40:0. Faith and Belief
P1114:5, 101:8.1 Belief has attained the level of faith when it
motivates life and shapes the mode of living. The acceptance of a teaching as
true is not faith; that is mere belief. Neither is certainty nor conviction
faith. A state of mind attains to faith levels only when it actually dominates
the mode of living. Faith is a living attribute of genuine personal religious
experience. One believes truth, admires beauty, and reverences goodness, but
does not worship them; such an attitude of saving faith is centered on God
alone, who is all of these personified and infinitely more.
P1114:6, 101:8.2 Belief is always limiting and binding; faith is
expanding and releasing. Belief fixates, faith liberates. But living religious
faith is more than the association of noble beliefs; it is more than an exalted
system of philosophy; it is a living experience concerned with spiritual
meanings, divine ideals, and supreme values; it is God-knowing and man-serving.
Beliefs may become group possessions, but faith must be personal. Theological
beliefs can be suggested to a group, but faith can rise up only in the heart of
the individual religionist.
P1114:7, 101:8.3 Faith has falsified its trust when it presumes
to deny realities and to confer upon its devotees assumed knowledge. Faith is a
traitor when it fosters betrayal of intellectual integrity and belittles loyalty
to supreme values and divine ideals. Faith never shuns the problem-solving duty
of mortal living. Living faith does not foster bigotry, persecution, or
intolerance.
P1115:1, 101:8.4 Faith does not shackle the creative
imagination, neither does it maintain an unreasoning prejudice toward the
discoveries of scientific investigation. Faith vitalizes religion and constrains
the religionist heroically to live the golden rule. The zeal of faith is
according to knowledge, and its strivings are the preludes to sublime peace.
P1115:2, 101:9.1 No professed revelation of religion could be
regarded as authentic if it failed to recognize the duty demands of ethical
obligation which had been created and fostered by preceding evolutionary
religion. Revelation unfailingly enlarges the ethical horizon of evolved
religion while it simultaneously and unfailingly expands the moral obligations
of all prior revelations.
P1115:3, 101:9.2 When you presume to sit in critical judgment on
the primitive religion of man (or on the religion of primitive man), you should
remember to judge such savages and to evaluate their religious experience in
accordance with their enlightenment and status of conscience. Do not make the
mistake of judging another's religion by your own standards of knowledge and
truth.
P1115:4, 101:9.3 True religion is that sublime and profound
conviction within the soul which compellingly admonishes man that it would be
wrong for him not to believe in those morontial realities which constitute his
highest ethical and moral concepts, his highest interpretation of life's
greatest values and the universe's deepest realities. And such a religion is
simply the experience of yielding intellectual loyalty to the highest dictates
of spiritual consciousness.
P1115:5, 101:9.4 The search for beauty is a part of religion
only in so far as it is ethical and to the extent that it enriches the concept
of the moral. Art is only religious when it becomes diffused with purpose which
has been derived from high spiritual motivation.
P1115:6, 101:9.5 The enlightened spiritual consciousness of
civilized man is not concerned so much with some specific intellectual belief or
with any one particular mode of living as with discovering the truth of living,
the good and right technique of reacting to the ever-recurring situations of
mortal existence. Moral consciousness is just a name applied to the human
recognition and awareness of those ethical and emerging morontial values which
duty demands that man shall abide by in the day-by-day control and guidance of
conduct.
P1115:7, 101:9.6 Though recognizing that religion is imperfect, there are at least two practical manifestations of its nature and function:
P1115:8, 101:9.7 1. The spiritual urge and philosophic pressure of religion tend to cause man to project his estimation of moral values directly outward into the affairs of his fellows -- the ethical reaction of religion.
P1115:9, 101:9.8 2. Religion creates for the human mind a spiritualized consciousness of divine reality based on, and by faith derived from, antecedent concepts of moral values and co-ordinated with superimposed concepts of spiritual values. Religion thereby becomes a censor of mortal affairs, a form of glorified moral trust and confidence in reality, the enhanced realities of time and the more enduring realities of eternity.
P1116:1, 101:9.9 Faith becomes the connection between moral consciousness and the spiritual concept of enduring reality. Religion becomes the avenue of man's escape from the material limitations of the temporal and natural world to the supernal realities of the eternal and spiritual world by and through the technique of salvation, the progressive morontia transformation.
