Quil posts above: "The issue isn't about intellectual misunderstandings. We agree salvation is by faith.
But faith in what exactly?"
And Jim posts: "The simple answer is faith. But faith in what?"According to my understanding, no one has faith "in" anything...but
belief in things or persons. Faith is often and certainly can be unconscious. Children and barbarians have faith experience. It's what gives birth to soul!! Faith works even if we have faith "in" ghosts, suns, trees, nature, fetishes, charms, magic, evil spirits, and luck!
You are both way off base here. You have
beliefs about faith which clearly contradict the UB teachings about faith.
Have you read Papers 86-92?? What or who do you think Andon and Fonta had faith "in" exactly?? What do you think they believed? Or understood? Come, come. Think about it. The very first minds connected to all 7 Adjutants gave birth to soul and resurrected. Now all have souls...or very nearly so.
Faith in who or what is an invalid question. Faith is a function of and response to the Deity connection within and Divine Affection and Assurance circuitry...no beliefs required for that people!! We are born connected to Spirit!
A critical subject and key to appreciation and understanding of the personal religious experience as presented in the Papers. Faith delivers salvation regardless of the inaccuracy or the complete fiction of our knowledge, beliefs, and reality perspective. Everyone with a soul is climbing Jim's fictional "rope". Even those without a soul yet but connected to the Adjutants and Holy Spirit are too.
Jim hopes to convince others to believe his beliefs or he declares they lack faith and will not survive. Poppycock. Faith does not depend upon accuracy of beliefs or any particular beliefs either. No one needs to believe what Jim believes...or what I believe...or so I understand the teachings of the Revelation.
Climb your own rope Jim. Every soul climbs their own. Your belief that few souls survive is but your own opinion which is certainly not supported by your unsubstantiated claims and so called facts and faulty mathematics and complete distortions of the mansion worlds, nurseries, etc.
The religious experience is not based on belief but faith, as you say too, but faith is a function of the Divine Connection and delivers the personal religious experience which is completely personalized and unique to each of us....regardless of our knowledge or beliefs. Insight validates the faith experience...it is a result and not a cause.
As to "faith" and what the UB says:
https://www.urantia.org/urantia-book/se ... &op=Search101:2.2 (1106.1) Reason is the method of science;
faith is the method of religion; logic is the attempted technique of philosophy. Revelation compensates for the absence of the morontia viewpoint by providing a technique for achieving unity in the comprehension of the reality and relationships of matter and spirit by the mediation of mind. And true revelation never renders science unnatural, religion unreasonable, or philosophy illogical.
101:2.3 (1106.2) Reason, through the study of science, may lead back through nature to a First Cause, but
it requires religious faith to transform the First Cause of science into a God of salvation; and revelation is further required for the validation of such a faith, such spiritual insight.
101:2.10 (1106.9)
Faith reveals God in the soul. Revelation, the substitute for morontia insight on an evolutionary world, enables man to see the same God in nature that faith exhibits in his soul. Thus does revelation successfully bridge the gulf between the material and the spiritual, even between the creature and the Creator, between man and God.
101:2.13 (1107.3) True religion is an insight into reality, the faith-child of the moral consciousness, and not a mere intellectual assent to any body of dogmatic doctrines. True religion consists in the experience that “the Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.” Religion consists
not in theologic propositions but in spiritual insight and the sublimity of the soul’s trust.
101:2.14 (1107.4) Your deepest nature—the divine Adjuster—
creates within you a hunger and thirst for righteousness, a certain craving for divine perfection. Religion is the faith act of the recognition of this inner urge to divine attainment; and
thus is brought about that soul trust and assurance of which you become conscious as the way of salvation, the technique of the survival of personality and all those values which you have come to look upon as being true and good.101:2.15 (1107.5) The realization of religion
never has been, and never will be, dependent on great learning or clever logic. It is spiritual insight, and that is just the reason why some of the world’s greatest religious teachers, even the prophets, have sometimes possessed so little of the wisdom of the world. Religious faith is available alike to the learned and the unlearned.
