fairness

• defined as › justice in harmony with mercy

2:4.4Mercy is the nat­u­ral and in­ev­i­ta­ble off­spring of good­ness and love. The good na­ture of a lov­ing Fa­ther could not pos­si­bly with­hold the wise min­istry of mercy to each mem­ber of ev­ery group of his uni­verse chil­dren. Eter­nal jus­tice and di­vine mercy to­gether con­sti­tute what in hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence would be called fair­ness.

• defined as › justice in harmony with mercy
• evidence is basis of

10:6.3Ev­i­dence, the ba­sis of fair­ness (jus­tice in har­mony with mercy), is sup­plied by the per­son­al­i­ties of the Third Source and Cen­ter, the con­joint rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Fa­ther and the Son to all realms and to the minds of the in­tel­li­gent be­ings of all cre­ation.

• in Havona requirements are fitting, inherently natural

14:5.3The reg­u­la­tions of the cen­tral uni­verse are fit­tingly and in­her­ently nat­u­ral; the rules of con­duct are not ar­bi­trary. In ev­ery re­quire­ment of Ha­vona there is dis­closed the rea­son of righ­teous­ness and the rule of jus­tice. And these two fac­tors, com­bined, equal what on Uran­tia would be de­nom­i­nated fair­ness. When you ar­rive in Ha­vona, you will nat­u­rally en­joy do­ing things the way they should be done.

• being just is precondition to showing

28:6.8The mercy re­flec­tors, with their ter­tiary as­so­ciates, en­gage in nu­mer­ous super­uni­verse min­istries, in­clud­ing the teach­ing of the as­cend­ing crea­tures. Among many other things the Sig­nif­i­cances of Ori­gins teach these as­cend­ers how to ap­ply spirit ethics, and fol­low­ing such train­ing, the Mem­o­ries of Mercy teach them how to be truly mer­ci­ful. While the spirit tech­niques of mercy min­istry are be­yond your con­cept, you should even now un­der­stand that mercy is a qual­ity of growth. You should re­al­ize that there is a great re­ward of per­sonal sat­is­fac­tion in be­ing first just, next fair, then pa­tient, then kind. And then, on that foun­da­tion, if you choose and have it in your heart, you can take the next step and re­ally show mercy; but you can­not ex­hibit mercy in and of it­self. These steps must be tra­versed; oth­er­wise there can be no gen­uine mercy. There may be pa­tron­age, con­de­scen­sion, or char­ity—even pity—but not mercy. True mercy comes only as the beau­ti­ful cli­max to these pre­ced­ing ad­juncts to group un­der­stand­ing, mu­tual ap­pre­ci­a­tion, fra­ter­nal fel­low­ship, spir­i­tual com­mu­nion, and di­vine har­mony.

• considers underlying motives, racial tendencies

39:1.8The se­raphic court ad­vis­ers serve ex­ten­sively as de­fend­ers of mor­tals. Not that there ever ex­ists any dis­po­si­tion to be un­fair to the lowly crea­tures of the realms, but while jus­tice de­mands the ad­ju­di­ca­tion of ev­ery de­fault in the climb to­wards di­vine per­fec­tion, mercy re­quires that ev­ery such mis­step be fairly ad­judged in ac­cor­dance with the crea­ture na­ture and the di­vine pur­pose. These an­gels are the ex­po­nents and ex­em­pli­fi­ca­tion of the el­e­ment of mercy in­her­ent in di­vine jus­tice—of fair­ness based on the knowl­edge of the un­der­ly­ing facts of per­sonal mo­tives and racial ten­den­cies.

• God is merciful with primitive mortals

40:5.11The Gods who or­dained that mor­tal man should climb to higher lev­els of spir­i­tual in­tel­li­gence through long ages of evo­lu­tion­ary tri­als and tribu­la­tions, take note of his sta­tus and needs at ev­ery stage of the as­cent; and al­ways are they di­vinely fair and just, even charm­ingly mer­ci­ful, in the fi­nal judg­ments of these strug­gling mor­tals of the early days of the evolv­ing races.

