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of a personal relationship with the deity within. Stripped of authority from outside ourselves, the religion of the spirit appears to have all the necessary potential to bring peace on earth and goodwill to all, in addition to fostering the progress of the eternal career of those who embrace it.
"The only uniform thing about men is their indwelling spirit which reacts uniformly to all spiritual appeals. Only through and by appeal to this spirit can mankind ever attain unity and brotherhood." (1672)
For most of us, understanding the nature of God is often best learned from parables. Important among these are:
Imagine a fisherman who takes his young son out for his first trip on the family fishing boat. As they haul in the nets the boy asks for a nice fish to take home to his mother. But the father gives him a toad fish, an inedible, even poisonous, fish. Or imagine the father is a baker and his hungry young son asks for some bread. But instead of fresh bread, his father gives him some stale crusts fit only for the dogs. Would a good earthly father do such things? How much more consideration then would we expect the heavenly Father to have for the welfare of his earthly children?
The heavenly Father is father to all his earthly children no matter what race or religion they might be, or whether they be rich or poor, clever or dull, handsome or ugly, their Creator-Father loves them all equally. His concern is that they all should, sooner or later, now or in the eternal future, voluntarily seek him and hope to become like him. God knows all about every one of us, what makes us as we are. His mercy, his compassion, his understanding are unsurpassable. Knowing this, the parable helps us to comprehend the true meaning of loving and treating our brothers and sisters as we think God would love and treat them.
For many thousands of years human societies have been forced to establish systems of rewards and punishments to ensure that their society is practically operative. Along with this procedure, judges are usually appointed so as to make punishments fit the crime. Human societies have always tended to make their Gods in the image of man, and so their Gods are wrathful and vengeful so as to secure obedience. What really lacks in human justice systems that regulate society is the ability to know what makes the law-breaker what he or she is.
For example, human leaders often become ambitious And to fulfill their ambitions, they have their young men trained to become obedient (but often cruel and heartless) soldiers of the armies they send out to subdue the enemy. When things go wrong and these soldiers are captured, they may come in for retributive punishment for their crimes. But who really is the guilty party, the soldiers, or the leader who used them for his own nefarious purposes? And what of the child brought up in a home in which it knows only the behavior patterns of immoral and abusive parents?
The spirit of the Father is present in the minds of all human beings, there to inform us, if we will listen, what is really right in contrast to what human society might teach us is right. God knows every detail of what makes each of us as we are--and God also knows what it will take to make us what he would have us be. So instead of a wrathful, punishing God, made in human image, we need to learn about a God who takes the initiative to seek out those who go astray from his ideal pathway and brings them back to become fruitful members of his earthly family.
We have a group of parables that illustrate this fact about God's nature. Among them is the good shepherd who, when one of his hundred sheep goes astray, shuts the remainder in a pen, while he goes forth to find and bring back the one that is lost; the lost coin of the poor widow who turns her house upside down until she recovers that which was lost; and the prodigal son, the lazy, party-going spendthrift who wastes his inheritance then, penniless and in despair, goes back to his father to beg for forgiveness and to be taken on as a hired servant. But instead, on sighting him coming home, his father, without waiting for his son's expression of penitence, rushes out to welcome him back into the family.
Wrath, vengeance, and punishment are absent entities in the God who is love. If there is punishment for our misdeeds it is what we do to ourselves that brings self-punishment in the form of our having rejected the love of God that is our birthright.
The only sure way to ultimately bring mankind to religion of the spirit is for those who have it to lead by example.
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