I dislike writing autobiography and only do so when completely necessary.
I've spent the last 10 months trying to codify a philosophy I've been working on my entire life. When other kids wanted to play, I just wanted to think. I'm only 26 years old, and I've spent every spare scrap of mental energy I've had for the past 21 years on the problem of integrating disparate belief systems to mitigate what I see as unnecessary conflict, i.e. seeing conflicts where they don't really exist, i.e. what caused my parents divorce, which is what has shaped my whole life.
This was MY work - MY philosophy problem - and I was going to be the one to solve it.
But the Urantia Book beat me to the punch by about 81 years.
So you find something that encompasses the philosophy that's been growing inside of you. Do you get angry that you can't publish your philosophy anymore, because it pales in comparison? Or do you get happy that what you've been shooting for your entire life has already been written down in a strange book of dubious origins. If I believe the book, I'm just believing in the first thing that best fits my philosophy which I already believe, and it's just self-verification. If I don't believe the book, I'm denying the most stunning and gripping revelation of divine philosophy I've ever seen, and also negating my own philosophy which is largely copacetic with the book's philosophy.
Philosophy has always been my passion, and all the best integrations I could come up with in a lifetime could hardly begin to approach what we find in just a few pages of The Urantia Book. The concepts of deity in The Urantia Book do what I thought was impossible, they offer an explanation of God which is philosophically satisfying without reducing him in power or scope. My favorite papers of the book are the Foreword, which is a philosophical masterpiece, and the papers on the child, adolescent, and young-adult life of Jesus.
I feel like the only natural next step for me is to embrace the supernal truths I find within the book and try to build my philosophy off of that. The only problem is that I have a dream of being a published philosopher and I have no idea how my endorsement or non-endorsement of The Urantia Book will affect my ability to be published. The only thing I know left to do is criticize it until I can support my belief in it so well that I can publish work on it and not have to deal with hundreds of gnats with gnatty questions.
I've spent a lot of my recent years trying to mash Biblical truths into postmodern philosophical jargon to make it sensible to secular minds. Much to my surprise, it's not actually hard at all to get someone to accept the basic concepts of Christianity (not the dogma, but the principles of love and service.) In fact many avid "non-Christians" still embrace the core of Christian truth, as far as morality and society, they just have separated from institutionalized churches. This experiential evidence of mine corroborates with the claims of many over the past century that humankind is preparing to enter a new epoch. If they weren't preparing to enter a new epoch, I don't think they would still be open to all the old Christian values (love, peace, charity, etc.) but on the contrary they are, in fact many people are more open to these values than many churchgoers.
In summary, if I start to philosophize from the Urantia Book there's a whole different set of consequences than if I was just writing my own philosophy for publication. For this reason I return here, because I never intended to use a mysterious book as my source text, but it seems that's inevitably what must happen. No matter what I pursue in life, careers, books, hobbies, friends, my inner drive always pushes me harder and harder to keep philosophizing, to keep looking for a solution to everything, every waking hour of my life. This is how it's always been for me.
But I will never be able to get the supernal concepts from the Urantia Book out of my head. It has permanently made its mark on any future philosophizing. If my philosophical ideas are cows, they'll all be indelibly branded with three concentric circles. I'm constrained and attached to this epochal revelation whether I like it or not, so the least I can do is criticize it like someone who's not attached to it, and pretend I have some semblance of freedom left.
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