P1116:2, 101:10.1 Intelligent man knows that he is a child of
nature, a part of the material universe; he likewise discerns no survival of
individual personality in the motions and tensions of the mathematical level of
the energy universe. Nor can man ever discern spiritual reality through the
examination of physical causes and effects.
P1116:3, 101:10.2 A human being is also aware that he is a part
of the ideational cosmos, but though concept may endure beyond a mortal life
span, there is nothing inherent in concept which indicates the personal survival
of the conceiving personality. Nor will the exhaustion of the possibilities of
logic and reason ever reveal to the logician or to the reasoner the eternal
truth of the survival of personality.
P1116:4, 101:10.3 The material level of law provides for
causality continuity, the unending response of effect to antecedent action; the
mind level suggests the perpetuation of ideational continuity, the unceasing
flow of conceptual potentiality from pre-existent conceptions. But neither of
these levels of the universe discloses to the inquiring mortal an avenue of
escape from partiality of status and from the intolerable suspense of being a
transient reality in the universe, a temporal personality doomed to be
extinguished upon the exhaustion of the limited life energies.
P1116:5, 101:10.4 It is only through the morontial avenue
leading to spiritual insight that man can ever break the fetters inherent in his
mortal status in the universe. Energy and mind do lead back to Paradise and
Deity, but neither the energy endowment nor the mind endowment of man proceeds
directly from such Paradise Deity. Only in the spiritual sense is man a child of
God. And this is true because it is only in the spiritual sense that man is at
present endowed and indwelt by the Paradise Father. Mankind can never discover
divinity except through the avenue of religious experience and by the exercise
of true faith. The faith acceptance of the truth of God enables man to escape
from the circumscribed confines of material limitations and affords him a
rational hope of achieving safe conduct from the material realm, whereon is
death, to the spiritual realm, wherein is life eternal.
P1116:6, 101:10.5 The purpose of religion is not to satisfy curiosity about God but rather to afford intellectual constancy and philosophic security, to stabilize and enrich human living by blending the mortal with the divine, the partial with the perfect, man and God. It is through religious experience that man's concepts of ideality are endowed with reality.
P1116:7, 101:10.6 Never can there be either scientific or
logical proofs of divinity. Reason alone can never validate the values and
goodness of religious experience. But it will always remain true: Whosoever
wills to do the will of God shall comprehend the validity of spiritual values.
This is the nearest approach that can be made on the mortal level to offering
proofs of the reality of religious experience. Such faith affords the only
escape from the mechanical clutch of the material world and from the error
distortion of the incompleteness of the intellectual world; it is the only
discovered solution to the impasse in mortal thinking regarding the continuing
survival of the individual personality. It is the only passport to completion of
reality and to eternity of life in a universal creation of love, law, unity, and
progressive Deity attainment.
P1117:1, 101:10.7 Religion effectually cures man's sense of
idealistic isolation or spiritual loneliness; it enfranchises the believer as a
child of God, a citizen of a new and meaningful universe. Religion assures man
that, in following the gleam of righteousness discernible in his soul, he is
thereby identifying himself with the plan of the Infinite and the purpose of the
Eternal. Such a liberated soul immediately begins to feel at home in this new
universe, his universe.
P1117:2, 101:10.8 When you experience such a transformation of
faith, you are no longer a slavish part of the mathematical cosmos but rather a
liberated volitional son of the Universal Father. No longer is such a liberated
son fighting alone against the inexorable doom of the termination of temporal
existence; no longer does he combat all nature, with the odds hopelessly against
him; no longer is he staggered by the paralyzing fear that, perchance, he has
put his trust in a hopeless phantasm or pinned his faith to a fanciful error.
P1117:3, 101:10.9 Now, rather, are the children of God enlisted
together in fighting the battle of reality's triumph over the partial shadows of
existence. At last all creatures become conscious of the fact that God and all
the divine hosts of a well-nigh limitless universe are on their side in the
supernal struggle to attain eternity of life and divinity of status. Such
faith-liberated children of God have certainly enlisted in the struggles of time
on the side of the supreme forces and divine personalities of eternity; even the
stars in their courses are now doing battle for them; at last they gaze upon the
universe from within, from God's viewpoint, and all is transformed from the
uncertainties of material isolation to the sureties of eternal spiritual
progression. Even time itself becomes but the shadow of eternity cast by
Paradise realities upon the moving panoply of space.
