Science & Materialism Vs. A Religion About Jesus & The Weakness of Both

This week we begin a study of Urantia Paper 195 - After Pentecost. This paper essentially sums up the spread of Christianity and touches on both its strengths and its weaknesses.

This paper reveals that Christianity faces a struggle more difficult than any it has known throughout history. The rise of science and materialism challenges religion. The higher a civilization evolves, the more necessary it becomes that people seek spiritual reality to help stabilize society and solve material problems. Society without a morality based on spiritual reality cannot survive.

True science has no conflict with true religion; but the change from an age of miracles to an age of machines has been upsetting to modern man. Religious leaders are mistaken when they try to lure people to spiritual practice with methods that were used in the middle ages. Religion must renew itself and find new ways to approach modern people.

Modern secularism sprang from two influences: atheistic science and the protest against the domination of western civilization by the medieval Christian church. For centuries Western thinking has been progressively secularized. Secularism is barren of spiritual values and satisfactions. It freed humankind from ecclesiastical slavery only to lead them into political and economic slavery, unrest, unhappiness, and disaster. The blessings of secularism-tolerance, social service, democracy, and civil liberty-can be had without sacrificing faith in God.

Christianity stands in need of the teachings of Jesus. Our world "is now quivering on the very brink of one of its most amazing and enthralling epochs of social readjustment, moral quickening, and spiritual enlightenment." Religion needs leaders who will depend solely on Jesus and his teachings. The world must see Jesus living again in the experience of spirit-born mortals who reveal the Master to all people.

Please join us as we undertake this study!