-
Posts
-
I have a simple question and would like to know what you think.
I’ve recently been thinking that the UB represents what a lot of people are looking for. Objective evidence of God’s existence.
Do you think that the Urantia Book is objevtive evidence?
Yes but only if your not in the secular camp that believes the universe created itself.
evidence for me comes from a couple of statements in the book
one from the forward where my irresistible urge to symbolize God is identified and another from the papers on true religion ( maybe 99 or 100??) where the author identifies another of my irresistible urges to be righteous – and how they originate. How much more objective evidence is needed?
Well….over 90% of Americans (those from other places consult your local statistics – Europe is lower for example) already believe in God. The UB will ‘objectively’ prove nothing to the others I do not think.
The UB teaches that only the presence, realization, and relationship of God proves God’s existence.
My opinion is that there is ample objective ‘evidence’ of God to any perceptive and wondering mind. We are surrounded by the wonder of creation. Love and resulting service are evidence of God as the source of love – from whence else does it come? It’s downright unnatural. Each mind is already endowed with the 3 Great Spirits who are constantly communicating, creating yearning, hunger, and thirst for their ministries. Will someone believe the UB while denying the Spirit within?
I agree that the UB delivers (represents?) what believers and non-believers are looking for. Facts and knowledge answering so many previous mysteries. A perspective and philosophy of living that is reality based and aligned which, when employed, delivers progress in the Spirit.
But if one needs more evidence of God’s existence than life, love, the world, the stars, and the beauty and grandeur of the glorious universe…..then I do not think the UB provides sufficient evidence.
ADJECTIVE
(of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.Who might lay aside their personal feelings and/or opinions about God, based on the claims of the UB?
One must read the UB and read it a great deal over considerable time and live accordingly to begin to believe the claims of the authors. I believed in God and the eternal adventure before finding the UB. It took me time to believe the UB itself. But when I came around to that, it certainly made the universe of universes more orderly, functional, and believable!!
Paper 101 addresses this question and exhaustively answers it. Worth a read!!
101:1.3 (1104.6) The divine spirit makes contact with mortal man, not by feelings or emotions, but in the realm of the highest and most spiritualized thinking. It is your thoughts, not your feelings, that lead you Godward. The divine nature may be perceived only with the eyes of the mind. But the mind that really discerns God, hears the indwelling Adjuster, is the pure mind. “Without holiness no man may see the Lord.” All such inner and spiritual communion is termed spiritual insight. Such religious experiences result from the impress made upon the mind of man by the combined operations of the Adjuster and the Spirit of Truth as they function amid and upon the ideas, ideals, insights, and spirit strivings of the evolving sons of God.
101:1.4 (1105.1) Religion lives and prospers, then, not by sight and feeling, but rather by faith and insight. It consists not in the discovery of new facts or in the finding of a unique experience, but rather in the discovery of new and spiritual meanings in facts already well known to mankind. The highest religious experience is not dependent on prior acts of belief, tradition, and authority; neither is religion the offspring of sublime feelings and purely mystical emotions. It is, rather, a profoundly deep and actual experience of spiritual communion with the spirit influences resident within the human mind, and as far as such an experience is definable in terms of psychology, it is simply the experience of experiencing the reality of believing in God as the reality of such a purely personal experience.
101:1.5 (1105.2) While religion is not the product of the rationalistic speculations of a material cosmology, it is, nonetheless, the creation of a wholly rational insight which originates in man’s mind-experience. Religion is born neither of mystic meditations nor of isolated contemplations, albeit it is ever more or less mysterious and always indefinable and inexplicable in terms of purely intellectual reason and philosophic logic. The germs of true religion originate in the domain of man’s moral consciousness, and they are revealed in the growth of man’s spiritual insight, that faculty of human personality which accrues as a consequence of the presence of the God-revealing Thought Adjuster in the God-hungry mortal mind.
Can those minds that do not hunger and thirst and yearn be rationally convinced of such reality? Nope. Not even standing next to Jesus himself….evidently.
I’ve recently been thinking that the UB represents what a lot of people are looking for. Objective evidence of God’s existence. Do you think that the Urantia Book is objevtive evidence?
I think TUB is objective evidence that we are not alone in the universe. It’s hard for me to fathom a human, or humans, from this planet as authors of this book. The perspective is “other worldly”. Objective validity of the existence of God the Father cannot be provided by a book because God the Father is a person. We can only validate his presence by person-to-person experience.