P1118:4, 102:1.1
The work of the Thought Adjuster constitutes the explanation of the translation
of man's primitive and evolutionary sense of duty into that higher and more
certain faith in the eternal realities of revelation. There must be perfection
hunger in man's heart to insure capacity for comprehending the faith paths to
supreme attainment. If any man chooses to do the divine will, he shall know the
way of truth. It is literally true, "Human things must be known in order to
be loved, but divine things must be loved in order to be known." But honest
doubts and sincere questionings are not sin; such attitudes merely spell delay
in the progressive journey toward perfection attainment. Childlike trust secures
man's entrance into the kingdom of heavenly ascent, but progress is wholly
dependent on the vigorous exercise of the robust and confident faith of the
full-grown man.
P1119:1, 102:1.2
The reason of science is based on the observable facts of time; the faith of
religion argues from the spirit program of eternity. What knowledge and reason
cannot do for us, true wisdom admonishes us to allow faith to accomplish through
religious insight and spiritual transformation.
P1119:2, 102:1.3
Owing to the isolation of rebellion, the revelation of truth on Earth has all
too often been mixed up with the statements of partial and transient
cosmologies. Truth remains unchanged from generation to generation, but the
associated teachings about the physical world vary from day to day and from year
to year. Eternal truth should not be slighted because it chances to be found in
company with obsolete ideas regarding the material world. The more of science
you know, the less sure you can be; the more of religion you have, the
more certain you are.
P1119:3, 102:1.4
The certainties of science proceed entirely from the intellect; the certitudes
of religion spring from the very foundations of the entire personality.
Science appeals to the understanding of the mind; religion appeals to the
loyalty and devotion of the body, mind, and spirit, even to the whole
personality.
P1119:4, 102:1.5 God is so all real and absolute that no material sign of proof or no demonstration of so-called miracle may be offered in testimony of his reality. Always will we know him because we trust him, and our belief in him is wholly based on our personal participation in the divine manifestations of his infinite reality.
P1119:5, 102:1.6 The indwelling Thought Adjuster unfailingly arouses in man's soul a true and searching hunger for perfection together with a far-reaching curiosity which can be adequately satisfied only by communion with God, the divine source of that Adjuster. The hungry soul of man refuses to be satisfied with anything less than the personal realization of the living God. Whatever more God may be than a high and perfect moral personality, he cannot, in our hungry and finite concept, be anything less.
P1119:6, 102:2.1
Observing minds and discriminating souls know religion when they find it in the
lives of their fellows. Religion requires no definition; we all know its social,
intellectual, moral, and spiritual fruits. And this all grows out of the fact
that religion is the property of the human race; it is not a child of culture.
True, one's perception of religion is still human and therefore subject to the
bondage of ignorance, the slavery of superstition, the deceptions of
sophistication, and the delusions of false philosophy.
P1119:7, 102:2.2
One of the characteristic peculiarities of genuine religious assurance is that,
notwithstanding the absoluteness of its affirmations and the staunchness of its
attitude, the spirit of its expression is so poised and tempered that it never
conveys the slightest impression of self-assertion or egoistic exaltation. The
wisdom of religious experience is something of a paradox in that it is both
humanly original and Adjuster derivative. Religious force is not the product of
the individual's personal prerogatives but rather the outworking of that sublime
partnership of man and the everlasting source of all wisdom. Thus do the words
and acts of true and undefiled religion become compellingly authoritative for
all enlightened mortals.
P1119:8, 102:2.3
It is difficult to identify and analyze the factors of a religious experience,
but it is not difficult to observe that such religious practitioners live and
carry on as if already in the presence of the Eternal. Believers react to this
temporal life as if immortality already were within their grasp. In the lives of
such mortals there is a valid originality and a spontaneity of expression that
forever segregate them from those of their fellows who have imbibed only the
wisdom of the world. Religionists seem to live in effective emancipation from
harrying haste and the painful stress of the vicissitudes inherent in the
temporal currents of time; they exhibit a stabilization of personality and a
tranquility of character not explained by the laws of physiology, psychology,
and sociology.