• primitives assumed power would be used selfishly

70:11.14The whole idea of prim­i­tive jus­tice was not so much to be fair as to dis­pose of the con­test and thus pre­vent pub­lic dis­or­der and pri­vate vi­o­lence. But prim­i­tive man did not so much re­sent what would now be re­garded as an in­jus­tice; it was taken for granted that those who had power would use it self­ishly. Nev­er­the­less, the sta­tus of any civ­i­liza­tion may be very ac­cu­rately de­ter­mined by the thor­ough­ness and eq­uity of its courts and by the in­tegrity of its judges.

• do not expect God to love you more than others

91:4.3In all your pray­ing be fair; do not ex­pect God to show par­tial­ity, to love you more than his other chil­dren, your friends, neigh­bors, even en­e­mies. But the prayer of the nat­u­ral or evolved re­li­gions is not at first eth­i­cal, as it is in the later re­vealed re­li­gions. All pray­ing, whether in­di­vid­ual or com­mu­nal, may be ei­ther ego­is­tic or al­tru­is­tic. That is, the prayer may be cen­tered upon the self or upon oth­ers. When the prayer seeks noth­ing for the one who prays nor any­thing for his fel­lows, then such at­ti­tudes of the soul tend to the lev­els of true wor­ship. Ego­is­tic prayers in­volve con­fes­sions and pe­ti­tions and of­ten con­sist in re­quests for ma­te­rial fa­vors. Prayer is some­what more eth­i­cal when it deals with for­give­ness and seeks wis­dom for en­hanced self-con­trol.

• Jesus’ questions in temple evinced spirit of f.

125:4.3At the sec­ond con­fer­ence Je­sus had made bold to ask ques­tions, and in a very amaz­ing way he par­tic­i­pated in the tem­ple dis­cus­sions but al­ways in a man­ner con­sis­tent with his youth. Some­times his pointed ques­tions were some­what em­bar­rass­ing to the learned teach­ers of the Jew­ish law, but he evinced such a spirit of can­did fair­ness, cou­pled with an ev­i­dent hunger for knowl­edge, that the ma­jor­ity of the tem­ple teach­ers were dis­posed to treat him with ev­ery con­sid­er­a­tion. But when he pre­sumed to ques­tion the jus­tice of putting to death a drunken gen­tile who had wan­dered out­side the court of the gen­tiles and un­wit­tingly en­tered the for­bid­den and re­put­edly sa­cred precincts of the tem­ple, one of the more in­tol­er­ant teach­ers grew im­pa­tient with the lad’s im­plied crit­i­cisms and, glow­er­ing down upon him, asked how old he was. Je­sus replied, “thir­teen years lack­ing a tri­fle more than four months.” “Then,” re­joined the now irate teacher, “why are you here, since you are not of age as a son of the law?” And when Je­sus ex­plained that he had re­ceived con­se­cra­tion dur­ing the Pass­over, and that he was a fin­ished stu­dent of the Naz­a­reth schools, the teach­ers with one ac­cord de­ri­sively replied, “We might have known; he is from Naz­a­reth.” But the leader in­sisted that Je­sus was not to be blamed if the rulers of the syn­a­gogue at Naz­a­reth had grad­u­ated him, tech­ni­cally, when he was twelve in­stead of thir­teen; and not­with­stand­ing that sev­eral of his de­trac­tors got up and left, it was ruled that the lad might con­tinue undis­turbed as a pupil of the tem­ple dis­cus­sions.

