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The privilege of choosing
If a moral being chooses to be unselfish when confronted by the urge to be selfish, that is a primitive religious experience. No animal can make such a choice; such a decision is both human and religious.
Unselfishness in the face of selfish choice exhibits the impulse towards social service and embraces the reality of God-consciousness.
Mankind tends to identify selfish urges with the ego--the self; and to identify the will to be altruistic with some outside influence--God. Such a judgment is correct for all such unselfish desires do have their origin in the leading of the indwelling Spirit of the Father.
Regardless of the influence of all primitive contributions to the early religion of mankind, the fact remains that all true religious impulses originate from genuine spirit presences activating the will to be unselfish.
Jesus swept away all of the ceremonials of sacrifice and atonement. He destroyed the basis of fictitious guilt and the sense of isolation in the universe by declaring that we are children of God, that God is our loving Father, and all ceremonials not a legitimate part of such an intimate family relationship are forever abrogated.
God, the Father, deals with his earthly children, not on the basis of actual virtue or worthiness but in recognition of motivation--the creature purpose and intent. The relationship is one of parent-child association and is actuated by divine love.
Jesus enlarged the neighbor scope to embrace the whole of humanity, even that we should love our enemies. And there is something inside of every normal human being that tells him this teaching is moral--right.
All men recognize the morality of the universal human urge to be unselfish and altruistic. The humanist ascribes its origin to the natural outworking of the mind; the religionist more correctly recognizes that all of the truly unselfish drive of the mortal mind is in response to the inner spirit leading of our indwelling God- Spirit.
The pursuit of the ideal--the striving to be God-like--is a continuous effort before death and after. Life after death is no different in its essentials from our mortal existence. Everything we do that is good contributes to the enhancement of the after life. Every mortal gain enriches the immortal survival experience.
It lifts us out from ourselves when once we recognize that there lives and strives within us something that is eternal and divine--the indwelling spirit of the Father.
Man is most truly the architect of his own destiny.
Bridging the gulf
Revelation is the only hope and the only way than we can bridge the gulf between the material and the spiritual. Unaided, faith and reason cannot conceive or construct a logical universe.
Faith, human religious insight, can be surely instructed only by revelation, can be surely elevated only by personal experience with the indwelling presence of the God who is spirit.
The progression of science is not limited to the terrestrial life of mankind; our universe ascension experience will, to no small degree, be the study of energy transmutation and material metamorphosis.
Logic can never succeed in harmonizing the findings of science and the insights of religion unless both the scientific and religious aspects of a personality are truth dominated, sincerely desirous of following the truth wherever it may lead regardless of the conclusions that may be reached.
What both developing science and religion need is more searching and fearless self-criticism, a greater awareness of incompleteness of evolutionary status.
The truth--an understanding of cosmic relationships, universe facts, and spiritual values--can best be had through ministry of the Spirit of Truth and can best be criticized by revelation. But revelation originates neither a science or a religion; its function is to co-ordinate both with the truth of reality.
In the mortal state nothing can be absolutely proved, both science and religion are predicated on assumptions.
There is a real "proof" of "spiritual reality" in the presence of the indwelling Spirit of God--but the validity of the "proof" is not demonstrable to the external world, but only to the one who thus experiences the indwelling of God.
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