Religion and Morality
Audio File
No professed revelation of religion could be regarded as authentic if it failed to recognize the duty demands of ethical obligation which had been created and fostered by preceding evolutionary religion while it simultaneously and unfailingly expands the moral obligations of all prior revelations.
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.
True religion is that sublime and profound conviction within the soul which compellingly admonishes a human that it would be wrong for them not to believe in those immortal realities which constitute their highest ethical and moral concepts, their highest interpretation of life’s greatest values and the universe’s deepest realities. And such a religion is simply the experience of yielding intellectual loyalty to the highest dictates of spiritual consciousness. The enlightened spiritual consciousness of civilized humans is not concerned so much with some specific intellectual belief or with any one particular mode of living as with discovering the truth of living, the good and right technique of reacting to the ever-recurring situations of human existence. Moral consciousness is just a name applied to the human recognition and awareness of those ethical and emerging immortal values which duty demands that a person shall abide by in the day-by-day control and guidance of conduct.
Though recognizing that religion is imperfect, there are at least two practical manifestations of its nature and function:
- The spiritual urge and philosophic pressure of religion tend to cause humans to project their estimation of moral values directly outward into the affairs of their fellows — the ethical reaction of religion.
- Religion creates for the human mind a spiritualized consciousness of divine reality based on, and by faith derived from, antecedent concepts of moral values and coordinated with superimposed concepts of spiritual values. Religion thereby becomes a censor of human affairs, a form of glorified moral trust and confidence in reality, the enhanced realities of time and the more enduring realities of eternity.
Faith becomes the connection between moral consciousness and the spiritual concept of enduring reality. Religion becomes the avenue of a human’s escape from the material limitations of the temporal and natural world to the supernal realities of the eternal and spiritual world. by and through the technique of salvation, the progressive ‘immortal’ transformation.
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