P1120:1, 102:2.4 Time is an invariable element in the attainment
of knowledge; religion makes its endowments immediately available, albeit there
is the important factor of growth in grace, definite advancement in all phases
of religious experience. Knowledge is an eternal quest; always are you learning,
but never are you able to arrive at the full knowledge of absolute truth. In
knowledge alone there can never be absolute certainty, only increasing
probability of approximation; but the religious soul of spiritual illumination knows,
and knows now. And yet this profound and positive certitude does not
lead such a sound-minded religionist to take any less interest in the ups and
downs of the progress of human wisdom, which is bound up on its material end
with the developments of slow-moving science.
P1120:2, 102:2.5 Even the discoveries of science are not truly real
in the consciousness of human experience until they are unraveled and
correlated, until their relevant facts actually become meaning through
encircuitment in the thought streams of mind. Mortal man views even his physical
environment from the mind level, from the perspective of its psychological
registry. It is not, therefore, strange that man should place a highly unified
interpretation upon the universe and then seek to identify this energy unity of
his science with the spirit unity of his religious experience. Mind is unity;
mortal consciousness lives on the mind level and perceives the universal
realities through the eyes of the mind endowment. The mind perspective will not
yield the existential unity of the source of reality, the First Source and
Center, but it can and sometime will portray to man the experiential synthesis
of energy, mind, and spirit in and as the Supreme Being. But mind can never
succeed in this unification of the diversity of reality unless such mind is
firmly aware of material things, intellectual meanings, and spiritual values;
only in the harmony of the functional reality is there unity, and only in unity
is there the personality satisfaction of the realization of cosmic constancy and
consistency.
P1120:3, 102:2.6 Unity is best found in human experience through
philosophy. And while the body of philosophic thought must ever be founded on
material facts, the soul and energy of true philosophic dynamics is mortal
spiritual insight.
P1120:4, 102:2.7 Evolutionary man does not naturally relish hard
work. To keep pace in his life experience with the impelling demands and the
compelling urges of a growing religious experience means incessant activity in
spiritual growth, intellectual expansion, factual enlargement, and social
service. There is no real religion apart from a highly active personality.
Therefore do the more indolent of men often seek to escape the rigors of truly
religious activities by a species of ingenious self-deception through resorting
to a retreat to the false shelter of stereotyped religious doctrines and dogmas.
But true religion is alive. Intellectual crystallization of religious concepts
is the equivalent of spiritual death. You cannot conceive of religion without
ideas, but when religion once becomes reduced only to an idea, it is no
longer religion; it has become merely a species of human philosophy.
P1121:1, 102:2.8 Again, there are other types of unstable and
poorly disciplined souls who would use the sentimental ideas of religion as an
avenue of escape from the irritating demands of living. When certain vacillating
and timid mortals attempt to escape from the incessant pressure of evolutionary
life, religion, as they conceive it, seems to present the nearest refuge, the
best avenue of escape. But it is the mission of religion to prepare man for
bravely, even heroically, facing the vicissitudes of life. Religion is
evolutionary man's supreme endowment, the one thing which enables him to carry
on and "endure as seeing Him who is invisible." Mysticism, however, is
often something of a retreat from life which is embraced by those humans who do
not relish the more robust activities of living a religious life in the open
arenas of human society and commerce. True religion must act. Conduct
will be the result of religion when man actually has it, or rather when religion
is permitted truly to possess the man. Never will religion be content with mere
thinking or un-acting feeling.
P1121:2, 102:2.9 We are not blind to the fact that religion
often acts unwisely, even irreligiously, but it acts. Aberrations of
religious conviction have led to bloody persecutions, but always and ever
religion does something; it is dynamic!
P1121:3, 102:3.1
Intellectual deficiency or educational poverty unavoidably handicaps higher
religious attainment because such an impoverished environment of the spiritual
nature robs religion of its chief channel of philosophic contact with the world
of scientific knowledge. The intellectual factors of religion are important, but
their overdevelopment is likewise sometimes very handicapping and embarrassing.
