Meredith Sprunger's Synopsis of The Urantia Book
Synopsis of Paper 86
EARLY EVOLUTION OF RELIGION
1. Aside from the natural worship urge, early evolutionary religion had. its roots of origin in the human experiences of chance—so‑called luck, commonplace happenings... The constant dread of unknown and unseen calamity hung over these savages as a cloud of despair which effectively eclipsed every pleasure; they lived in constant dread of doing something that would bring bad luck. Superstitious savages always feared a run of good luck; they viewed such good fortune as a certain harbinger of calamity... It is no wonder that partially civilized people still believe in chance and. evince lingering predispositions to gambling.
2. Anxiety was a natural state of the savage mind. When men and women fall victims to excessive anxiety, they are simply reverting to the natural estate of their far‑distant ancestors...Pain and suffering are essential to progressive evolution.
3. Mankind has been slow to learn that there is not necessarily any relationship between purposes and results. Human beings are only just beginning to realize that the reaction of existence appear between acts and their consequences...The difference between the minds of savage and. civilized men is more one of content than of nature, of degree rather than of quality.
4. Chance is a word which signifies that man is too ignorant or too indolent to determine causes...Exploration of the phenomena of life sooner or later destroys man's belief in chance, luck, and. so‑called accidents, substituting therefor a universe of law and order wherein all effects are preceded by definite causes. Thus is the fear of existence replaced by the joy of living.
5. Death was the supreme shock to evolving man, the most perplexing combination of chance and mystery...Death as a natural and expected end of life was not clear to the consciousness of primitive people, and it has required age upon age for men to realize its inevitability.
6. The dream origin of the belief in a future existence explains the tendency always to imagine unseen things in the terms of things seen. And presently this new dream‑ghost‑ future‑life concept begin effectively to antidote the death fear associated with the biologic instinct of self‑preservation.
7. Eventually the savage conceived of himself as a double—body and. breath. The breath minus the body equaled a spirit, a ghost. While having a very definite human origin, ghosts, or spirits, were regarded as superhuman. And. this belief in the existence of disembodied spirits seemed to explain the occurrence of the unusual, the extraordinary, the infrequent, and the inexplicable.
8. The primitive doctrine of survival after death was not necessarily a belief in immortality. Beings who could not count over twenty could hardly conceive of infinity and eternity; they rather thought of recurring incarnations.
9. Early man entertained no ideas of hell or future punishment. The savage looked upon the future life as just like this one minus all ill luck ...since many primitive races believed that men entered the next life just as he left this one, they...much preferred to be killed before becoming too infirm.
10. The nonmaterial part of man has been variously termed ghost, spirit, shade, phantom, specter, and latterly soul ...Gradually the dream life of the race so developed and. expanded the activities of this evolving spirit world that death was finally regarded as "giving up the ghost."...The savage looked. upon sneezing as an abortive attempt of the soul to escape from the body ...Later on, sneezing was always accompanied by some religious expression, such a. "God. bless you"
11. The ancients made a practice of awaking sleepers gradually so that the soul might have time to get back into the body...The ancients believed that souls could enter animals or even inanimate objects. This culminated in the werewolf ideas of animal identification. Primitive men thought that the soul was associated with the breath, and that its qualities could be imparted or transferred by the breath….It was long the custom of the eldest son to try to catch the last breath of his dying father,
12. Very early in the history of mankind the realities of the imaginary world of ghosts and spirits became universally believed, end this newly imagined spirit world became a power in primitive society. The mental and moral life of all mankind was modified for all time by the appearance of this new factor in human thinking and acting. Into this major premise of illusion and. ignorance, mortal fear has packed all of the subsequent superstition and religion of primitive peoples. This was man’s only religion up to the times of revelation, and today many of the world’s races have only this crude religion of evolution. .
13. Each passing generation smiles at the foolish superstitions of its ancestors while it goes on entertaining those fallacies of thought and. worship which will give cause for further smiling on the part of enlightened posterity.
14. The beginnings of a primitive philosophic life policy were emerging...The concept of right and wrong had at last evolved; and all of this long before the times of any revelation on earth. With the emergence of these concepts, there was initiated the long and wasteful struggle to appease the ever‑displeased spirits, the slavish bondage to evolutionary religious fear, that long waste of human effort upon tombs, temples, sacrifices, and. priesthoods. It was a terrible and frightful price to pay, but it was worth all it cost, for man therein achieved a natural consciousness of relative right and wrong; human ethics was born
15. Modern society is removing the business of insurance from the realm of priests aid religion, placing it in the domain of economics...Modern man, at least those who think, no longer pay wasteful premiums to control luck. Religion is slowly ascending to higher philosophic levels in contrast with its former function as a scheme of insurance against bad luck.
16. But while men are giving up the erroneous doctrine of a spirit cause of the vicissitudes of life, they exhibit a surprising willingness to accept an almost equally fallacious teaching which bids them attribute all human inequalities to political misadaptation, social injustice, and industrial competition.
17. Primitive religion prepared. the soil of the human mind, by the powerful and awesome force of false fear, for the bestowal of a bona fide spiritual force of supernatural origin, the Thought Adjuster. And. the divine Adjusters have ever since labored to transmute God‑fear into God‑love. Evolution may be slow, but it is unerringly effective.
Discussion Questions1. Do we still entertain the notion when we experience good fortune that something bad will happen to counterbalance the good?
2. Why do people continue to spend money on a lottery when they know the odds are overwhelming against their winning anything?
3. Why do human beings fall victim to excessive anxiety?
4. Are most people shaped more by value decisions or chance happenings?
5. Why are pain and suffering essential to progressive evolution?
6. What do Christians think about the nature of the soul?
7. How do Christians think of their resurrected appearance?
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