• Jesus refused to take unfair advantage

125:5.8And all the day through, those who lis­tened mar­veled at these ques­tions, and none was more as­ton­ished than Si­mon. For more than four hours this Naz­a­reth youth plied these Jew­ish teach­ers with thought-pro­vok­ing and heart-search­ing ques­tions. He made few com­ments on the re­marks of his el­ders. He con­veyed his teach­ing by the ques­tions he would ask. By the deft and sub­tle phras­ing of a ques­tion he would at one and the same time chal­lenge their teach­ing and sug­gest his own. In the man­ner of his ask­ing a ques­tion there was an ap­peal­ing com­bi­na­tion of sagac­ity and hu­mor which en­deared him even to those who more or less re­sented his youth­ful­ness. He was al­ways em­i­nently fair and con­sid­er­ate in the ask­ing of these pen­e­trat­ing ques­tions. On this event­ful af­ter­noon in the tem­ple he ex­hib­ited that same re­luc­tance to take un­fair ad­van­tage of an op­po­nent which char­ac­ter­ized his en­tire sub­se­quent pub­lic min­istry. As a youth, and later on as a man, he seemed to be ut­terly free from all ego­is­tic de­sire to win an ar­gu­ment merely to ex­pe­ri­ence log­i­cal tri­umph over his fel­lows, be­ing in­ter­ested su­premely in just one thing: to pro­claim ev­er­last­ing truth and thus ef­fect a fuller rev­e­la­tion of the eter­nal God.

• Jesus refused to take unfair advantage

128:4.7This same mo­tive also ex­plains why he per­mit­ted him­self to be known by dif­fer­ent ti­tles dur­ing var­i­ous epochs of his di­ver­si­fied life on earth. Again, he did not want to bring any un­due in­flu­ence to bear upon his fam­ily or oth­ers which would lead them to be­lieve in him against their hon­est con­vic­tions. He al­ways re­fused to take un­due or un­fair ad­van­tage of the hu­man mind. He did not want men to be­lieve in him un­less their hearts were re­spon­sive to the spir­i­tual re­al­i­ties re­vealed in his teach­ings.

• defined as › fruit of the spirit

193:2.2“Peace be upon you. You re­joice to know that the Son of Man has risen from the dead be­cause you thereby know that you and your breth­ren shall also sur­vive mor­tal death. But such sur­vival is de­pen­dent on your hav­ing been pre­vi­ously born of the spirit of truth-seek­ing and God-find­ing. The bread of life and the wa­ter thereof are given only to those who hunger for truth and thirst for righ­teous­ness—for God. The fact that the dead rise is not the gospel of the king­dom. These great truths and these uni­verse facts are all re­lated to this gospel in that they are a part of the re­sult of be­liev­ing the good news and are em­braced in the sub­se­quent ex­pe­ri­ence of those who, by faith, be­come, in deed and in truth, the ev­er­last­ing sons of the eter­nal God. My Fa­ther sent me into the world to pro­claim this sal­va­tion of son­ship to all men. And so send I you abroad to preach this sal­va­tion of son­ship. Sal­va­tion is the free gift of God, but those who are born of the spirit will im­me­di­ately be­gin to show forth the fruits of the spirit in lov­ing ser­vice to their fel­low crea­tures. And the fruits of the di­vine spirit which are yielded in the lives of spirit-born and God-know­ing mor­tals are: lov­ing ser­vice, un­selfish de­vo­tion, coura­geous loy­alty, sin­cere fair­ness, en­light­ened hon­esty, undy­ing hope, con­fid­ing trust, mer­ci­ful min­istry, un­fail­ing good­ness, for­giv­ing tol­er­ance, and en­dur­ing peace. If pro­fessed be­liev­ers bear not these fruits of the di­vine spirit in their lives, they are dead; the Spirit of Truth is not in them; they are use­less branches on the liv­ing vine, and they soon will be taken away. My Fa­ther re­quires of the chil­dren of faith that they bear much spirit fruit. If, there­fore, you are not fruit­ful, he will dig about your roots and cut away your un­fruit­ful branches. In­creas­ingly, must you yield the fruits of the spirit as you pro­gress heav­en­ward in the king­dom of God. You may en­ter the king­dom as a child, but the Fa­ther re­quires that you grow up, by grace, to the full stature of spir­i­tual adult­hood. And when you go abroad to tell all na­tions the good news of this gospel, I will go be­fore you, and my Spirit of Truth shall abide in your hearts. My peace I leave with you.”