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True religion is man’s heartfelt loyalty to his highest and truest convictions.
155:3:5 [#4]One of the great lessons of this sojourn at Caesarea had to do with the origin of religious traditions, with the grave danger of allowing a sense of sacredness to become attached to nonsacred things, common ideas, or everyday events. From one conference they emerged with the teaching that true religion was man’s heartfelt loyalty to his highest and truest convictions.It is wholly spiritual in motive. 155:3:7(180:5.6) Some persons discern and interpret the golden rule as a purely intellectual affirmation of human fraternity. Others experience this expression of human relationship as an emotional gratification of the tender feelings of the human personality. Another mortal recognizes this same golden rule as the yardstick for measuring all social relations, the standard of social conduct. Still others look upon it as being the positive injunction of a great moral teacher who embodied in this statement the highest concept of moral obligation as regards all fraternal relationships. In the lives of such moral beings the golden rule becomes the wise center and circumference of all their philosophy.
(180:5.7) In the kingdom of the believing brotherhood of God-knowing truth lovers, this golden rule takes on living qualities of spiritual realization on those higher levels of interpretation which cause the mortal sons of God to view this injunction of the Master as requiring them so to relate themselves to their fellows that they will receive the highest possible good as a result of the believer’s contact with them. This is the essence of true religion: that you love your neighbor as yourself.
(157:2.2) It is not the purpose of true religion merely to bring peace but rather to insure progress. And there can be no peace in the heart or progress in the mind unless you fall wholeheartedly in love with truth, the ideals of eternal realities. The issues of life and death are being set before you—the sinful pleasures of time against the righteous realities of eternity. Even now you should begin to find deliverance from the bondage of fear and doubt as you enter upon the living of the new life of faith and hope. And when the feelings of service for your fellow men arise within your soul, do not stifle them; when the emotions of love for your neighbor well up within your heart, give expression to such urges of affection in intelligent ministry to the real needs of your fellows.”
(143:1.4) “Love is the greatest of all spirit realities.”
When I first read about “true religion,” the term escaped me. It took a considerable amount of time to learn what it is. I’m still learning. But I will say this: it was through gaining the knowledge of “the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it” that true religion became real for me. Thank you Urantia Book.
What is true religious living? We would need to study the life of Jesus and how he lived it to find the answer.
92:1.5 Jesus, the revelation of the highest type of religious living, proclaimed that “God is love.”.196:1.3 One of the most important things in human living is to find out what Jesus believed, to discover his ideals, and to strive for the achievement of his exalted life purpose. Of all human knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it.I paraphrased and summarized what TUB has to say about true religious living:
True religious living is a mode of living in which one gives wholehearted devotion to supreme values with an unquestioning loyalty. A sincere religionist is aware of universe citizenship and is also conscious of contact with superhuman powers yet exhibits cosmic poise due to lack of doubt and inner turmoil. True religious living results in a sense of security owing to an ultimate confidence and trust in God. Because true religious living requires the ego to surrender to self-discipline there is less emotional conflict making the burdens of life easier to bear. True religious living lifts the spirit with hope and encourages a sense of humor due to less emphasis on the importance of self. There is also present within the psyche an intense striving for superhuman goals and ideals characterized by patience, fortitude and tolerance. True religion is a living love which adds meaning to life, generates enthusiasm, courage and a sublime peace.
I guess the logical next question would be, what is true religious living?
The Papers teach us much on this subject. Indeed the first Paper I read and the one I most often re-read, over and over, is Paper 100/Religion in Human Experience.
“True religious living” is a unique and personalized experience for each person but it does have many common elements. Notice in the Paper the power and purpose of LOVE and the functional reality that true religious living is progressive and dynamic and can never be static. One of the most important elements is that true religion is transformative and not merely one time or one event but continuously transformative…true religious living transforms the mind and grows the soul. Such dynamic and progressive and transformative experience delivers two effects – more and more wisdom AND more and more spiritual fruit. And the ‘more and more’ result will lead the believer to become more and more identified with the spirit nature and will adjust our approach and perspective to the material life and its challenges in the day to day (the transfer of the seat of our personal identity).
Fear and anxiety must be abandoned to live the true religious life. Faith embraces the reality of our faith-child relationship to God and the friendly universe and delivers a real trust in God and our care and destiny. True religious living ever strengthens this confidence and brings a sublime peace to mind. True religious living is the only way to know true happiness too!
Ahhhh…..the tadpole life!!!
(1094.1) 100:0.1 THE experience of dynamic religious living transforms the mediocre individual into a personality of idealistic power. Religion ministers to the progress of all through fostering the progress of each individual, and the progress of each is augmented through the achievement of all.
(1096.1) 100:2.4 Spirituality becomes at once the indicator of one’s nearness to God and the measure of one’s usefulness to fellow beings. Spirituality enhances the ability to discover beauty in things, recognize truth in meanings, and discover goodness in values. Spiritual development is determined by capacity therefor and is directly proportional to the elimination of the selfish qualities of love.
