What is Assurance?

I am reminded of an old saying (Twain I think but don't quote me...hahaha):

"Just because a fool says the earth is round don't make it flat!"

Despite the irrational manner in which the topic was raised, the issue of social assurance is interesting. It is unfortunate SEla did not see fit simply to ask about the UB's voluminous and exhaustive contents about social assurance but let's just assume such a question has been posed shall we?

I have often claimed that one of the favorite things about the UB to me is its endless assurances and reassurances regarding God's friendly universe and our relationship to God and our destiny. All of these are certainly related and connected directly to each other. How can we enjoy total personal assurance in a material world which appears chaotic and filled with so many forms of temporal risks and suffering? A very relevant question and one which the UB offers us much to consider!

The first related question might be why do people suffer? Why does God allow suffering? We certainly know, here at TB, that God does not cause suffering...but certainly does God allow it. And then we might ask if there is a meaning, value, and purpose to suffering? The UB is clear and redundant that free will, immaturity, evolution, and self importance are all causes of suffering...causes which God will not interfere with except for certain time, proximity, and radial effect-limits on the repercussions of such errors, evils, and sins. And in an evolutionary universe where experiential wisdom is the prize, then certainly is there value and purpose to suffering. The hammer and anvil shape and form and transform the parts into the perfecting causes of Divine effects in the universes of time and space and with the Deity of the Supreme as well! In fact, we are told the greatest affliction we can suffer is no afflictions at all!! Consider that fact and truth.

Over 40 pages of historical quotes here on TB about suffering, including entire topics and discussions:

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But remember this is all about evolutionary progress, both personal and social...or planetary. The UB says that as go the parts so goes the whole! Our planet's progress depends on the work of the Most Highs and angels and Midwayers but also on the spiritualization of each person on the planet. But people are here for such a short time. How does a world progress? Such as over the past 1 million years? And the next million years? It's all in the Urantia Papers!! Interested?

Start by reading Paper 52 - Planetary Mortal Epochs. Every planet, once considered populated by mortals and declared as such, has an inevitable destiny!! Fearmongering doubters and paranoids obviously have not read or do not believe the reality presented in this one Paper or the entirity of the UB. For the detailed history of our own world which admittedly does have a very unique evolutionary path, please read Papers 63-93 for the record of our own progress from savagery and barbarity to today's environment of semi-savagery and semi-barbarity!! Naturally, in some parts of the world different elements and examples of greater enlightenment can be found...the beacons or flickering lights of progress still to come for the rest of us. As the world progresses, the whole does contribute to the progress of the each as well.

And certain profoundly influential and differential and timely influences are brought to bear upon a world...such as the bestowal of the Sons of God who deliver the Spirit of Truth and unleash the flood of God Fragments upon a world as occured here some 2000 years ago! But there are many such Divine and Deity sourced influences upon this and all worlds to assure the inevitability of attaining Light and Life per Paper 52's teachings.

One of the more fascinating teachings about the social-perspective in the UB is that the enlightened, informed, and spiritual mind begins to see the world and today and every relationship and decision with a new time unit lens of perspective. Actually the more spiritized the mind the more the world changes in our perspective of it. It's like one of those visual psyche tests that may be shown to hold two oppositional pictures to different eyes and minds of perception. The world does not change materially but our view of the world SHOULD evolve and change and become more positive and forgiving and hopeful and trusting and ASSURED as to its OBVIOUS evolutionary progress and its trajectory and its vector or target.

118:1.3 (1295.3) There is a direct relationship between maturity and the unit of time consciousness in any given intellect. The time unit may be a day, a year, or a longer period, but inevitably it is the criterion by which the conscious self evaluates the circumstances of life, and by which the conceiving intellect measures and evaluates the facts of temporal existence.

118:1.4 (1295.4) Experience, wisdom, and judgment are the concomitants of the lengthening of the time unit in mortal experience. As the human mind reckons backward into the past, it is evaluating past experience for the purpose of bringing it to bear on a present situation. As mind reaches out into the future, it is attempting to evaluate the future significance of possible action. And having thus reckoned with both experience and wisdom, the human will exercises judgment-decision in the present, and the plan of action thus born of the past and the future becomes existent.

118:1.5 (1295.5) In the maturity of the developing self, the past and future are brought together to illuminate the true meaning of the present. As the self matures, it reaches further and further back into the past for experience, while its wisdom forecasts seek to penetrate deeper and deeper into the unknown future. And as the conceiving self extends this reach ever further into both past and future, so does judgment become less and less dependent on the momentary present. In this way does decision-action begin to escape from the fetters of the moving present, while it begins to take on the aspects of past-future significance.

118:1.6 (1295.6) Patience is exercised by those mortals whose time units are short; true maturity transcends patience by a forbearance born of real understanding.

118:1.7 (1295.7) To become mature is to live more intensely in the present, at the same time escaping from the limitations of the present. The plans of maturity, founded on past experience, are coming into being in the present in such manner as to enhance the values of the future.

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.

Those who are ruled by doom and gloom and anxiety and doubt and parnoia are spirituallly immature and suffer from blindness and ignorance and prejudice (those last two being the primary obstacles to spiritual progress by the way).

So social assurance comes only by trust in God and by personal spiritual assurance delivered by faith and truth. The one follows the other. To trust God is not naive. To have confidence in God's purpose, plan, and power is not naive either. To embrace anxiety and be determined to share it with others endlessly is pure madness and selfishness. Most unfortunate to have it exhibited here so frequently by some. May the doubters and fearmongers find God within and grow in assurance!!

FEAR NOT !!

:biggrin:

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