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The reality basis of religion.
Religion as human experience ranges from the primitive slavery of the fear of the evolving primitive up to the magnificent liberty of faith of those mortals who are superbly conscious of being members of the family of the eternal God who is love.
Religion is the experiencing of divinity in the consciousness of a moral being of evolutionary origin. It represents true experience with eternal realities in time, the realization of spiritual satisfaction while yet in the flesh.
There really is a true and genuine inner voice, "the true light that lights every man who comes into the world." And this spirit leading is distinct from the ethical prompting of human conscience.
The assurance of religion transcends the reason of mind, even the logic of philosophy. Religion IS faith, trust, and assurance.
The Divine Spirit makes contact with mortal beings, not by feelings or emotions, but in the realm of your highest and most spiritualized thinking. It is your thoughts not your feelings that lead you God-ward.
The divine nature may be perceived only with the eyes of the mind. But the mind that really discerns God, hears his indwelling Spirit, is the pure mind. For "Without holiness no man may see the Lord."
Religion is a profoundly deep and actual experience of spiritual communion with the spirit influences resident within the human mind--and in so far as such an experience is definable, it is simply the experiencing of experiencing the reality of believing in God as the reality of such a personal experience.
Religious longings and spiritual urges are of such a nature as lead us to want to believe in God--whence they evolve to the conviction that we ought to believe in God, so that finally we reach that attitude of soul that concludes we do not have the right not to believe in God.
And so we come to conclude that to even doubt God or to distrust his perfect goodness would amount to being untrue to the realest and deepest thing within the human mind and soul--the indwelling Spirit of the Father.
Pointing the way
The faith of Jesus pointed the way to the ultimate of mortal attainment in that it provided for salvation from material fetters, intellectual bondage, spiritual blindness, time, and incompleteness of self--the finite.
Such salvation involves the personal realization that we are children of the Father who are aware of the universality of the family of God, the goodness of spiritual values, and the necessity for spirit levels of harmony with others--plus achievement of an eternal life of progression in God-recognition, God-consciousness, and God-service.
Jesus made the discovery, in human experience, of the Final Father--and we, his brothers and sisters in the flesh, can follow him in this same experience of Father-discovery of the absolute goodness of God. Mortal beings, ourselves, can even attain, as we are, the same satisfaction in this experience of Father-discovery as did Jesus, as he was.
Jesus was and is the new and living way whereby mankind can come into the divine inheritance which the Father has decreed will be theirs for the asking.
Faith and Philosophy
Philosophy transforms primitive religion, largely a fairy-tale of conscience, into a living experience--thereby freeing the individual who dares to think, act, and live honestly, loyally, fearlessly, and truthfully from all the traditional handicaps imposed by convention.
Belief has attained the level of faith when it motivates life and shapes the mode of living. The acceptance of a teaching as true is not faith; that is mere belief. Neither is certainty or conviction faith. A state of mind attains to faith levels only when it dominates the mode of living.
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