Day 20 - THE JEWS OF JESUS' TIME

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THE JEWS OF JESUS' TIME is here:

http://maninthemaze.blogspot.com/2011/12/jews-of-jesus-time.html

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ERRONEOUS IDEAS OF GOD

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From THE URANTIA BOOK

Part I, 4, 4 

 

ERRONEOUS IDEAS OF GOD

   Religious tradition is the imperfectly preserved record of the experiences of the God-knowing men of past ages, but such records are untrustworthy as guides for religious living or as the source of true information about the Universal Father. Such ancient beliefs have been invariably altered by the fact that primitive man was a mythmaker.

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   One of the greatest sources of confusion on Urantia concerning the nature of God grows out of the failure of your sacred books clearly to distinguish between the personalities of the Paradise Trinity and between Paradise Deity and the local universe creators and administrators. During the past dispensations of partial understanding, your priests and prophets failed clearly to differentiate between Planetar Princes, System Sovereigns, Constellation Fathers, Creator Sons, Superuniverse Rulers, the Supreme Being, and the Universal Father. Many of the messages of subordinate personalities, such as Life Carriers and various orders of angels, have been, in your records, presented as coming from God himself. Urantian religious thought still confuses the associate personalities of Deity with the Universal Father himself, so that all are included under one appellation.

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   The people of Urantia continue to suffer from the influence of primitive concepts of God. The gods who go on a rampage in the storm; who shake the earth in their wrath and strike down men in their anger; who inflict their judgments of displeasure in times of famine and flood—these are the gods of primitive religion; they are not the Gods who live and rule the universes. Such concepts are a relic of the times when men supposed that the universe was under the guidance and domination of the whims of such imaginary gods. But mortal man is beginning to realize that he lives in a realm of comparative law and order as far as concerns the administrative policies and conduct of the Supreme Creators and the Supreme Controllers.
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   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.

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   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.

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   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!

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   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.
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PRIESTS AND RITUALS

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From THE URANTIA BOOK
Part III, 90, 5
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The essence of the ritual is the perfection of its performance; among savages it must be practiced with exact precision. It is only when the ritual has been correctly carried out that the ceremony possesses compelling power over the spirits. If the ritual is faulty, it only arouses the anger and resentment of the gods. Therefore, since man’s slowly evolving mind conceived that the technique of ritual was the decisive factor in its efficacy, it was inevitable that the early shamans should sooner or later evolve into a priesthood trained to direct the meticulous practice of the ritual. And so for tens of thousands of years endless rituals have hampered society and cursed civilization, have been an intolerable burden to every act of life, every racial undertaking.
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 Ritual is the technique of sanctifying custom;

 ritual creates and perpetuates myths as well as contributing to the preservation of social and religious customs. Again, ritual itself has been fathered by myths. Rituals are often at first social, later becoming economic and finally acquiring the sanctity and dignity of religious ceremonial. Ritual may be personal or group in practice — or both — as illustrated by prayer, dancing, and drama.

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Words become a part of ritual, such as the use of terms like amen and selah. The habit of swearing, profanity, represents a prostitution of former ritualistic repetition of holy names. The making of pilgrimages to sacred shrines is a very ancient ritual. The ritual next grew into elaborate ceremonies of purification, cleansing, and sanctification. The initiation ceremonies of the primitive tribal secret societies were in reality a crude religious rite. The worship technique of the olden mystery cults was just one long performance of accumulated religious ritual. Ritual finally developed into the modern types of social ceremonials and religious worship, services embracing prayer, song, responsive reading, and other individual and group spiritual devotions.

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 The priests evolved from shamans up through oracles, diviners, singers, dancers, weathermakers, guardians of religious relics, temple custodians, and foretellers of events, to the status of actual directors of religious worship. Eventually the office became hereditary; a continuous priestly caste arose.

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 As religion evolved, priests began to specialize according to their innate talents or special predilections. Some became singers, others prayers, and still others sacrificers; later came the orators — preachers. And when religion became institutionalized, these priests claimed to “hold the keys of heaven.”
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 The priests have always sought to impress and awe the common people by conducting the religious ritual in an ancient tongue and by sundry magical passes so to mystify the worshipers as to enhance their own piety and authority. The great danger in all this is that the ritual tends to become a substitute for religion.

