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A Discourse on Religion
The religions of the world have a double origin--natural and revelational. Three manifestations of the religious urge are common to peoples of all races and at all times. They are:
1. Primitive religion. In Western countries in the twentieth century, the primitive aspects of religion, formerly conditioned by fear, have now tended to be replaced by the yearnings of lost and lonely souls for some form of direct personal contact with supernatural forces or beings. These yearnings may become manifested as belief in the occult, or in magic, covert, esoteric and mysterious forces and beings that provide excitement and escape from the reality of a puzzling, rapidly changing, and poorly understood intellectual and social environment.
2. The religions of civilization. Authoritarian religions of the mind, now suffering the assaults of a scientific materialism that is driving even main stream religionists to flee to the shelter of fundamentalism .
3. True religion--the religion of revelation. The revelation of eternal values and realities. The very concept of supernatural revelation is also suffering under the assault of scientific materialism and a philosophy that denies any basis for the existence of eternal values--or, for that matter, any preferred system of values. The basic value of revelatory religion consists in the glimpse it provides of the goodness and beauty of the infinite character of the Father in heaven--a religion of the spirit as promulgated through personal religious experience.
During this period of his teaching, the Master made it clear that the great difference between the religion of the mind and the religion of the spirit is that, while the former is upheld by ecclesiastical authority, the latter is based solely on individual human experience. He said:
"Until the human race progresses to the level of a higher and more general recognition of the realities of spiritual experience, large numbers of men and women will continue to show a personal preference for those religions of authority which require only intellectual assent. In contrast, the religion of the spirit entails active participation of mind and soul in the faith adventure of grappling with the rigorous realities of progressive human experience.
"The acceptance of the traditional religions of authority presents the easy way out for man's urge to seek satisfaction for the longings of his spiritual nature. The settled, crystallized, and established religions of authority afford a ready refuge to which the distracted and distraught soul of man may flee when harassed by fear and tormented by uncertainty. Such a religion requires of its devotees, as the price to be paid for its satisfactions and assurances, only a passive and purely intellectual assent.
"For a long time there will live on earth those timid, fearful, and hesitant individuals who will prefer thus to secure their religious consolations, even though, in so casting their lot with the religions of authority, they compromise the sovereignty of personality, debase the dignity of self-respect, and utterly surrender the right to participate in that most thrilling and inspiring of all possible human experiences: the personal quest for truth, the exhilaration of facing the perils of intellectual discovery, the determination to explore the realities of personal religious experience, the supreme satisfaction of experiencing the personal triumph of the actual realization of the victory of spiritual faith over intellectual doubt as it is honestly won in the supreme adventure of all human existence--man seeking God, for himself and as himself, and finding him.
"The religion of the spirit means effort, struggle, conflict, faith, determination, love, loyalty, and progress. The religion of the mind--the theology of authority--requires little or none of these exertions from its formal believers. Tradition is a safe refuge and an easy path for those fearful and halfhearted souls who instinctively shun the spirit struggles and mental uncertainties associated with those faith voyages of daring adventure upon the high seas of unexplored truth in search of spiritual realities as they may be discovered by the progressive human mind and experienced by the evolving human soul."
When human beings form religious groups, as the group enlarges it is virtually inevitable that a hierarchical structure will develop, rules will be made, and rituals and creeds will gradually be formulated. Along with such organization, positions of power and authority evolve, and people become divided and ranked according to status in its pyramidal structure. Even a religion that starts as a communal group tends to follow this pattern, aided and abetted by ambitious individuals struggling to clamber toward the apex of the pyramid. Jesus told the gathering that the appeal of all such religions is to the mind. He warned his followers that the religion of the spirit would always be in deadly conflict with all such forms of religious organization and that, for the religion of the spirit, authority resides in the Father in a one-on-one relationship with the individual. Then, pointing to each of his followers and calling them by name, he said:
"And now, which one of you would prefer to take the easy path of conformity to an established and fossilized religion rather than to suffer the difficulties and persecutions
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