As the very last quote may indicate, ideally the personal religionist who is not in need of symbol and dogma can find a religious satisfaction that surpasses anything that organized social religion can add to individual experience (with my emphases).
92:1.3 Religion arises as a biologic reaction of mind to spiritual beliefs and the environment; it is the last thing to perish or change in a race. Religion is society’s adjustment, in any age, to that which is mysterious. As a social institution it embraces rites, symbols, cults, scriptures, altars, shrines, and temples. Holy water, relics, fetishes, charms, vestments, bells, drums, and priesthoods are common to all religions. And it is impossible entirely to divorce purely evolved religion from either magic or sorcery.
I have no use for material associations of things to a group belief system. The gathering of the PEOPLE in the spirit of God-recognition is plenty good enough for me.
102:8.6 While personal religion precedes the evolution of human morals, it is regretfully recorded that institutional religion has invariably lagged behind the slowly changing mores of the human races. Organized religion has proved to be conservatively tardy. The prophets have usually led the people in religious development; the theologians have usually held them back. Religion, being a matter of inner or personal experience, can never develop very far in advance of the intellectual evolution of the races.
100:5.1 The world is filled with lost souls, not lost in the theologic sense but lost in the directional meaning, wandering about in confusion among the isms and cults of a frustrated philosophic era. Too few have learned how to install a philosophy of living in the place of religious authority. (The symbols of socialized religion are not to be despised as channels of growth, albeit the river bed is not the river.)
These "lost souls" are not in need of finding the right group. They are in need of find the God inside inside them and sharing their God- consciousness with the brethren, in a both organized (if they feel they must) or, all the better, unorganized way.
155:3.8 Jesus repeatedly taught his apostles that no civilization could long survive the loss of the best in its religion. And he never grew weary of pointing out to the twelve the great danger of accepting religious symbols and ceremonies in the place of religious experience. His whole earth life was consistently devoted to the mission of thawing out the frozen forms of religion into the liquid liberties of enlightened sonship.
And that frost still traps the forms of nearly all organized religions today.
99:2.1 Institutional religion cannot afford inspiration and provide leadership in this impending world-wide social reconstruction and economic reorganization because it has unfortunately become more or less of an organic part of the social order and the economic system which is destined to undergo reconstruction. Only the real religion of personal spiritual experience can function helpfully and creatively in the present crisis of civilization.
It would be good to recall that the very "crisis of civilization" in the 21st Century has much to do with the entanglement of this very religious formalization within the social structures that perpetuate the already ingrained mix of church and state (economic ones as well). We should expect no change in this social religious situation until society is significantly reformed...
99:2.2 Institutional religion is now caught in the stalemate of a vicious circle. It cannot reconstruct society without first reconstructing itself; and being so much an integral part of the established order, it cannot reconstruct itself until society has been radically reconstructed. 99:2.3 Religionists must function in society, in industry, and in politics as individuals, not as groups, parties, or institutions. A religious group which presumes to function as such, apart from religious activities, immediately becomes a political party, an economic organization, or a social institution. Religious collectivism must confine its efforts to the furtherance of religious causes.
The question at this point in history is: Do any named religious organization have the group-wisdom to practice group-self-control? Does it take money for the groups activities based on its group creeds? Then must it always use those funds to advance the individual's personal search for spiritual meaning, above any group or social promotion of the group.
99:2.4 Religionists are of no more value in the tasks of social reconstruction than nonreligionists except in so far as their religion has conferred upon them enhanced cosmic foresight and endowed them with that superior social wisdom which is born of the sincere desire to love God supremely and to love every man as a brother in the heavenly kingdom. An ideal social order is that in which every man loves his neighbor as he loves himself.
99:2.5 The institutionalized church may have appeared to serve society in the past by glorifying the established political and economic orders, but it must speedily cease such action if it is to survive. Its only proper attitude consists in the teaching of nonviolence, the doctrine of peaceful evolution in the place of violent revolution—peace on earth and good will among all men.
