The Real Nature of Religion

101:9.1No pro­fessed rev­e­la­tion of re­li­gion could be re­garded as au­then­tic if it failed to rec­og­nize the duty de­mands of eth­i­cal obli­ga­tion which had been cre­ated and fos­tered by pre­ced­ing evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion. Rev­e­la­tion un­fail­ingly en­larges the eth­i­cal hori­zon of evolved re­li­gion while it si­mul­ta­ne­ously and un­fail­ingly ex­pands the moral obli­ga­tions of all prior rev­e­la­tions.

101:9.2When you pre­sume to sit in crit­i­cal judg­ment on the prim­i­tive re­li­gion of man (or on the re­li­gion of prim­i­tive man), you should re­mem­ber to judge such sav­ages and to eval­u­ate their re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence in ac­cor­dance with their en­light­en­ment and sta­tus of con­science. Do not make the mis­take of judg­ing an­other’s re­li­gion by your own stan­dards of knowl­edge and truth.

101:9.3True re­li­gion is that sub­lime and pro­found con­vic­tion within the soul which com­pellingly ad­mon­ishes man that it would be wrong for him not to be­lieve in those mor­ontial re­al­i­ties which con­sti­tute his high­est eth­i­cal and moral con­cepts, his high­est in­ter­pre­ta­tion of life’s great­est val­ues and the uni­verse’s deep­est re­al­i­ties. And such a re­li­gion is sim­ply the ex­pe­ri­ence of yield­ing in­tel­lec­tual loy­alty to the high­est dic­tates of spir­i­tual con­scious­ness.

101:9.4The search for beauty is a part of re­li­gion only in so far as it is eth­i­cal and to the ex­tent that it en­riches the con­cept of the moral. Art is only re­li­gious when it be­comes dif­fused with pur­pose which has been de­rived from high spir­i­tual mo­ti­va­tion.

101:9.5The en­light­ened spir­i­tual con­scious­ness of civ­i­lized man is not con­cerned so much with some spe­cific in­tel­lec­tual be­lief or with any one par­tic­u­lar mode of liv­ing as with dis­cov­er­ing the truth of liv­ing, the good and right tech­nique of re­act­ing to the ever-re­cur­ring sit­u­a­tions of mor­tal ex­is­tence. Moral con­scious­ness is just a name ap­plied to the hu­man rec­og­ni­tion and aware­ness of those eth­i­cal and emerg­ing mor­ontial val­ues which duty de­mands that man shall abide by in the day-by-day con­trol and guid­ance of con­duct.

101:9.6Though rec­og­niz­ing that re­li­gion is im­per­fect, there are at least two prac­ti­cal man­i­fes­ta­tions of its na­ture and func­tion:

101:9.71. The spir­i­tual urge and philo­sophic pres­sure of re­li­gion tend to cause man to project his es­ti­ma­tion of moral val­ues di­rectly out­ward into the af­fairs of his fel­lows—the eth­i­cal re­ac­tion of re­li­gion.

101:9.82. Re­li­gion cre­ates for the hu­man mind a spir­i­tu­al­ized con­scious­ness of di­vine re­al­ity based on, and by faith de­rived from, an­te­ced­ent con­cepts of moral val­ues and co-or­di­nated with super­im­posed con­cepts of spir­i­tual val­ues. Re­li­gion thereby be­comes a cen­sor of mor­tal af­fairs, a form of glo­ri­fied moral trust and con­fi­dence in re­al­ity, the en­hanced re­al­i­ties of time and the more en­dur­ing re­al­i­ties of eter­nity.

101:9.9Faith be­comes the con­nec­tion be­tween moral con­scious­ness and the spir­i­tual con­cept of en­dur­ing re­al­ity. Re­li­gion be­comes the av­enue of man’s es­cape from the ma­te­rial lim­i­ta­tions of the tem­po­ral and nat­u­ral world to the su­per­nal re­al­i­ties of the eter­nal and spir­i­tual world by and through the tech­nique of sal­va­tion, the pro­gres­sive mor­ontia trans­for­ma­tion.