Between the Anvil of Necessity and
the Hammer of Anguish:
Confronting AIDS

By Jay Newbern

The Urantia Book is the Fifth Epochal Revelation of God to our planet, which we have named Earth, but which is known to the universe as Urantia. The First Epochal Revelation was lost to the Lucifer Rebellion 200,000 years ago; and the second, that of Adam and Eve, defaulted nearly 38,000 years ago due to evil influences of the First. Thus was the planetary stage set for the suffering of life-threatening disease and illness, HIV/AIDS being only the latest plague of pandemic (worldwide) proportion.

Our Third Epochal Revelation occurred 4,000 years ago when Machiventa Melchizedek, an emergency divine Son, instructed Abraham on monotheism and taught faith and trust in God. The Fourth, of course, was Christ Jesus, whose life and teachings 2,000 years ago focused on love of God and service of man. This Revelation of the universe Creator Son, Michael of Nebadon, is a work still in progress. Its eventual, successful triumph is guaranteed by the Truth, Beauty, and Goodness it proclaims to millions of inhabited worlds, ours included - appearances notwithstanding.

Some 500,000 years ago, Urantia's First Epochal Revelation arrived in the person of Caligastia, the world's initial Planetary Prince. Accompanying this Lanonandek Son were 100 corporealized, ascendant celestial beings who comprised his staff of assistants. Their headquarters was the city of Dalamatia, a world center of culture in the Persian Gulf region of later Mesopotamia.

The Prince's staff of 100 was organized for service into ten different councils (food, animals, industry, religion, etc.) to induce primitive Urantians to achieve advances in civilization and evolutionary progress. The seventh council was the Guardians of Health and Life. This unit instructed our distant ancestors that cooking food, or boiling and roasting, was a way to avoid sickness and reduce infant mortality. Primeval superstition of fire made this difficult; promotion of hygiene among these ignorant people was also hard since they could not see the tiny microbes - bacteria and viruses - which cause disease. Thousands of years were required to get them to burn their refuse; they buried the decaying rubbish instead. The great sanitary advance came in teaching them that sunlight gives health and destroys germs. Cleanliness from washing bodies was brought about by including water in weekly purification ceremonies at the worship of the one Father.

"These guardians of health also sought to introduce handshaking in substitution for saliva exchange or blood drinking as a seal of personal friendship, and as a token of group loyalty. But, when out from under the compelling pressure of the teachings of their superior leaders, these primitive peoples were not slow in reverting to their former health-destroying and disease-breeding practices of ignorance and superstition." (UB 748)

And that they did after 300,000 years of progress when, 200,000 years ago, the Lucifer Rebellion occurred - only the third such revolt in the young universe of Nebadon. Lucifer was the very bright sovereign of our system of more than 600 inhabited worlds; he became an ego-maniac who caused unimaginable suffering. With Satan as his lieutenant, he claimed allegiance to himself, rather than to the Universal Father (First Person of Trinity), First Source and Center of the universe of universes. Together, they led Caligastia (our legendary "Devil") to betray his trust and cause Urantia to be the 37^th planet in the rebellion. The Most High Fathers of our constellation (superior to systems) cut off the spiritual circuits, thereby isolating the rebellious system of Satania from loyal worlds. This necessary quarantine to stop the unspiritual contagion would mean an increase in deadly physical diseases for humans simply because of the attendant loss of knowledge.

As serious as the retrogression of hygiene and santitation practices was in the betrayal of the First Epochal Revelation 200,000 years ago by traitorous Prince Caligastia; the truly calamitous damage to human health happened when this same devilish archrebel…"…by a wily stratagem, outmaneuvered the Edenic pair and entrapped them into a violation of the covenant of their trusteeship as the visible rulers of (our) world,…" (UB 583), thereby ensnaring Adam and Eve into default of the Second Epochal Revelation nearly 38,000 years ago.

The end result of this default by Eve and then Adam would be four consequences for humans of Urantia, none of them pleasant or positive: bodies more prone to disease and premature death, bodies less spiritually receptive than originally intended, enhanced sexual imagination without corresponding ability for self-control, and fear, (the enemy of faith).

To appreciate the more recent impact of this decreased wellness among the human race, one has only to observe each century's different major pathogen or disease during just the past millennium.

CENTURY MAJOR PATHOGEN

11^{th century:} Ergotism (fungus on rye)

12^th century: Smallpox

13^th century: Leprosy

14^th century: Plague (Bubonic, then pneumonic)

15^th century: Syphilis

16^th century: Dysentery

17^th century: Tuberculosis

18^th century: Typhus

19^th century: Cholera

20^th century: Cancer, HIV/AIDS

The Grim Reaper of deadly disease on this planet was in its most terrible form during the 1300's (14^th Century) when the Black Death of Bubonic Plague wiped out a third of Europe's population. Its vector was rat fleas.

But the 20^th Century, even with all of its advances in medical science, is the runner-up in the toll from fatal disease. In the teens of this century, a worldwide influenza epidemic killed about 20 million people, a total greater than World War I. And as the industrial revolution increased its pollution, so rose the morbidity rate from cancer in various forms. Finally, of course, is the ongoing AIDS pandemic, less than two decades old, which has slaughtered millions and virtually destroyed five African countries. In 1998 the United Nations estimated that 6 million persons (another Holocaust?) globally had been infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS which causes death. Added to all of these concerns is the fact that the over-use of antibiotics has now bred untouchable, newly mutated strains of bacteria. Viruses, of course, are not even affected by any antibiotics.