99:2.6 Modern religion finds it difficult to adjust its attitude toward the rapidly shifting social changes only because it has permitted itself to become so thoroughly traditionalized, dogmatized, and institutionalized. The religion of living experience finds no difficulty in keeping ahead of all these social developments and economic upheavals, amid which it ever functions as a moral stabilizer, social guide, and spiritual pilot. True religion carries over from one age to another the worth-while culture and that wisdom which is born of the experience of knowing God and striving to be like him.
99:4.7 There is no danger in religion’s becoming more and more of a private matter—a personal experience—provided it does not lose its motivation for unselfish and loving social service. Religion has suffered from many secondary influences: sudden mixing of cultures, intermingling of creeds, diminution of ecclesiastical authority, changing of family life, together with urbanization and mechanization.
One who is enlightened by communion with the TA, will definitely be able to apply the lessons learned in the individual's personal religious experience to the benefit of any and all groups--of any sort. Yet the opposite cannot be true. Group religious experience cannot definitely effect positive religious growth in the personal life of each individual in the organized group. Albeit, some will find great benefit from group activity, as long as they don't sacrifice their personal work in knowing God through the intimate association of the TA in the human mind, as enhanced by the successful growing of a soul.
99:5.1 While religion is exclusively a personal spiritual experience—knowing God as a Father—the corollary of this experience—knowing man as a brother—entails the adjustment of the self to other selves, and that involves the social or group aspect of religious life. Religion is first an inner or personal adjustment, and then it becomes a matter of social service or group adjustment. The fact of man’s gregariousness perforce determines that religious groups will come into existence. What happens to these religious groups depends very much on intelligent leadership. In primitive society the religious group is not always very different from economic or political groups. Religion has always been a conservator of morals and a stabilizer of society. And this is still true, notwithstanding the contrary teaching of many modern socialists and humanists.
99:6.3 But as religion becomes institutionalized, its power for good is curtailed, while the possibilities for evil are greatly multiplied. The dangers of formalized religion are: fixation of beliefs and crystallization of sentiments; accumulation of vested interests with increase of secularization; tendency to standardize and fossilize truth; diversion of religion from the service of God to the service of the church; inclination of leaders to become administrators instead of ministers; tendency to form sects and competitive divisions; establishment of oppressive ecclesiastical authority; creation of the aristocratic “chosen-people” attitude; fostering of false and exaggerated ideas of sacredness; the routinizing of religion and the petrification of worship; tendency to venerate the past while ignoring present demands; failure to make up-to-date interpretations of religion; entanglement with functions of secular institutions; it creates the evil discrimination of religious castes; it becomes an intolerant judge of orthodoxy; it fails to hold the interest of adventurous youth and gradually loses the saving message of the gospel of eternal salvation.
I have observed that many well-meaning UB readers who are inclined toward fundamentalizing the TEXT of the UB, see themselves as "chosen" and therefore consider all other religious organizations to be inferior to a UB-based organized religion. But, were they to stop and think for a moment, THAT attitude is the problem with all former institutionalization of religion in the past. Logically, why would some person who is dismayed with the group they officially worship be attracted to just another group (even if it is a UB-based organization, like Behz's)? To attempt to make a church for UB readers is a noble, even worthy, aspiration.
Yet, short of worldwide understanding about the extensive and well- clarified cosmology (with science too) presented in the UB and the religion OF Jesus presented to tease out the errors and inconsistencies of all forms of Biblical "Christianity," no UB-based church will ever attract personal religionists, nor "adventurous youths." I think there will be a Urantian Church of Humanity, but it will await the deconstruction and reconstruction of social and economic orders FIRST (as is said above).
99:6.4 Formal religion restrains men in their personal spiritual activities instead of releasing them for heightened service as kingdom builders.