Religion must continually labor under a paradoxical necessity: the necessity of
making effective use of thought while at the same time discounting the spiritual
serviceableness of all thinking.
P1121:4, 102:3.2
Religious speculation is inevitable but always detrimental; speculation
invariably falsifies its object. Speculation tends to translate religion into
something material or humanistic, and thus, while directly interfering with the
clarity of logical thought, it indirectly causes religion to appear as a
function of the temporal world, the very world with which it should
everlastingly stand in contrast. Therefore will religion always be characterized
by paradoxes, the paradoxes resulting from the absence of the experiential
connection between the material and the spiritual levels of the universe --
morontia mota, the super-philosophic sensitivity for truth discernment and unity
perception.
P1121:5, 102:3.3
Material feelings, human emotions, lead directly to material actions, selfish
acts. Religious insights, spiritual motivations, lead directly to religious
actions, unselfish acts of social service and altruistic benevolence.
P1121:6, 102:3.4
Religious desire is the hunger quest for divine reality. Religious experience is
the realization of the consciousness of having found God. And when a human being
does find God, there is experienced within the soul of that being such an
indescribable restlessness of triumph in discovery that he is impelled to seek
loving service-contact with his less illuminated fellows, not to disclose that
he has found God, but rather to allow the overflow of the welling-up of eternal
goodness within his own soul to refresh and ennoble his fellows. Real religion
leads to increased social service.
P1122:1, 102:3.5 Science, knowledge, leads to fact consciousness; religion, experience, leads to value consciousness; philosophy, wisdom, leads to co-ordinate consciousness; revelation (the substitute for morontia mota) leads to the consciousness of true reality; while the co-ordination of the consciousness of fact, value, and true reality constitutes awareness of personality reality, maximum of being, together with the belief in the possibility of the survival of that very personality.
P1122:2, 102:3.6 Knowledge leads to placing men, to originating
social strata and castes. Religion leads to serving men, thus creating ethics
and altruism. Wisdom leads to the higher and better fellowship of both ideas and
one's fellows. Revelation liberates men and starts them out on the eternal
adventure.
P1122:3, 102:3.7 Science sorts men; religion loves men, even as
yourself; wisdom does justice to differing men; but revelation glorifies man and
discloses his capacity for partnership with God.
P1122:4, 102:3.8 Science vainly strives to create the
brotherhood of culture; religion brings into being the brotherhood of the
spirit. Philosophy strives for the brotherhood of wisdom; revelation portrays
the eternal brotherhood.
P1122:5, 102:3.9 Knowledge yields pride in the fact of
personality; wisdom is the consciousness of the meaning of personality; religion
is the experience of cognizance of the value of personality; revelation is the
assurance of personality survival.
P1122:6, 102:3.10 Science seeks to identify, analyze, and classify the segmented parts of the limitless cosmos. Religion grasps the idea-of-the-whole, the entire cosmos. Philosophy attempts the identification of the material segments of science with the spiritual-insight concept of the whole. Wherein philosophy fails in this attempt, revelation succeeds, affirming that the cosmic circle is universal, eternal, absolute, and infinite. This cosmos of the Infinite I AM is therefore endless, limitless, and all-inclusive -- timeless, spaceless, and unqualified.
P1122:7, 102:3.11 Philosophy presents the idea of an
Absolute; religion envisions God as a loving spiritual personality.
Revelation affirms the unity of the fact of Deity, the idea of the
Absolute, and the spiritual personality of God and, further, presents this
concept as our Father -- the universal fact of existence, the eternal idea of
mind, and the infinite spirit of life.
P1122:8, 102:3.12 The pursuit of knowledge constitutes science;
the search for wisdom is philosophy; the love for God is religion; the hunger
for truth is a revelation. But it is the indwelling Thought Adjuster that
attaches the feeling of reality to man's spiritual insight into the cosmos.
P1122:9, 102:3.13 In science, the idea precedes the expression
of its realization; in religion, the experience of realization precedes the
expression of the idea. There is a vast difference between the evolutionary
will-to-believe and the product of enlightened reason, religious insight, and
revelation -- the will that believes.