Every evolutionary world of time and space receives its own Adam and Eve when the primitive human beings reach the stage of development where they are ready to be biologically uplifted. This provides for the basic organic evolution of the mortal species by upstepping the races forward in the scale of human progress, thus eliminating defectives and degenerates. Admixture of Adamic life plasm was designed to reinforce resisting powers of the blended races to make them immune to the renegade parasitic fungi, bacteria and viruses caused by the retrogression of some primeval plant life. But not enough of the violet race got infused in only 117 years before the default.

"The body cells of the Material Sons and their progeny are far more resistant to disease than are those of the evolutionary beings indigenous to the planet. The body cells of the native races are akin to the living disease-producing microscopic and ultramicroscopic organisms of the realm. These facts explain why the Urantia peoples must do so much by way of scientific effort to withstand so many physical disorders. You would be far more disease-resistant if your races carried more of the Adamic life." (UB 851)

In the beautiful Garden of Eden (peninsula on Eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea) which had been prepared for them before the Material Son and Daughter (divine sex creatures) materialized in adult form; Eve grew impatient. After more than a century, she wanted to see more tangible results of her mating (strictly with Adam) between her offspring and the highest types of the neighboring tribes. She broke the mandate of monogamy with Adam and experienced intercourse with Cano, a superb specimen of the native Urantians. To remain loyally in the same status with her, Adam then deliberately mated with an outstanding female of the primitives. The judgment of universe authorities was that "their transgression had been an error of judgment and not the sin of conscious and deliberate rebellion." (UB 852) Adam and Eve still had to leave the Garden and lost their celestial status, reverting to mere mortals. It was after the Adamic Default that Michael of Nebadon, our universe Creator Son, chose Urantia as the bestowal world for his human incarnation as Jesus 36,000 years later. He would do this only once in eternity and there were millions of inhabited planets from which to select.

From the limited infusion of the violet race that Adam and Eve's children bestowed upon ancient Urantians came this sexual conundrum of paradoxical nature:

"The all-absorbing sex passion of the more highly civilized peoples is chiefly due to race mixtures, especially where the evolutionary nature has been stimulated by the associative imagination and beauty appreciation of the Nodites and Adamites. But this Andite inheritance was absorbed by the evolutionary races in such limited amounts as to fail to provide sufficient self-control for the animal passions thus quickened and aroused by the endowment of keener sex consciousness and stronger mating urges." (UB 913)

In other words, we received lots of sexual imagination (fantasy) coupled with very little self-control. Witness our pornography and even advertising. From the African heterosexual to the American homosexual, this hardwired tendency towards sexual promiscuity has given each group staggering death rates of HIV/AIDS.

The default of Adam and Eve was not the "Fall of Man" and we are not cursed with "original sin". Instead, it has proven to be a tremendous handicap to our physical well-being and an awful hindrance to our self-mastery of the sexual nature in favor of spiritual reality.

On this confused world it is many times apparent that we have important concepts turned around backwards. What seems to be a blessing is actually a curse, and vice versa.

"Much of what a mortal would call good luck might really be bad luck; the smile of fortune that bestows unearned leisure and undeserved wealth may be the greatest of human afflictions; the apparent cruelty of a perverse fate that heaps tribulation upon some suffering mortal may in reality be the tempering fire that is transmuting the soft iron of immature personality into the tempered steel of real character." (UB 1305)

The celestial beings who are the revelational authors of the 196 Urantia Papers are fond of the analogy of God as the Cosmic Blacksmith and humans as metal being transmuted by passing through fiery tests, trials, and tribulations. Or are we U-shaped (for Urantia) horseshoes being pounded into shape?

"The confusion and turmoil of Urantia do not signify that the Paradise Rulers lack either interest or ability to manage affairs differently. The Creators are possessed of full power to make Urantia a veritable paradise, but such an Eden would not contribute to the development of those strong, noble and experienced characters which the Gods are so surely forging out on your world between the anvils of necessity and the hammers of anguish." (UB 2258)

When things go wrong, man has an innate tendency to blame God for the misfortune. Some fundamentalist Christians even claim that AIDS is God's punishment for the sinful homosexual (they conveniently ignore the African heterosexual). Others will assert that planetary weather violence are "Acts of God", when, in fact, they are either natural or man-influenced through pollution.

The apostle Nathaniel was at a loss to understand why the loving Father in heaven permitted so many of his children on earth to suffer so many afflictions. Jesus answered him:

"…My son, you should know that the Father does not purposely afflict his children. Man brings down upon himself unnecessary affliction as a result of his persistent refusal to walk in the better ways of the divine will. Affliction is potential in evil, but much of it has been produced by sin and iniquity. Many unusual events have transpired on this world, and it is not strange that all thinking men should be perplexed by the scenes of suffering and affliction which they witness. But of one thing you may be sure: The Father does not send affliction as an arbitrary punishment for wrongdoing. The imperfections and handicaps of evil are inherent; the penalties of sin are inevitable; the destroying consequences of iniquity are inexorable. Man should not blame God for those afflictions which are the natural results of the life which he chooses to live; neither should man complain of those experiences which are a part of life as it is lived on this world. It is the Father's will that mortal man should work persistently and consistently toward the betterment of his estate on earth. Intelligent application would enable man to overcome much of his earthly misery." (UB 1661)

The Master concluded this instruction to Nathaniel by reminding him of relevant Scriptural passages including these:

Jay Newbern
San Francisco
November 1998