The Urantia Book

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abstraction

4 paragraphs · about 1 minute

Every paragraph the index cites under abstraction, once, in the order of the book. Beside each stand the entries that cite it.

2:7.5Philoso­phers com­mit their gravest er­ror when they are mis­led into the fal­lacy of ab­strac­tion, the prac­tice of fo­cus­ing the at­ten­tion upon one as­pect of re­al­ity and then of pro­nounc­ing such an iso­lated as­pect to be the whole truth. The wise philoso­pher will al­ways look for the cre­ative de­sign which is be­hind, and pre-ex­is­tent to, all uni­verse phe­nom­ena. The cre­ator thought in­vari­ably pre­cedes cre­ative ac­tion.

12:9.5Your re­li­gion is be­com­ing real be­cause it is emerg­ing from the slav­ery of fear and the bond­age of su­per­sti­tion. Your phi­los­o­phy strug­gles for eman­ci­pa­tion from dogma and tra­di­tion. Your sci­ence is en­gaged in the age­long con­test be­tween truth and er­ror while it fights for de­liv­er­ance from the bond­age of ab­strac­tion, the slav­ery of math­e­mat­ics, and the rel­a­tive blind­ness of mech­a­nis­tic ma­te­ri­al­ism.

16:9.8Un­selfish so­cial con­scious­ness must be, at bot­tom, a re­li­gious con­scious­ness; that is, if it is ob­jec­tive; oth­er­wise it is a purely sub­jec­tive philo­sophic ab­strac­tion and there­fore de­void of love. Only a God-know­ing in­di­vid­ual can love an­other per­son as he loves him­self.

102:7.3Those who would in­vent a re­li­gion with­out God are like those who would gather fruit with­out trees, have chil­dren with­out par­ents. You can­not have ef­fects with­out causes; only the I AM is cause­less. The fact of re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence im­plies God, and such a God of per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence must be a per­sonal De­ity. You can­not pray to a chem­i­cal for­mula, sup­pli­cate a math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tion, wor­ship a hy­poth­e­sis, con­fide in a pos­tu­late, com­mune with a pro­cess, serve an ab­strac­tion, or hold lov­ing fel­low­ship with a law.

Onward

Cited alongside: philosophy