary progress. The smaller the group or numbers of people considered, the more the cultural or scientific or religious experience may outpace and outdistance one from the other...but as a whole, these three aspects of progress stay more bundled and bunched up than in any individual experience.
This allows for individual believers to religiously transcend their own or their cultural and social limitations of secular or scientific progress. Our individual religious experience is not limited by our intelligence or technology or social standing or cultural progressiveness...and neither is it necessarily enhanced, individually, by planetary secular/scientific progress. Individually, we can attain all the fruits of the Spirit and eternal bliss and peace of mind and faith/truth assurance and sufficient Spiritual progress to actually fuse, even on a world where such a thing is rare or unusual. Or the full range of first circlers to seventh circlers co-exist with the same secular and scientific realities or someone with a very advanced secular/scientific life is very retarded spiritually while someone who lives a primitive existence related to culture and science can become very spiritized.
But as a world, the culture and science and religious progress are more intertwined and each helps define and limit the progress potential of the others I think. Papers 68-92 tell the story of how these 3 causes AND the integrated effects of these causes have delivered our own world from the trees to the caves to the huts to the towns to the cities to the globalizing of culture of our own history...from first words to world wide digital instant communication and stone tools to laser robotics, evolutionary religion has driven humanity forward in our quest to know, understand, explain, create, manipulate, improve, transform, and transcend all prior limits and limitations of our science and culture. It is our connection to the Spirit within that delivers the future....personally and collectively....and connects us to reality and to potential and to source and to destiny. There is no life, no life at all, without religious experience and the connection we have to Spirit. Religious realities deliver all other realities and all meanings and all value. Religious experience is the key that unlocks the truth of the universe and the only reality that delivers happiness and validates our very existence....or so I think!!
3. The Nature of Evolutionary Religion
92:3.1 (1005.3) The study of human religion is the examination of the fossil-bearing social strata of past ages. The mores of the anthropomorphic gods are a truthful reflection of the morals of the men who first conceived such deities. Ancient religions and mythology faithfully portray the beliefs and traditions of peoples long since lost in obscurity. These olden cult practices persist alongside newer economic customs and social evolutions and, of course, appear grossly inconsistent. The remnants of the cult present a true picture of the racial religions of the past. Always remember, the cults are formed, not to discover truth, but rather to promulgate their creeds.
92:3.2 (1005.4) Religion has always been largely a matter of rites, rituals, observances, ceremonies, and dogmas. It has usually become tainted with that persistently mischief-making error, the chosen-people delusion. The cardinal religious ideas of incantation, inspiration, revelation, propitiation, repentance, atonement, intercession, sacrifice, prayer, confession, worship, survival after death, sacrament, ritual, ransom, salvation, redemption, covenant, uncleanness, purification, prophecy, original sin—they all go back to the early times of primordial ghost fear.
92:3.3 (1005.5) Primitive religion is nothing more nor less than the struggle for material existence extended to embrace existence beyond the grave. The observances of such a creed represented the extension of the self-maintenance struggle into the domain of an imagined ghost-spirit world. But when tempted to criticize evolutionary religion, be careful. Remember, that is what happened; it is a historical fact. And further recall that the power of any idea lies, not in its certainty or truth, but rather in the vividness of its human appeal.
92:3.4 (1006.1) Evolutionary religion makes no provision for change or revision; unlike science, it does not provide for its own progressive correction. Evolved religion commands respect because its followers believe it is The Truth; “the faith once delivered to the saints” must, in theory, be both final and infallible. The cult resists development because real progress is certain to modify or destroy the cult itself; therefore must revision always be forced upon it.
92:3.5 (1006.2) Only two influences can modify and uplift the dogmas of natural religion: the pressure of the slowly advancing mores and the periodic illumination of epochal revelation. And it is not strange that progress was slow; in ancient days, to be progressive or inventive meant to be killed as a sorcerer. The cult advances slowly in generation epochs and agelong cycles. But it does move forward. Evolutionary belief in ghosts laid the foundation for a philosophy of revealed religion which will eventually destroy the superstition of its origin.
92:3.6 (1006.3) Religion has handicapped social development in many ways, but without religion there would have been no enduring morality nor ethics, no worth-while civilization. Religion enmothered much nonreligious culture: Sculpture originated in idol making, architecture in temple building, poetry in incantations, music in worship chants, drama in the acting for spirit guidance, and dancing in the seasonal worship festivals.
92:3.7 (1006.4) But while calling attention to the fact that religion was essential to the development and preservation of civilization, it should be recorded that natural religion has also done much to cripple and handicap the very civilization which it otherwise fostered and maintained. Religion has hampered industrial activities and economic development; it has been wasteful of labor and has squandered capital; it has not always been helpful to the family; it has not adequately fostered peace and good will; it has sometimes neglected education and retarded science; it has unduly impoverished life for the pretended enrichment of death. Evolutionary religion, human religion, has indeed been guilty of all these and many more mistakes, errors, and blunders; nevertheless, it did maintain cultural ethics, civilized morality, and social coherence, and made it possible for later revealed religion to compensate for these many evolutionary shortcomings.
92:3.8 (1006.5) Evolutionary religion has been man’s most expensive but incomparably effective institution. Human religion can be justified only in the light of evolutionary civilization. If man were not the ascendant product of animal evolution, then would such a course of religious development stand without justification.
92:3.9 (1006.6) Religion facilitated the accumulation of capital; it fostered work of certain kinds; the leisure of the priests promoted art and knowledge; the race, in the end, gained much as a result of all these early errors in ethical technique. The shamans, honest and dishonest, were terribly expensive, but they were worth all they cost. The learned professions and science itself emerged from the parasitical priesthoods. Religion fostered civilization and provided societal continuity; it has been the moral police force of all time. Religion provided that human discipline and self-control which made wisdom possible. Religion is the efficient scourge of evolution which ruthlessly drives indolent and suffering humanity from its natural state of intellectual inertia forward and upward to the higher levels of reason and wisdom.
92:3.10 (1006.7) And this sacred heritage of animal ascent, evolutionary religion, must ever continue to be refined and ennobled by the continuous censorship of revealed religion and by the fiery furnace of genuine science.
4. The Gift of Revelation
92:4.1 (1007.1) Revelation is evolutionary but always progressive. Down through the ages of a world’s history, the revelations of religion are ever-expanding and successively more enlightening. It is the mission of revelation to sort and censor the successive religions of evolution. But if revelation is to exalt and upstep the religions of evolution, then must such divine visitations portray teachings which are not too far removed from the thought and reactions of the age in which they are presented. Thus must and does revelation always keep in touch with evolution. Always must the religion of revelation be limited by man’s capacity of receptivity.
92:4.2 (1007.2) But regardless of apparent connection or derivation, the religions of revelation are always characterized by a belief in some Deity of final value and in some concept of the survival of personality identity after death.
92:4.3 (1007.3) Evolutionary religion is sentimental, not logical. It is man’s reaction to belief in a hypothetical ghost-spirit world—the human belief-reflex, excited by the realization and fear of the unknown. Revelatory religion is propounded by the real spiritual world; it is the response of the superintellectual cosmos to the mortal hunger to believe in, and depend upon, the universal Deities. Evolutionary religion pictures the circuitous gropings of humanity in quest of truth; revelatory religion is that very truth.
Me here: Remember - The Gift of Revelation came with the first people on our world in the same generation as the forces of Evolutionary Religion. We must be cautious when attempting to extricate their influences from the planetary progress through the Mortal Epochs of Time.
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