P1122:10, 102:3.14 In evolution, religion often leads to man's
creating his concepts of God; revelation exhibits the phenomenon of God's
evolving man himself. Evolution tends to make God manlike; revelation tends to
make man Godlike.
P1122:11, 102:3.15 Science is only satisfied with first causes,
religion with supreme personality, and philosophy with unity. Revelation affirms
that all are good. The eternal real is the good of the universe and not
the time illusions of space evil. In the spiritual experience of all
personalities, always is it true that the real is the good and the good is the
real.
P1123:1, 102:4.1
Because of the presence in your minds of the Thought Adjuster, it is no more of
a mystery for you to know the mind of God than for you to be sure of the
consciousness of knowing any other mind, human or superhuman. Religion and
social consciousness have this in common: They are predicated on the
consciousness of other-mindness. The technique whereby you can accept another's
idea as yours is the same whereby you may "let the mind which was in Jesus
be also in you."
P1123:2, 102:4.2
What is human experience? It is simply any interplay between an active and
questioning self and any other active and external reality. The mass of
experience is determined by depth of concept plus totality of recognition of the
reality of the external. The motion of experience equals the force of expectant
imagination plus the keenness of the sensory discovery of the external qualities
of contacted reality. The fact of experience is found in self-consciousness plus
other-existences -- other- thingness, other-mindness, and other- spiritness.
P1123:3, 102:4.3
Man very early becomes conscious that he is not alone in the world or the
universe. There develops a natural spontaneous self-consciousness of
other-mindness in the environment of selfhood. Faith translates this natural
experience into religion, the recognition of God as the reality -- source,
nature, and destiny -- of other-mindness. But such a knowledge of God is
ever and always a reality of personal experience. If God were not a personality,
he could not become a living part of the real religious experience of a human
personality.
P1123:4, 102:4.4
The element of error present in human religious experience is directly
proportional to the content of materialism which contaminates the spiritual
concept of the Universal Father. Man's pre-spirit progression in the universe
consists in the experience of divesting himself of these erroneous ideas of the
nature of God and of the reality of pure and true spirit. Deity is more than
spirit, but the spiritual approach is the only one possible to ascending man’s
soul.
P1123:5, 102:4.5 Prayer is indeed a part of religious experience, but it has been wrongly emphasized by modern religions, much to the neglect of the more essential communion of worship. The reflective powers of the mind are deepened and broadened by worship. Prayer may enrich the life, but worship illuminates destiny.
P1123:6, 102:4.6 Revealed religion is the unifying element of human existence. Revelation unifies history, co-ordinates geology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and psychology. Spiritual experience is the real soul of man's cosmos.
P1124:3, 102:6.1
The philosophic elimination of religious fear and the steady progress of science
add greatly to the mortality of false gods; and even though these casualties of
man-made deities may momentarily befog the spiritual vision, they eventually
destroy that ignorance and superstition which so long obscured the living God of
eternal love. The relation between the creature and the Creator is a living
experience, a dynamic religious faith, which is not subject to precise
definition. To isolate part of life and call it religion is to disintegrate life
and to distort religion. And this is just why the God of worship claims all
allegiance or none.
P1124:4, 102:6.2
The gods of primitive men may have been no more than shadows of themselves; the
living God is the divine light whose interruptions constitute the creation
shadows of all space.
P1124:5, 102:6.3 The religionist of philosophic attainment has
faith in a personal God of personal salvation, something more than a reality, a
value, a level of achievement, an exalted process, a transmutation, the ultimate
of time-space, an idealization, the personalization of energy, the entity of
gravity, a human projection, the idealization of self, nature's upthrust, the
inclination to goodness, the forward impulse of evolution, or a sublime
hypothesis. The religionist has faith in a God of love. Love is the essence of
religion and the wellspring of superior civilization.
P1124:6, 102:6.4 Faith transforms the philosophic God of
probability into the saving God of certainty in the personal religious
experience. Skepticism may challenge the theories of theology, but confidence in
the dependability of personal experience affirms the truth of that belief which
has grown into faith.
