Joined: Sun Mar 25, 2012 5:29 am +0000
Posts: 6028
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Greetings Steve!
I could not begin to count the Ah Ha and WOW moments I had reading the UB the first time, still having them after many, many readings and decades later. So many preconceptions and beliefs confirmed, so many dots connected, so many mysteries explained, so many falsehoods revealed, so brilliantly cohesive and comprehensible and logical....OF COURSE!! You will be delighted to know that no matter how many times you read this text, still will new meanings emerge from old facts as the contents begin to transform from many concepts into a singular perspective of universe reality that integrates all these many elements and all this history and all these personalities into a multi-dimensional tapestry and full throated orchestra presenting a completed symphony of power.
no sophist gives very wise counsel...allow me to reiterate. The UB teaches that all true religious experience is good and that people have profoundly important and fruitful religious experience without reality knowledge and even with false beliefs. Faith is not dependent upon knowledge of facts or the correctness of beliefs. We are not to judge primitive, evolutionary religions or the religious experience of primitive minds based on our own beliefs or knowledge (or false convictions and prejudices either).
Jesus did not attempt to correct or challenge or criticize that which was false in anyone's beliefs. He attempted to find that which was held in common and to recognize the light of faith in others and to promote that and encourage that and hold that sacred and something shared by us all. He taught his apostles to honor traditional religions and the traditions of religion for the faithful are faithful and thereby righteous in motive and intention and need no correction or coercion or conversion.
Indeed the Master once said it would be better to have a mill stone tied about one's neck and thrown into the sea that to take away the faith of another!! We are to be VERY careful not to belittle or diminish the flicker of faith in any other being....this is not love! It is self important and evil! Be focused on how to add to, not subtract from! Or so Jesus taught us.
We are taught to ADD to the hope, trust, ideals, peace, confidence, and faith we find in others, no matter the underlying beliefs with which we may agree OR disagree. Our evangelism should be tempered by the sharing of the fruits of the spirit...not by demands for correction and conversions. Jesus did not begin a religion about Jesus - the Apostles did that. Jesus came to release us all from fear of damnation and a the myth and lie of an angry and vengeful God...the true gospel, the Jesusonian Gospel is simply that God loves us with a paternal and Divine affection and we are all his beloved children and that makes us all one family in God's creation and friendly universe!!
The UB is very complimentary to Buddhism and describes it as the most likely belief to adopt and adapt the Jesusonian Gospel (not Christianity) due to the truths learned so long ago by Lao Tsu and Siddhartha Guatama. Great and profound teachers of truth as described in the UB...share that with your wife!!
Finally, for now....the UB teaches that the reason there is so much evil in the world is the same reason as taught by the Buddhists....we reap what we sow...the karmic repercussions of poor choice. Evil is always a potential with free will creatures. We are free will creatures. The potential for evil is realized by the self choosing self importance over importance of others. It is also realized and unleased by immaturity, inexperience, and impatience as well as when anxiety, fear, anger, or greed impinge upon our being and our choosing. Lack of spirituality and religious experience is also the correct answer but both of those require experience in choosing and experiential wisdom from the prior errors/evils of less wise choosing to learn to choose better/wiser...and still better/wiser... and still even better and wiser.
Such experiential learning and wisdom is a long endeavor, merely begun in this material life on the planets of origin for the pilgrims of time. We have much to learn in this journey of perfecting. Karma was only later polluted and burdened by the notion of reincarnation (which does not exist)...don't throw the karma baby out with the reincarnation water!! Acts have consequences. Choices deliver repercussions...both the good and the contrasting bad....the better to learn thereby!
103:1.3 While your religion is a matter of personal experience, it is most important that you should be exposed to the knowledge of a vast number of other religious experiences (the diverse interpretations of other and diverse mortals) to the end that you may prevent your religious life from becoming egocentric—circumscribed, selfish, and unsocial.
103:1.5 That religionists have believed so much that was false does not invalidate religion because religion is founded on the recognition of values and is validated by the faith of personal religious experience. Religion, then, is based on experience and religious thought; theology, the philosophy of religion, is an honest attempt to interpret that experience. Such interpretative beliefs may be right or wrong, or a mixture of truth and error.
101:9.2 When you presume to sit in critical judgment on the primitive religion of man (or on the religion of primitive man), you should remember to judge such savages and to evaluate their religious experience in accordance with their enlightenment and status of conscience. Do not make the mistake of judging another's religion by your own standards of knowledge and truth.
94:6.3 Lao-tse built directly upon the concepts of the Salem traditions when he declared Tao to be the One First Cause of all creation. Lao was a man of great spiritual vision. He taught that man's eternal destiny was "everlasting union with Tao, Supreme God and Universal King." His comprehension of ultimate causation was most discerning, for he wrote: "Unity arises out of the Absolute Tao, and from Unity there appears cosmic Duality, and from such Duality, Trinity springs forth into existence, and Trinity is the primal source of all reality." "All reality is ever in balance between the potentials and the actuals of the cosmos, and these are eternally harmonized by the spirit of divinity." *
94:6.4 Lao-tse also made one of the earliest presentations of the doctrine of returning good for evil: " Goodness begets goodness, but to the one who is truly good, evil also begets goodness."
94:7.7 When proclaimed at its best, Gautama's gospel of universal salvation, free from sacrifice, torture, ritual, and priests, was a revolutionary and amazing doctrine for its time. And it came surprisingly near to being a revival of the Salem gospel. It brought succor to millions of despairing souls, and notwithstanding its grotesque perversion during later centuries, it still persists as the hope of millions of human beings.
94:7.8 Siddhartha taught far more truth than has survived in the modern cults bearing his name. Modern Buddhism is no more the teachings of Gautama Siddhartha than is Christianity the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
94:8.3 The original gospel of Gautama was based on the four noble truths:
1. The noble truths of suffering.
2. The origins of suffering.
3. The destruction of suffering.
4. The way to the destruction of suffering
94:8.8 Closely linked to the doctrine of suffering and the escape therefrom was the philosophy of the Eightfold Path: right views, aspirations, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and contemplation. It was not Gautama's intention to attempt to destroy all effort, desire, and affection in the escape from suffering; rather was his teaching designed to picture to mortal man the futility of pinning all hope and aspirations entirely on temporal goals and material objectives. It was not so much that love of one's fellows should be shunned as that the true believer should also look beyond the associations of this material world to the realities of the eternal future.
94:9.6 Buddhism is a living, growing religion today because it succeeds in conserving many of the highest moral values of its adherents. It promotes calmness and self-control, augments serenity and happiness, and does much to prevent sorrow and mourning. Those who believe this philosophy live better lives than many who do not.
I was raised in and by the Bible but it was my studies in Zen that made the UB so serenely true to me...satori experienced by the discovery of discernment and inspired insights into the nature of being, becoming, and reality itself!! The enlightening experience of the embrace of knowledge and truth that transforms my being and my perspective of all that is. I am very grateful to the Buddhist traditions that originated by and from the Salem missionaries, one of the five epochal revelations to our world - the UB claims to be #5.
By the way, the authors of Part IV claim to have attended and witnessed the events presented in Part IV.
Thanks for sharing your journey!!
Bradly    
_________________
"Live loyally today—grow—and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole."
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