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The Parliament of The World's Religions.
Byron Belitsos, OK, USA
For anyone interested in the future of religion, the 1993 Parliament of the World's Religions, held in Chicago last September, was a central event of our times, a jubilee for inter-religious dialogue. It also marked the centennial of the world-historic 1893 Parliament of World Religion, now recognized as the founding event in the interfaith movement. The 1993 Parliament heralded a new beginning for the movement for religious unity in a postmodern world.
I attended the Parliament as a member of the press corps, but I was gladly swept up in the spontaneous religious fervor of the event. It was indeed a watershed in my own religious growth. My concepts of unity were so deepened, my inspiration from the event was so powerful, that in certain moments the ground on which we stood became sacred, became for me a mythic world center, an axis mundi. Through this place--the mundane Palmer House Hotel in downtown Chicago--was poured a unifying spirit manifesting itself in a dazzling array of forms of human expression of the divine.
Beauty is a matter of "the harmonic unification of contrasts", and "variety is essential to the concept of beauty" (646). Because 125 faiths were united there, the Parliament was an epiphany of the beauty of religious unity--albeit a brief experience of sharing crowded into a week in September.
In actuality, religious unity is a distant dream for Urantia. We have not even achieved peace and non-violence between the religions; it is depressing to realize that many of the 40 or so wars and conflicts in the world today are religiously-motivated. The war in Bosnia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the conflict in Northern Ireland are sad examples of the breakdowns that occur when diverse religions are not in dialogue. But the eight days of the Parliament last September were an inspiring model of where we are headed. With a few exceptions, it was marked by unity, tolerance, and loving dialogue between the myriad of faiths represented.
To adequately summarize the events of this historic week is nearly an impossible task. Consider that each day, the 6000 attendees had a choice among: morning and evening interfaith meditation sessions; two plenary sessions; dozens of major presentations in large ballrooms by some of the world's leading religious figures; more than 100 seminars and lectures on every conceivable topic; an extensive video/film festival; special symposiums on religious pluralism, science, business ethics, and media; and numerous artistic events.
Choosing from this rich menu of options was in itself a religious experience!
The Urantia Book and the parliament
It is unfortunate indeed that no organization representing The Urantia Book participated in any of these interfaith activities. Only one lecture by a Urantia Book reader-believer was given, an impromptu event attended by less than ten people. This lecture was not listed in the 151-page program booklet for the Parliament, which included over 600 lectures, seminars, and workshops of amazing variety. Why? The Fellowship of Urantia Book Readers had voted not to join the 125 sponsoring organizations. It did reverse itself just a few weeks before--but too late to be visible in the Parliament program. As an afterthought, a committee of the Fellowship did sponsor a strictly promotional booth. The Urantia Foundation, headquartered in Chicago , was completely absent, not even sending an observer of the proceedings. This is shocking when you consider that several thousand representatives of overseas religions flew into Chicago at great expense.
All this is especially puzzling in view of the Book's progressive teachings on religious unity and interfaith dialogue. On page 1012 we read, "There is not a Urantia religion that could not profitably study and assimilate the best of the truths in every other faith, for they all contain truth." Might this not also apply to believers in the Urantia revelation?
In the Urmia lectures, Jesus himself advocates that all religions "...completely divest themselves of all ecclesiastical authority and fully surrender all concept of spiritual sovereignty...." (1487) 1 would therefore ask, do believers in the fifth epochal revelation lay claim to such authority? If not in theory, then in action?
Most of the religions represented at the Parliament evolved from what their adherents believe is a textual revelation of some kind of revelatory event. Think of The Koran, the Vedas, the tablets of Baha'ulla that created the Baha'i religion, The Hebrew Bible, The Book of Mormon, or the scriptures resulting from the revelatory event of Jesus, or Buddha's, or Zoroaster's life and teachings. Believers in all these revelations of truth participated at the Parliament. What keeps us from dialogue with so many others with whom we share a claim to revelation?
Our absence from the Parliament shows once again how urgent it has become for reader-believers of The Urantia Book to constitute themselves as a bona fide religious movement, a spiritual movement that embodies a mixture of evolutionary and revelatory religion--just like any other religion on Urantia. Anything less is intellectually dishonest and
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