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 The priesthoods have done much to delay scientific development and to hinder spiritual progress, but they have contributed to the stabilization of civilization and to the enhancement of certain kinds of culture. But many modern priests have ceased to function as directors of the ritual of the worship of God, having turned their attention to theology — the attempt to define God.
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 It is not denied that the priests have been a millstone about the neck of the races, but the true religious leaders have been invaluable in pointing the way to higher and better realities.

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THEOLOGY FROM AN ASTRONAUT

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When I was the last man to

walk on the moon in December 1972,

I stood in the blue darkness and looked in awe

at the earth from the lunar surface.

What I saw was almost too beautiful to grasp.

There was too much logic, too much purpose -

it was just too beautiful to have happend by accident.

It doesn't matter how you choose to worship God ....

He has to exist to have created what I was privileged to see.

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Astronaut Gene Cernan

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THE HOLY SPIRIT CAN BE IDENTIFIED

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In every school of Christianity,

we see people who follow the same spirit,

who do not want to speculate on what cannot

be speculated about. "Negative theology"

is an effort and practice to prevent Christians

from being caught by notions and concepts

that prevent them from touching the living

spirit of Christianity. When we speak of

negative theology, the theology about the

Death of God, we are talking about the

death of every concept we may have of God

in order to experience God as a living

reality directly.

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A good theologian is one who says almost

nothing about God, even though the word

"theology" means "discourse about God."

It is risky to talk about God. The notion

of God might be an obstacle for us to touch

God as love, wisdom, and mindfulness.

The Buddha was very clear about this.

He said, "You tell me that you are in love with

a beautiful woman, but when I ask you,

'What is the color of her eyes? What is her

name? What is the name of her town?'

you cannot tell me. I don't believe you are

really in love with something real."

Your notion of God may be vague like that,

not having to do with reality. The Buddha was

not against God. He was only against notions

of God that are mere mental constructions

that do not correspond to reality, notions

that prevent us from developing ourselves

and touching ultimate reality.

That is why I believe it is safer to approach

God through the Holy Spirit than through

the door of theology. We can identify

the Holy Spirit whenever it makes its

presence felt. Whenever we see someone

who is loving, compassionate, mindful,

caring, and understanding, we know

that the Holy Spirit is there.

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From Living Buddha, Living Christ

Thich Nhat Hanh

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HOW ABOUT THOSE MONKS!?!

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Monasticism was actually an immense and
multifarious series of experiments in alternative
community lifestyles. The monks prayed and
meditated (directed fantasy), sang, read, composed
music, copied and illuminated manuscripts,
studied every classical language and discipline,
developed new agricultural techniques, provided
solace and hospitality, worked, ate, and drank
together in thousands of different communal
patterns. Nor were they wholly "withdrawn" from
the everyday world. They interacted with it at a
hundred different levels. They served, taught,
nursed, prayed for, and contributed to the life
of the commonweal. The different monastic orders
displayed numberless fantasies of how human beings
could live together in love and mutuality.
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The monks understood their relation to the
rest of Christendom within a theological
worldview that seems implausible to us today,
at least on the surface. They were praying for
the people who had less time to pray because
they fought, ruled, or toiled in the fields.
The monks lived out a longing for spiritual
perfection that was hardly possible for all men.
Their communities, in other words, were
contributing in their own distinctive way to
the future everyone in Christendom expected
or at least hoped for, a blissful reward in
heaven after death.
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Though this theology eludes us today,
the monks were really more accurate than
we often think. They were in fact contributing
to the future of the whole civilization, though
not quite in the way they understood.
The seeds of the Renaissance and the Reformation
were cultivated in the monasteries. Luther and
Mendel were both monks. The Benedictines
practiced participatory democracy before it
became a political issue. The idea of a
disciplined work schedule and of work as
service to God began with the monks, and
without it the entire Industrial Revolution
could never have occurred. Max Weber was
right when he said that during the Reformation
"every man became a monk and the whole world
a monastery." Life styles, discipline, and
communal patterns that had been born,
nourished, and refined in small communities
now supplied the pattern for a whole civilization.
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From The Feast of FoolsHarvey Cox
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