THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD and the brotherhood of man present the paradox of the part and the whole on the level of personality. God loves each individual as an individual child in the heavenly family. Yet God thus loves every individual; he is no respecter of persons, and the universality of his love brings into being a relationship of the whole: the universal brotherhood.
The love of the Father absolutely individualizes each personality as a unique child of the Universal Father, a child without duplicate in infinity, a will creature irreplaceable in all eternity. The Father’s love glorifies each child of God, illuminating each member of the celestial family, sharply silhouetting the unique nature of each personal being against the impersonal levels that lie outside the fraternal circuit of the Father of all. The love of God strikingly portrays the transcendent value of each will creature, unmistakably reveals the high value which the Universal Father has placed upon each and every one of his children from the highest creator personality of Paradise status to the lowest personality of will dignity among the savage tribes of men in the dawn of the human species on some evolutionary world of time and space.
This very love of God for the individual brings into being the divine family of all individuals, the universal brotherhood of the freewill children of the Paradise Father. And this brotherhood, being universal, is a relationship of the whole. Brotherhood, when universal, discloses not the each relationship, but the all relationship. Brotherhood is a reality of the total and therefore discloses qualities of the whole in contradistinction to qualities of the part.
Brotherhood constitutes a fact of relationship between every personality in universal existence. No person can escape the benefits or the penalties that may come as a result of relationship to other persons. The part profits or suffers in measure with the whole. The good effort of each man benefits all men; the error or evil of each man augments the tribulation of all men. As moves the part, so moves the whole. As the progress of the whole, so the progress of the part. The relative velocities of part and whole determine whether the part is retarded by the inertia of the whole or is carried forward by the momentum of the cosmic brotherhood.¹
You become conscious of man as your creature brother because you are already conscious of God as your Creator Father. Fatherhood is the relationship out of which we reason ourselves into the recognition of brotherhood. And Fatherhood becomes, or may become, a universe reality to all moral creatures because the Father has himself bestowed personality upon all such beings and has encircuited them within the grasp of the universal personality circuit. We worship God, first, because he is, then, because he is in us, and last, because we are in him.
Is it strange that the cosmic mind should be self-consciously aware of its own source, the infinite mind of the Infinite Spirit, and at the same time conscious of the physical reality of the far-flung universes, the spiritual reality of the Eternal Son, and the personality reality of the Universal Father?²
THE URANTIA BOOK
¹PAPER 12 THE UNIVERSE OF UNIVERSES
SECTION 7 THE PART AND THE WHOLE
²PAPER 16 THE SEVEN MASTER SPIRITS
SECTION 9 REALITY OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/02/16/1364637/-BREAKING-Obama-Is-NOT-The-Antichrist
Obama is not the Antichrist.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/15/religious-fanaticism-huge-factor-americans-support-israel/
The nascent brotherhood of those whose belief, understanding, and actions are informed by their study of the Papers has been systematically co-opted. manipulated, and marginalized by pro-Israel zealots whose loyalty is to their tribe and to the Zionist nation state. They are ably aided by nominally “Christian” Zionists who are largely ignorant of the life and religion of the human Jesus and dismissive of his teachings.
196:1.1 Jesus’ devotion to the Father’s will and the service of man was even more than mortal decision and human determination; it was a wholehearted consecration of himself to such an unreserved bestowal of love. No matter how great the fact of the sovereignty of Michael, you must not take the human Jesus away from men. The Master has ascended on high as a man, as well as God; he belongs to men; men belong to him. How unfortunate that religion itself should be so misinterpreted as to take the human Jesus away from struggling mortals! Let not the discussions of the humanity or the divinity of the Christ obscure the saving truth that Jesus of Nazareth was a religious man who, by faith, achieved the knowing and the doing of the will of God; he was the most truly religious man who has ever lived on Urantia.