99:5.7 Just as certainly as men share their religious beliefs, they create a religious group of some sort which eventually creates common goals. Someday religionists will get together and actually effect co-operation on the basis of unity of ideals and purposes rather than attempting to do so on the basis of psychological opinions and theological beliefs. Goals rather than creeds should unify religionists. Since true religion is a matter of personal spiritual experience, it is inevitable that each individual religionist must have his own and personal interpretation of the realization of that spiritual experience. Let the term “faith” stand for the individual’s relation to God rather than for the creedal formulation of what some group of mortals have been able to agree upon as a common religious attitude. “Have you faith? Then have it to yourself.”
99:4.3 True religion is a meaningful way of living dynamically face to face with the commonplace realities of everyday life. But if religion is to stimulate individual development of character and augment integration of personality, it must not be standardized. If it is to stimulate evaluation of experience and serve as a value-lure, it must not be stereotyped. If religion is to promote supreme loyalties, it must not be formalized.
What could be clearer than the above passage?
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. Theologic beliefs can be suggested to a group, but faith can rise up only in the heart of the individual religionist.
143:7.2 True religion is the act of an individual soul in its self-conscious relations with the Creator; organized religion is man’s attempt to socialize the worship of individual religionists.
145:2.4 You well know that, while a kindhearted father loves his family as a whole, he so regards them as a group because of his strong affection for each individual member of that family. No longer must you approach the Father in heaven as a child of Israel but as a child of God. As a group, you are indeed the children of Israel, but as individuals, each one of you is a child of God. I have come, not to reveal the Father to the children of Israel, but rather to bring this knowledge of God and the revelation of his love and mercy to the individual believer as a genuine personal experience. The prophets have all taught you that Yahweh cares for his people, that God loves Israel. But I have come among you to proclaim a greater truth, one which many of the later prophets also grasped, that God loves you — every one of you — as individuals. All these generations have you had a national or racial religion; now have I come to give you a personal religion.
With the emphasized wording above, how could any UB-based minister then try to circumvent this need for personal spiritual experience and individual religious life, by locking his message back up into the iron chains of group-based motivation. I like Rev. Dennis Shield's church (over Behz's) because the UB is not held as a "sacred book" the way it is for UB-based Paula Thompson-style churchification.
121:5.18 Into such a generation of men, dominated by such incomplete systems of philosophy and perplexed by such complex cults of religion, Jesus was born in Palestine. And to this same generation he subsequently gave his gospel of personal religion — sonship with God.
The Gospel of Personal Religion IS The Gospel of Jesus. Period.
101:2.13 True religion is an insight into reality, the faith-child of the moral consciousness, and not a mere intellectual assent to any body of dogmatic doctrines. True religion consists in the experience that “the Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.” Religion consists not in theologic propositions but in spiritual insight and the sublimity of the soul’s trust.
Read: "soul's" as singular and individual.
But the following is perhaps the most useful and appropriate passage regarding how folks like myself (and the majority of UB readers who have gained insight from the UB's discussion of personal vs group "faith") should view group religionists - at this stage of history - with GREAT tolerance; affording them dignity for what they personally need (short of discovering that true religious experience is an individual pursuit...
I understand that there is some real potential for people who need the "Fellowship's" UB churchification for the very reason listed in the centered passage above. Paula and Behz can truly be ministers for these folks who need symbols and ritual in order to get started in their pathway to Paradise. It is all good, in that the effort to bring humans to God is given opportunity to evolve. But at some point, in some way, and some day, EACH and EVERY individual in a UB- based organized religion - one with a name like Behz's organization - MUST depart from the group and work with their OWN indwelling Adjuster in the sanctuary of the mind to enhance the progression of their OWN immortal soul.
This will all eventually work out. And it is a credit to our movement that there aren't MORE of these mini-churches, cults, whatever you want to call them. With patience and common understanding, and with the personal goal of God consciousness steering the application of personal brotherly INsights outward to ALL of one's brothers and sisters, ALL groups can be given an example of how to PROPERLY use group religion and institutionalized faith.
[Please see the next post for further discussion about how the Urantia Book handles the word, "cult" and what the future might hold for a world-wide and universal "organization" of Personal Religionists.]
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