P1124:7, 102:6.5 Convictions about God may be arrived at through
wise reasoning, but the individual becomes God-knowing only by faith, through
personal experience. In much that pertains to life, probability must be reckoned
with, but when contacting with cosmic reality, certainty may be experienced when
such meanings and values are approached by living faith. The God-knowing soul
dares to say, "I know," even when this knowledge of God is questioned
by the unbeliever who denies such certitude because it is not wholly supported
by intellectual logic. To every such doubter the believer only replies,
"How do you know that I do not know?"
P1125:1, 102:6.6 Though reason can always question faith, faith
can always supplement both reason and logic. Reason creates the probability
which faith can transform into a moral certainty, even a spiritual experience.
God is the first truth and the last fact; therefore does all truth take origin
in him, while all facts exist relative to him. God is absolute truth. As truth
one may know God, but to understand -- to explain -- God, one must explore the
fact of the universe of universes. The vast gulf between the experience of the
truth of God and ignorance as to the fact of God can be bridged only by living
faith. Reason alone cannot achieve harmony between infinite truth and universal
fact.
P1125:2, 102:6.7 Belief may not be able to resist doubt and
withstand fear, but faith is always triumphant over doubting, for faith is both
positive and living. The positive always has the advantage over the negative,
truth over error, experience over theory, spiritual realities over the isolated
facts of time and space. The convincing evidence of this spiritual certainty
consists in the social fruits of the spirit which such believers, faithers,
yield as a result of this genuine spiritual experience. Said Jesus: "If you
love your fellows as I have loved you, then shall all men know that you are my
disciples."
P1125:3, 102:6.8 To science God is a possibility, to psychology
a desirability, to philosophy a probability, to religion a certainty, an
actuality of religious experience. Reason demands that a philosophy which cannot
find the God of probability should be very respectful of that religious faith
which can and does find the God of certitude. Neither should science discount
religious experience on grounds of credulity, not so long as it persists in the
assumption that man's intellectual and philosophic endowments emerged from
increasingly lesser intelligences the further back they go, finally taking
origin in primitive life which was utterly devoid of all thinking and feeling.
P1125:4, 102:6.9 The facts of evolution must not be arrayed
against the truth of the reality of the certainty of the spiritual experience of
the religious living of the God-knowing mortal. Intelligent men should cease to
reason like children and should attempt to use the consistent logic of
adulthood, logic which tolerates the concept of truth alongside the observation
of fact. Scientific materialism has gone bankrupt when it persists, in the face
of each recurring universe phenomenon, in refunding its current objections by
referring what is admittedly higher back into that which is admittedly lower.
Consistency demands the recognition of the activities of a purposive Creator.
P1125:5, 102:6.10 Organic evolution is a fact; purposive or
progressive evolution is a truth which makes consistent the otherwise
contradictory phenomena of the ever-ascending achievements of evolution. The
higher any scientist progresses in his chosen science, the more will he abandon
the theories of materialistic fact in favor of the cosmic truth of the dominance
of the Supreme Mind. Materialism cheapens human life; the gospel of Jesus
tremendously enhances and supernally exalts every mortal. Mortal existence must
be visualized as consisting in the intriguing and fascinating experience of the
realization of the reality of the meeting of the human upreach and the divine
and saving downreach.
P1126:1, 102:7.1
The Universal Father, being self-existent, is also self-explanatory; he actually
lives in every rational mortal. But you cannot be sure about God unless you know
him; being a child of God is the only experience which makes fatherhood certain.
The universe is everywhere undergoing change. A changing universe is a dependent
universe; such a creation cannot be either final or absolute. A finite universe
is wholly dependent on the Ultimate and the Absolute. The universe and God are
not identical; one is cause, the other effect. The cause is absolute, infinite,
eternal, and changeless; the effect, time-space and transcendental but ever
changing, always growing.
P1126:2, 102:7.2
God is the one and only self-caused fact in the universe. He is the secret of
the order, plan, and purpose of the whole creation of things and beings. The
everywhere-changing universe is regulated and stabilized by absolutely
unchanging laws, the habits of an unchanging God. The fact of God, the divine
law, is changeless; the truth of God, his relation to the universe, is a
relative revelation which is ever adaptable to the constantly evolving universe.