As to "insight"...all insight is "earned", even that received by personal revelation and by inspiration. It is earned by the normal function of intellect. Again, here we witness another term that is well defined in the Papers but which is here twisted and transformed by Jim.
0:6.8 (9.10) Mind is a phenomenon connoting the presence-activity of living ministry in addition to varied energy systems; and this is true on all levels of intelligence. In personality, mind ever intervenes between spirit and matter; therefore is the universe illuminated by three kinds of light: material light,
intellectual insight, and spirit luminosity.
0:6.9 (10.1) Light—spirit luminosity—is a word symbol, a figure of speech, which connotes the personality manifestation characteristic of spirit beings of diverse orders. This luminous emanation is in no respect related either to intellectual insight or to physical-light manifestations.
5:1.4 (63.2) The mortals of the realms of time and space may differ greatly in innate abilities and intellectual endowment, they may enjoy environments exceptionally favorable to social advancement and moral progress, or they may suffer from the lack of almost every human aid to culture and supposed advancement in the arts of civilization; but the possibilities for spiritual progress in the ascension career are equal to all;
increasing levels of spiritual insight and cosmic meanings are attained quite independently of all such sociomoral differentials of the diversified material environments on the evolutionary worlds.5:1.5 (63.3) However Urantia mortals may differ in their intellectual, social, economic, and even moral opportunities and endowments, forget not that
their spiritual endowment is uniform and unique. They all enjoy the same divine presence of the gift from the Father, and they are all equally privileged to seek intimate personal communion with this indwelling spirit of divine origin, while they may all equally choose to accept the uniform spiritual leading of these Mystery Monitors.
101:1.4 (1105.1) Religion lives and prospers, then, not by sight and feeling, but rather by faith and insight. It consists not in the discovery of new facts or in the finding of a unique experience, but rather in the discovery of new and spiritual meanings in facts already well known to mankind.
The highest religious experience is not dependent on prior acts of belief, tradition, and authority; neither is religion the offspring of sublime feelings and purely mystical emotions. It is, rather, a profoundly deep and actual experience of spiritual communion with the spirit influences resident within the human mind, and as far as such an experience is definable in terms of psychology, it is simply the experience of experiencing the reality of believing in God as the reality of such a purely personal experience.
101:1.5 (1105.2) While religion is not the product of the rationalistic speculations of a material cosmology, it is, nonetheless, the creation of a wholly rational insight which originates in man’s mind-experience. Religion is born neither of mystic meditations nor of isolated contemplations, albeit it is ever more or less mysterious and always indefinable and inexplicable in terms of purely intellectual reason and philosophic logic.
The germs of true religion originate in the domain of man’s moral consciousness, and they are revealed in the growth of man’s spiritual insight, that faculty of human personality which accrues as a consequence of the presence of the God-revealing Thought Adjuster in the God-hungry mortal mind.
101:1.6 (1105.3)
Faith unites moral insight with conscientious discriminations of values, and the pre-existent evolutionary sense of duty completes the ancestry of true religion. The experience of religion eventually results in the certain consciousness of God and in the undoubted assurance of the survival of the believing personality.
Me here: And this is the very real and present danger of Jim's sermons and so called essays here. They so frequently distort and refute and contradict the UB as he coopts well defined terms into his metaphorical preferences which support his personal belief system Beware!!
For those sincere students who may wish to consider what the UB teaches about the personal religious and faith experience, please consider the following topics posted here at TruthBook:
Pagans and the Evolution of Religion:https://truthbook.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5757Faith vs. intellect - fear of belief:
https://truthbook.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5696What Gives Salvation? Faith/Acts/Beliefs?:https://truthbook.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4592Such an important issue to consider and study the actual teachings given within the UB!
Beware all who seek to manipulate and goad by fear and spread anxiety and distrust in God's affection, mercy, and connection within. The UB is good and welcome news and not any threat or warning. Only weak and fearful mortal minds might think otherwise.
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