196:1.2 The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must not be longer sacrificed to even the splendid concept of the glorified Christ. What a transcendent service if, through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his name, and to all other religions! Surely the Christian fellowship of believers will not hesitate to make such adjustments of faith and of practices of living as will enable it to “follow after” the Master in the demonstration of his real life of religious devotion to the doing of his Father’s will and of consecration to the unselfish service of man. Do professed Christians fear the exposure of a self-sufficient and unconsecrated fellowship of social respectability and selfish economic maladjustment? Does institutional Christianity fear the possible jeopardy, or even the overthrow, of traditional ecclesiastical authority if the Jesus of Galilee is reinstated in the minds and souls of mortal men as the ideal of personal religious living? Indeed, the social readjustments, the economic transformations, the moral rejuvenations, and the religious revisions of Christian civilization would be drastic and revolutionary if the living religion of Jesus should suddenly supplant the theologic religion about Jesus.
The scholarly study of the history of political violence motivated by historical grievance reveals patterns and commonalities across racial, religious, and national lines. Unsurprisingly, groups motivated by historical grievances to use violence tend to be focused on the past. To the extent that they look to the future, their goals tend to be informed primarily by the desire to reclaim lost power, security, prestige, and land area controlled in the past during what they view as their nation’s or group’s golden age. Violent groups motivated by historical grievance march into the future resolutely facing backwards with their eyes focused determinedly on the imagined racial and religious glory of their ancestors; they have no idea where they are actually going and precious little or no concern or understanding as to how their plans and violent actions may affect others and shape mankind’s immediate future.
Pro-Israel Islamophobes, while claiming to be the acme of modernity, have frequently and persistently derided those they hate for their supposed allegiance to a primitive, backwards 13th century Islamic religious and cultural perspective. Evidence strongly suggests that the racist, bigoted accusations Christian and Jewish Zionists spew at Muslims are intended to distract attention from religious extremism in their own political tent and within their own religious tradition, extremism based directly on primitive cultural mores and religious practices that predate both Islam and Christianity. Israel’s Third Temple fanatics don’t look back to the 13th Century. They dream of the pre-Christian era and, if we take them at their word, their plan is to bring an end to Christianity, Islam, and all other religions except, of course, their own.
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/11/vision-replace-mosque
“And when I asked a young [Jewish] American named Jeremy, What do you think [Israel] will look like in 100 years? he responded with a religious vision: I see millions of people streaming through these streets to get to the temple to make animal sacrifices. People of all former religions from all over the world, he said–because then the messiah would be here and the other religions would disappear,” wrote Philip Weiss late last year.
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2014/04/15/israeli-settler-priests-prepare-to-build-holy-temple-resume-animal-sacrifices/
“So, when a bunch of seeming fanatics parade a bunch of fat, balding middle aged men through the streets of Jerusalem and tell us they’re the Jewish High Priests of the future, I sit up and take notice. This is friggin’ scary. Not because the rest of world Jewry will respond in any positive way to this rump attempt to revive the priestly elite. But rather because the combination of this religious movement allied with State power will send Israel even farther in the direction of religious holy war.
“There may be readers and policymakers in the U.S. and Europe who believe that this is a case of the boy who cried, “wolf.” But I assure any sensible analyst or policymaker that this is a lot worse than a silly visual farce (which it is). It could rapidly spin out of control, just as Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount led directly to the second Intifada. If anyone thinks Muslims throughout the world will react with equanimity to news of Jews encroaching on the Haram al-Sharif, they should have their heads examined. Israeli Jewish fanaticism will be met with strenuous Muslim resistance.
“I also urge Jewish religious leaders around the world to soundly reject this project. There must be a loud, united voice saying Jews do not want this. We do not want priests, we do not want sacrifices, we do not want Jews raising their arms in a priestly salute that reminds some of us other similar past racist salutes, we do not want a Temple. The poor goat sacrificed is worthier than those who would slaughter it. The blood flowing from its veins which they bless with a bracha is nothing more than a travesty and needless animal cruelty. Their ritual project is nothing more than what the impatient Jews did in Sinai with the Golden Calf. It is avodah zarah, worship of strange gods. We want values and ideas, not sacred relics,” wrote Richard Silverstein.
Third Temple zealots and those within the Israeli government who support their religious fanaticism desperately need and want a major war in the region and beyond. They need the chaos and fog of a major war in order to put into action their plans to raze the Muslim holy places on the Temple Mount, which is known as the Haram al-Sharif to Muslims, there to build their Third Temple and, for the first time in some 2,000 years, restore ritual animal sacrifice to what they consider its rightful place at the center of religion and worship.
