True God's Religion

True God's Religion

99:4.3 (1089.11)True religion is a meaningful way of living dynamically face to face with the ordinary realities of everyday life. But if religion is to stimulate the development of individual character and promote the integration of personality, it must not be standardized. If it is to stimulate the evaluation of experience, and serve to make truths appealing, it must not be stereotyped. If religion is to promote supreme loyalties, it should not be formalized.

99:4.4 (1089.12)Whatever upheavals may accompany the social and economic growth of civilization, religion is real and useful if it cultivates in the individual man the experience in which the sovereignty of truth, beauty and goodness prevails, for this is the true spiritual understanding of the supreme reality. And through love and worship of God this acquires meaning as friendship with men and sonship with God.

99:4.5 (1090.1)After all, it is more by what a person believes, than by what a person knows, that his behavior is determined and his personal achievements are controlled. Purely factual knowledge has very little influence on the average person unless that knowledge is emotionally activated. But the activation emanating from religion is supra-emotional, unifying the entire human experience at transcendental levels by contacting, and releasing, spiritual energies into the mortal's life.

99:4.6 (1090.2)In the twentieth century with its psychological uncertainty, in the economic upheavals, moral crosscurrents and sociological torrents of the transitions in a scientific epoch that come upon man like whirlwinds, many thousands of men and women have become humanly disrupted; they are anxious, restless, fearful, uncertain and confused; as never before in world history they need the consolation and stabilization that healthy religion provides. In the face of unparalleled achievements in science and technical development, there is spiritual stagnation and philosophical chaos.

99:4.7 (1090.3)When religion becomes more and more a private matter - a personal experience - there is no danger in this, provided it does not lose its motivation for selfless, loving social service. Religion has suffered from many secondary influences: the sudden mixing of cultures, the intermingling of faiths, the reduction of church authority, changes in family life, all in addition to urbanization and mechanization.

99:4.8 (1090.4)The greatest spiritual danger for man consists in partial progress, the predicament of unfinished growth: the abandonment of the evolutionary religions of fear, without immediate grasp of the revelatory religion of love. Modern science, specially psychology, has weakened only those religions that rely to a very large extent on fear, superstition and emotion.

99:4.9 (1090.5)Transitions are always accompanied by confusion, and there will not be much peace and tranquility in the world of religion until the great struggle between the three warring religious philosophies is over:

99:4.10 (1090.6)1. the spiritualistic belief (in a providential Deity) of many religions;

99:4.11 (1090.7)2. the humanistic and idealistic belief in many philosophies;

99:4.12 (1090.8)3. the mechanistic and naturalistic beliefs in many branches of science.

99:4.13 (1090.9)These three partial ways of approaching the reality of the cosmos must ultimately be harmonized with each other through the revelatory presentation of religion, philosophy and cosmology, which describes the triune existence of spirit, consciousness and energy that emanates from Paradise Trinity, and achieves time-space union within the Godhead of the Supreme.

A Thought for Consideration from The Urantia Book