P1126:3, 102:7.3 Those who would invent a religion without God
are like those who would gather fruit without trees, have children without
parents. You cannot have effects without causes; only the I AM is causeless. The
fact of religious experience implies God, and such a God of personal experience
must be a personal Deity. You cannot pray to a chemical formula, supplicate a
mathematical equation, worship a hypothesis, confide in a postulate, commune
with a process, serve an abstraction, or hold loving fellowship with a law.
P1126:4, 102:7.4 True, many apparently religious traits can grow
out of nonreligious roots. Man can, intellectually, deny God and yet be morally
good, loyal, filial, honest, and even idealistic. Man may graft many purely
humanistic branches onto his basic spiritual nature and thus apparently prove
his contentions in behalf of a godless religion, but such an experience is
devoid of survival values, God-knowingness and God-ascension. In such a mortal
experience only social fruits are forthcoming, not spiritual. The graft
determines the nature of the fruit, notwithstanding that the living sustenance
is drawn from the roots of original divine endowment of both mind and spirit.
P1126:5, 102:7.5 The intellectual earmark of religion is
certainty; the philosophical characteristic is consistency; the social fruits
are love and service.
P1126:6, 102:7.6 The God-knowing individual is not one who is blind to the difficulties or unmindful of the obstacles which stand in the way of finding God in the maze of superstition, tradition, and materialistic tendencies of modern times. He has encountered all these deterrents and triumphed over them, surmounted them by living faith, and attained the highlands of spiritual experience in spite of them. But it is true that many who are inwardly sure about God fear to assert such feelings of certainty because of the multiplicity and cleverness of those who assemble objections and magnify difficulties about believing in God. It requires no great depth of intellect to pick flaws, ask questions, or raise objections. But it does require brilliance of mind to answer these questions and solve these difficulties; faith certainty is the greatest technique for dealing with all such superficial contentions.
P1127:1, 102:7.7 If science, philosophy, or sociology dares to
become dogmatic in contending with the prophets of true religion, then should
God-knowing men reply to such unwarranted dogmatism with that more farseeing
dogmatism of the certainty of personal spiritual experience, "I know what I
have experienced because I am a child of I AM." If the personal experience
of a believer is to be challenged by dogma, then this faith-born child of the
experiencible Father may reply with that unchallengeable dogma, the statement of
his actual bond with the Universal Father.
P1127:2, 102:7.8 Only an unqualified reality, an absolute, could
dare consistently to be dogmatic. Those who assume to be dogmatic must, if
consistent, sooner or later be driven into the arms of the Absolute of energy,
the Universal of truth, and the Infinite of love.
P1127:3, 102:7.9 If the nonreligious approaches to cosmic
reality presume to challenge the certainty of faith on the grounds of its
unproved status, then the spirit experiencer can likewise resort to the dogmatic
challenge of the facts of science and the beliefs of philosophy on the grounds
that they are likewise unproved; they are likewise experiences in the
consciousness of the scientist or the philosopher.
P1127:4, 102:7.10 Of God, the most inescapable of all presences, the most real of all facts, the most living of all truths, the most loving of all friends, and the most divine of all values, we have the right to be the most certain of all universe experiences.
P1127:5, 102:8.1
The highest evidence of the reality and efficacy of religion consists in the fact
of human experience; namely, that man, naturally fearful and suspicious,
innately endowed with a strong instinct of self-preservation and craving
survival after death, is willing fully to trust the deepest interests of his
present and future to the keeping and direction of that power and person
designated by his faith as God. That is the one central truth of all religion.
As to what that power or person requires of man in return for this watchcare and
final salvation, no two religions agree; in fact, they all more or less
disagree.
P1127:6, 102:8.2
Regarding the status of any religion in the evolutionary scale, it may best be
judged by its moral judgments and its ethical standards. The higher the type of
any religion, the more it encourages and is encouraged by a constantly improving
social morality and ethical culture. We cannot judge religion by the status of
its accompanying civilization; we had better estimate the real nature of a
civilization by the purity and nobility of its religion. Many of the world's
most notable religious teachers have been virtually unlettered. The wisdom of
the world is not necessary to an exercise of saving faith in eternal realities.
P1127:7, 102:8.3
The difference in the religions of various ages is wholly dependent on the
difference in man's comprehension of reality and on his differing recognition of
moral values, ethical relationships, and spirit realities.