(1097.5) 100:4.1 Religious living is devoted living, and devoted living is creative living, original and spontaneous. New religious insights arise out of conflicts which initiate the choosing of new and better reaction habits in the place of older and inferior reaction patterns. New meanings only emerge amid conflict; and conflict persists only in the face of refusal to espouse the higher values connoted in superior meanings.
(1097.7) 100:4.3 But the great problem of religious living consists in the task of unifying the soul powers of the personality by the dominance of LOVE. Health, mental efficiency, and happiness arise from the unification of physical systems, mind systems, and spirit systems. Of health and sanity man understands much, but of happiness he has truly realized very little. The highest happiness is indissolubly linked with spiritual progress. Spiritual growth yields lasting joy, peace which passes all understanding.
(1101.1) 100:6.6 One of the most amazing earmarks of religious living is that dynamic and sublime peace, that peace which passes all human understanding, that cosmic poise which betokens the absence of all doubt and turmoil. Such levels of spiritual stability are immune to disappointment. Such religionists are like the Apostle Paul, who said: “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else shall be able to separate us from the love of God.”
(yet another simultaneous post with Bonita…..oh joy!)
True religious living brings great peace and joy.
True religious living isn’t anything like I thought it was when I was young.
I wonder what it will be like when I am old?
True religious living does not preclude trouble or adversity, accidents or catastrophy.
159:3.13 Teach all believers that those who enter the kingdom are not thereby rendered immune to the accidents of time or to the ordinary catastrophes of nature. Believing the gospel will not prevent getting into trouble, but it will insure that you shall be unafraid when trouble does overtake you. If you dare to believe in me and wholeheartedly proceed to follow after me, you shall most certainly by so doing enter upon the sure pathway to trouble. I do not promise to deliver you from the waters of adversity, but I do promise to go with you through all of them.Indeed! Courage, tenacity, confidence in uncertainty, creative problem solving, insight, and wisdom – all require obstacles and adversity. No one learns much without those I don’t think. But as pointed out, true religious living unfetters the mind and empowers the mind to seek out better and better solutions and choice-responses (eventuating into reflexive-response) by the joyful perspective delivered by such living. There is nothing passive about the believers life. Just as Jesus taught we are to be proactively responsive and wise in those responses when facing actual sin, anger, hate, injustice, or any form of act against us….it is not turn the other cheek but overwhelm evil with a love response and the patient second mile.
Learning is a progressive process. We are challenged by TA and the angels to learn. True religious living relieves the stress and anxieties of daily living but not the temporal demands and difficulties of living! If we require hunger to make us think, then hunger it is! But no temporal solution in itself delivers the yearning and craving to know more and be more today than yesterday. Life is dynamic and interactive….or it is not life for long.
On the boards over the years, I have often been accused by a few fellow students (by some who post here as well as other forums) of being lazy, indifferent, uncaring, and naïve in my contentment and confidence in my destiny and safety and that of our world, this Shrine of Nebadon. They demand anxiety, angst, blame, responsibility, change, duty, and (weirdly) the acts of others (naturally) to fix, change, save, and transform others and the world. To be fair, they are apparently concerned with suffering of others and their own and the unfairness perceived in the mortal life….it is not selfishness per se…and yet………..
Such ones display a total lack of faith in my opinion, filled with doubts and fears which require immediacy of remedy. Their interest in what others are or are not doing and should or should not be doing is quite illuminating to the believer whose faith delivers an inherent calmness and happiness, the better to face all vicissitudes along the edges of conflict. They simply have no concept of such a perspective but are all too willing to condemn those who do not share their great concerns and doubts and certainty of causes. The causes of effects are well described in the UB as is the cure.
We change the world first by our view of it in context of all time and the wholeness of the universes of time. Then and only then, we may positively change the world simply as we walk by………. Change our perspective and change the result! It’s not a matter of age.
102:2.3 (1119.8) 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 tranquillity of character not explained by the laws of physiology, psychology, and sociology.
102:2.8 (1121.1) 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 unacting feeling.
102:2.9 (1121.2) 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!
156:5.13 (1739.8) God-knowing individuals are not discouraged by misfortune or downcast by disappointment. Believers are immune to the depression consequent upon purely material upheavals; spirit livers are not perturbed by the episodes of the material world. Candidates for eternal life are practitioners of an invigorating and constructive technique for meeting all of the vicissitudes and harassments of mortal living. Every day a true believer lives, he finds it easier to do the right thing.
(102:2.7) But true religion is alive.
Bradly wrote: . . . true religious living is progressive and dynamic and can never be static. One of the most important elements is that true religion is transformative and not merely one time or one event but continuously transformative…true religious living transforms the mind and grows the soul.I really like this. What good is an “alive” religion if it isn’t transformative to both the self and others? I mean, a turnip is “alive,” isn’t it? In the ground it’s growing, yes, but it doesn’t really contribute to meaningful transformation until it’s eaten. I think some people have religion like turnips have soil. Just sayin’.
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