Objective validity is provided by the reality recognition responses of the cosmic mind and the personality-to-personality recognition response provided within a relationship . . . but not a relationship with the book. However, the book is designed to open the mind to these recognition responses as part of one’s personal experience with reality. The book is a structured dynamo designed to train the mind to recognize the elliptical symmetry of all three levels of reality. It begins by presenting ideas (facts), then reveals supernal ideals, and finally provides an example of perfect execution of those ideals in the life of Jesus, a person we are capable of having a relationship with.
p33:2 2:0.2 The nature of God can be studied in a revelation of supreme ideas, the divine character can be envisaged as a portrayal of supernal ideals, but the most enlightening and spiritually edifying of all revelations of the divine nature is to be found in the comprehension of the religious life of Jesus of Nazareth, both before and after his attainment of full consciousness of divinity. If the incarnated life of Michael is taken as the background of the revelation of God to man, we may attempt to put in human word symbols certain ideas and ideals concerning the divine nature which may possibly contribute to a further illumination and unification of the human concept of the nature and the character of the personality of the Universal Father.
I’ve recently been thinking that the UB represents what a lot of people are looking for. Objective evidence of God’s existence. Do you think that the Urantia Book is objevtive evidence?
Yes but only if your not in the secular camp that believes the universe created itself.
Can those minds that do not hunger and thirst and yearn be rationally convinced of such reality? Nope.
Objective validity of the existence of God the Father cannot be provided by a book
In general, I agree. It does not seem likely that someone who believes that God does not exist (secularists, materialists, atheists, etc.) will be convinced by the UB that he does exist. But such doubters can and sometimes do come around to believe in God. Some well-known atheists who have converted to Christianity are:
Francis Collins – American physician, geneticist. (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – Russian novelist, historian. (Godlessness, the First Step to the Gulag)
C. S. Lewis- British novelist, poet, academic. (Surprised by Joy)
Why did they abandon atheism and embrace Christianity? It appears that they all eventually realized that life and the facts of experience are fundamentally inconsistent with the worldview of atheism (materialism, secularism). The unrelenting philosophic pressure caused by these logical inconsistencies led them to search for and find God. The Book describes how this can happen.
The domains of philosophy and art intervene between the nonreligious and the religious activities of the human self. Through art and philosophy the material-minded man is inveigled into the contemplation of the spiritual realities and universe values of eternal meanings. (5:4.4)
It seems that after a prolonged philosophic effort to attain a consistent understanding of reality, these material-minded individuals finally reach the firm conclusion that they have no right not to believe in God, that God must exist. This same conclusion can be attained by the effort to understand the whole Book; it contains a profound philosophic proof that it is, in truth, a revelation from God.
The proof that revelation is revelation is this same fact of human experience: the fact that revelation does synthesize the apparently divergent sciences of nature and the theology of religion into a consistent and logical universe philosophy, a co-ordinated and unbroken explanation of both science and religion, thus creating a harmony of mind and satisfaction of spirit which answers in human experience those questionings of the mortal mind which craves to know how the Infinite works out his will and plans in matter, with minds, and on spirit. (101:2.1)
The worldview revealed in the Book, once grasped in its essentials, presents a philosophy which does harmoniously synthesize reason and faith, science and religion, cosmology and theology in “a co-ordinated and unbroken explanation.” There is a proof in the Book that it is a revelation, and so, it would seem that the material fact of the Book can be objective evidence which supports the subjective conviction that God exists. It requires a great deal of effort to discover this philosophic proof, while the spiritual proof of God is immediately grasped by the insight of faith. But this fact does not in any way diminish the validity of this proof.
“It requires a great deal of effort to discover this philosophic proof, while the spiritual proof of God is immediately grasped by the insight of faith. But this fact does not in any way diminish the validity of this proof.”
good point. And when one questions the origin of the motivation to make such effort, maybe faith happens??
And when one questions the origin of the motivation to make such effort, maybe faith happens??
Wouldn’t faith happen when one ceases to question or doubt, and instead, begin to trust the urge?
And when one questions the origin of the motivation to make such effort, maybe faith happens??
Wouldn’t faith happen when one ceases to question or doubt, and instead, begin to trust the urge?
definately a better way to think about it
Login to reply to this topic.
Not registered? Sign up here.