Communion, the service of Christian worship during which bread and wine are consecrated and shared, is based on the words and actions of Jesus at the Last Supper. Jesus’s substitution of bread and wine as symbols for flesh and blood in establishing his bloodless remembrance supper effectively removed ritual slaughter from its place at the center of primitive evolutionary religion. Even some non-believers view the Christian communion ritual and the de-legitimization of ritual slaughter/blood sacrifice in worship as the single most important act of social engineering in the evolution of religion. They might note, too, that his bloodless remembrance supper is philosophically consistent with Jesus’s portrayal of a just, loving, and merciful Heavenly Father.
Third Temple fanatics’ primitive vision of God is one that some self-professed Christian Zionists share and support. Any group’s vision of an angry, vengeful God whose wrath can only be propitiated by the ritual slaughter of living creatures is primitive, savage, exclusivist, and utterly incompatible with the modern world. The reasons for that are readily evident and should be glaringly obvious. Religion is socially powerful essentially because it represents believers’ most cherished ideas and ideals–or conceits. Devout believers strive to represent those ideas and ideals in their daily lives.
Religious belief informs and motivates human action. Ceremonial animal slaughter, ritual animal sacrifice in religion, shares typology with human sacrifice, and the vast majority of Jews and others consider the practice barbaric and repulsive. Most Jews view it as dangerous as well, not least because its reintroduction in Jewish religious services would surely increase anti-Jewish feeling and incite “blood libel,” the kinds of false charges of human sacrifice that were directed against Jews in the Middle Ages, a feature of classic European anti-Semitism that contributed directly to centuries of terrible prejudice and the horrific persecution of Jews.
Efforts to reintroduce and re-legitimize ritual slaughter, animal sacrifice, in religion and worship are dangerously retrograde, a reversion to a primitive religion with the ceremonial killing of animals commercially raised, groomed, and sold for slaughter as its center. Those familiar with Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, ideas, attitudes, political parties, policies, and laws based on historical Hebrew texts that promote primitive, exclusivist, tribal notions of racial superiority, can only be concerned by evidence of growing religious fanaticism there, fanaticism that has found socially-destabilizing political purchase in Tel Aviv and in Washington.
4:5.4 The barbarous idea of appeasing an angry God, of propitiating an offended Lord, of winning the favor of Deity through sacrifices and penance and even by the shedding of blood, represents a religion wholly puerile and primitive, a philosophy unworthy of an enlightened age of science and truth. Such beliefs are utterly repulsive to the celestial beings and the divine rulers who serve and reign in the universes. It is an affront to God to believe, hold, or teach that innocent blood must be shed in order to win his favor or to divert the fictitious divine wrath.
4:5.5 The Hebrews believed that “without the shedding of blood there could be no remission of sin.” They had not found deliverance from the old and pagan idea that the Gods could not be appeased except by the sight of blood, though Moses did make a distinct advance when he forbade human sacrifices and substituted therefor, in the primitive minds of his childlike Bedouin followers, the ceremonial sacrifice of animals.
4:5.6 The bestowal of a Paradise Son on your world was inherent in the situation of closing a planetary age; it was inescapable, and it was not made necessary for the purpose of winning the favor of God. This bestowal also happened to be the final personal act of a Creator Son in the long adventure of earning the experiential sovereignty of his universe. What a travesty upon the infinite character of God! this teaching that his fatherly heart in all its austere coldness and hardness was so untouched by the misfortunes and sorrows of his creatures that his tender mercies were not forthcoming until he saw his blameless Son bleeding and dying upon the cross of Calvary!
4:5.7 But the inhabitants of Urantia are to find deliverance from these ancient errors and pagan superstitions respecting the nature of the Universal Father. The revelation of the truth about God is appearing, and the human race is destined to know the Universal Father in all that beauty of character and loveliness of attributes so magnificently portrayed by the Creator Son who sojourned on Urantia as the Son of Man and the Son of God.