Meredith Sprunger's Synopsis of The Urantia Book
Synopsis of Paper 70
THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN GOVERNMENT
1. No sooner had man partially solved the problem of making a living than he was confronted with the task of regulating human contacts. Th. development of industry demanded law, order, and social adjustment; private property necessitated government.
2. War is the natural state and heritage of evolving man; peace is the social yardstick measuring civilization's advancement ...War is an animalistic reaction to misunderstandings and irritations…The Sangik races, together with the later deteriorated Adamites and Nodites, were all belligerent. The Andonites were early taught the golden rule, and, even today, their Eskimo descendants live very much by that code; custom is strong among them, and they are fairly free from violent antagonisms. Andon taught his children to settle disputes by each beating a tree with a stick, meanwhile cursing the tree; the one whose stick broke first was the victor.
3. Warfare persists because man is human, evolved from an animal, and all animals are bellicose. Among the early causes of war were:
1. Hunger...2. Woman scarcity...3. Vanity ...4. Slaves...5. Revenge...6. Recreation. ..7. Religion ...One of the great peace moves of the ages has been the attempt to separate church and state.
4. The first refinement of war was the taking of prisoners. Next, women were exempted from hostilities, and then came the recognition of noncombatants ....The practice of declaring war represented great progress…and this was followed by the gradual development of the rules of "civilized" warfare.
5. In past ages a fierce war would institute social changes and facilitate the adoption of new ideas such as would not have occurred naturally in ten thousand years ...War has had a certain evolutionary and selective value, but like slavery, it must sometime be abandoned as civilization slowly advances ...War has served many valuable purposes in the past, it has been an indispensable scaffolding in the building of civilization, but it is rapidly becoming culturally bankrupt—incapable of producing dividends of social gain in any way commensurate with the terrible losses attendant upon its invocation.
6. If industrialism is to triumph over militarism, it must avoid the dangers which beset it. The perils of budding industry on Urantia are:
1. The strong drift toward materialism, spiritual blindness.
2. The worship of wealth‑power, value distortion.
3. The vices of luxury, cultural immaturity.
4. The increasing dangers of indolence, service insensitivity.
5. The growth of undesirable racial softness, biologic deterioration.
6. The threat of standardized industrial slavery, personality stagnation. Labor is ennobling but drudgery is benumbing ...Society should in every way possible foster originality.
7. Man will never accept peace as a normal mode of living until he has been thoroughly and repeatedly convinced that peace is best for his material welfare, and until society has wisely provided peaceful substitutes for the gratification of that inherent tendency periodically to let loose a collective drive designed to liberate those ever‑accumulating emotions and energies belonging to the self‑preservation reactions of the human species.
8. The peace of Urantia will be promoted far more by international trade organizations than by all the sentimental sophistry of visionary peace planning.. .Modern society is largely held together by the industrial market.
9. The ceremony of adoption consisted in drinking each other's blood. In some groups saliva was exchanged in the place of blood drinking, this being the ancient origin of the practice of social kissing ...eventually wine alone was drunk to seal the adoption ceremony...Arab ancestors made use of the oath taken while the hand of the candidate rested upon the generative organ of the tribal native.
10. The earliest peace missions consisted of delegations of men bringing their choice maidens for the sex gratification of their onetime enemies, the sex appetite being utilized in combating the war urge ...And soon intermarriages between the families of the chiefs were sanctioned.
11. The first real governmental body was the council of the elders…This reign of the oligarchy of age gradually grew into the patriarchal idea. In the early council of the elders, there resided the potential of all governmental functions; executive, legislative, and. judicial.
12. Effective state rule only came with the arrival of a chief with full executive authority. Man found that effective government could be had only by conferring power on a personality, not by endowing an idea ...Hereditary kingship avoided the anarchy which had previously wrought such havoc between the death of a king and the election of a successor.
13. The succession of kings was eventually regarded as supernatural…Thus kings became fetish personalities and were inordinately feared, a special form of speech being adopted for court usage ....The early fetish king was often kept in seclusion... Ordinarily a representative was chosen to impersonate him, and this is the origin of prime ministers.
14. Blood kinship determined the first social groups...The next advance in social development was the evolution of religious cults arid the political clubs. These first appeared as secret societies ...The very secrecy of these societies conferred on all members the power of mystery over the rest of the tribe. Secrecy also appeals to vanity; the initiates were the social aristocracy of their day.
