Stonetower,
Thank you for the note. I do feel a bit better. I appreciate your interest in the Jesus section of Urantia but the Urantia book is not necessary for amplication of a relationship with Jesus. I stand by the belief that deviating from Catholic teaching is a serious undertaking that cannot end well. I don’t speak as a dogmatic Christian. I am as intellectual as you get. I used to believe in Urantia, new Age, etc. I went through my agnostic stage too. In my college years studying philosophy, literature, etc., I was one of those intellectuals that would have scoffed at faith. My first college degree was art. The second English. My first masters was literature. Now I am working on philosophy. I’ve read any new age book you can name, pantheist or Christian, and most philosophers. I read Urantia from a broad knowledge of philosophies and writing styles and time periods. It is not an inspired book I believe but a book of its epoch, enlightenment-spurred, as I said. I don’t reject the book is interesting but it’s just a book a human being wrote. Just like Don Juan adventures in Ixlan or Edgar Cayce is all work of the human imagination and awareness. I don’t doubt that humans have had deep insights into human ‘being’. This does not bring it to the level of inspired word of God or the level of transmission from angels arrived from space. I stand by my comment that Urantia is a work of Pantheism. If I had time and it was my dissertation I’d write on this in depth. Maybe I will explain or justify this to you later but I can’t right now. I have a huge paper due on Kant in less than a week, another due on Hegel that is past due. It’s not unwillingness to justify the claim. It’s lack of time this week, right now.
Regarding facts of religion: if interested you can see a post of mine regarding someone’s claim that Jesus was married or that Jesus was not pierced. I responded to both with the same post. In that post is an explanation of the debate of faith vs. ‘facts’. I have no interest in religious “facts”. You can view this post by going to the threads where I have posted. Some of my answer regarding Urantia would be, whenever I write it, related, though only tangentially, to the historical ground of that post. Urantia has its roots I would argue, in a historical frame, a moment of inspiration in a chain of such moments, on the Cartesian line of the “tree” which breaks off and acquires other branches within certain romantic, mystical, political, scientific movements along the way to develop itself. These branches can be explained but not today.
I too am very Catholic. Catholic schools K-12. I am now at a Catholic University working on a PhD in philosophy. My husband is Irish too.
The reason I am going to fiercely defend the total devotion to the Catholic faith, and that means a stoic rejection of ‘other’ inspirations is not explained in any of my posts thus far. It must be fiercely defended. Obedience to Rome is not a political act. Neither is it an individual act of weakness, the usurpation of human autonomy, to acquiesce to Rome. Autonomy is the sin of Lucifer and perhaps also, modern man.
God is a mystery. We want to discover God and sometimes we attempt to find him by leaving him. The search for understanding takes us far from God. This is a misunderstanding we must be alert to and avoid at all costs.
I promise this: There is nothing in the urantia book (outside of the sci-fi descriptions) that has not circulated in philosophy for centuries. I have read it all before.
peace
harisees,etc)