15. The puberty initiation ceremony usually extended over a period of five years. Much self‑torture and painful cutting entered into these ceremonies. Circumcision was first practiced as a rite of initiation into one of these secret fraternities ...But the secret societies did aim at the improvement of adolescent morals; one of the chief purposes of the puberty ceremonies was to impress upon the boy that he must leave other men's wives alone.
16. Many later tribes sanctioned the formation of women’s secret clubs, the purpose of which was to prepare adolescent girls for wifehood and motherhood ...Women's orders pledged against marriage early came into existence.
17. All secret associations imposed an oath, enjoined confidence, and taught the keeping of secrets. These orders awed, and controlled the mobs; they also acted as vigilance societies, thus, practicing lynch law. They were the first spies when the tribes were at war and the first secret police during times of peace. Best of all they kept unscrupulous kings on the anxious seat.
18. These clubs were employed by merchants to collect debts and by rulers to collect taxes. Taxation has been a long struggle, one of the earliest forms being the tithe, one tenth of the hunt or spoils. Taxes were originally levied to keep up the king's house, but it was found that they were easier to collect when disguised as an offering for the support of the temple service.
19. The mental and physical inequality of human beings insures that social classes will appear. The only worlds without social strata are the most primitive and the most advanced ...Classes in society, having naturally formed, will persist until man gradually achieves their evolutionary obliteration through intelligent manipulation of the biologic, intellectual, and spiritual resources of a progressing civilization... Religion is the mighty lever that lifts civilization from chaos, but it is powerless apart from the fulcrum of sound and normal mind resting securely on sound and normal heredity.
20. Nature confers no rights on man, only life and a world in which to live it ...Society's prime gift to man is security ...When rights are old beyond knowledge or origin, they are often called natural rights. But human rights are not really natural; they are entirely social. They are relative and ever changing.
21. The weak and the inferior have always contended for equal rights ...Society cannot offer equal rights to all, but it can promise to administer the varying rights of each with fairness and equity
22. In the earliest primitive society public opinion operated directly; officers of law were not needed. There was no privacy in primitive life ...It was very early believed that ghosts administered justice through the medicine men and priests; this constituted these orders the first crime detectors and officers of the law. Their early methods of detecting crime consisted in conducting ordeals of poison, fire and pain.
23. It is not to be wondered that the Hebrews and other semicivilized tribes practiced... primitive techniques of justice administration three thousand years ago, but it is most amazing that thinking men would subsequently retain such a relic of barbarism within the pages of a collection of sacred writings.
24. Suicide was a common mode of retaliation. If one were unable to avenge himself in life, he died entertaining the belief that, as a ghost, he could return and visit wrath upon his enemy ...Primitive man did not hold life very dear; suicide over trifles was common.
25. The practice of paying "blood money" also came into vogue as a substitute for blood vengeance…The administration of true justice dates from the taking of revenge from private and kin groups and lodging it in the hands of the social group, the state.
26. Society could not have held together during early times had not rights had the sanction of religion; superstition was the moral and social police force of the long evolutionary ages. The ancients all claimed that their olden laws, the taboos, had been given to their ancestors by the gods. Law is a codified record of long human experience, public opinion crystallized and legalized.
27. The first courts were regulated fistic encounters; the judges were merely umpires or referees..."Might was still right." Later on, verbal arguments were substituted for physical blows ...the status of any civilization may be very accurately determined by the thoroughness and equity of its courts and by the integrity of its judges.
28. Urantia mortals are entitled to liberty; they should create their systems of government; they should adopt their constitutions or other charters of civil authority and administrative procedure. And having done this, they should. select their most competent and worthy fellows as chief executives. F or representatives in the legislative branch they should elect only those who are qualified intellectually and morally to fulfill such sacred responsibilities. As judges of their high and supreme tribunals only those who are endowed with natural ability and who have been made wise by replete experience should be chosen.
29. Mankind's struggle to perfect government on Urantia has to do with perfecting channels of administration, with adapting them to ever‑changing current needs, with improving power distribution within government, and then with selecting such administrative leaders as are truly wise.
Discussion Questions1. What do you think of Andon’s way of having his children settle disputes?
2. How do contemporary people exercise their bellicose nature?
3. What are the advantages and liabilities of recent wars?
4. What are the civilized substitutes for war?
5. Why do we still keep the Old Testament as a saced writing when it contains many immoral practices?
6. What are the different classes of society today?
7. Why is the divine and ideal form of government not given by revelation?
A Service of
The Urantia Book Fellowship