How do we know what to believe?

[Jim Spencer]

God is invisible. Some of us humans can see spiritual beings. For example; I can "see" Jesus and angels through my spiritual eyes. I am slowly becoming more and more aware of the presence of higher dimensions of the universe although I am still relatively blind. There are people that are gifted with different abilities to discern greater levels of the universe around them. As we progress inward towards Paradise, we too shall grow in our ability to perceive the unimaginable beauty along the road to Heaven. One of the requirements to perceptive growth is the purification of our physical bodies so that they are able to become dwelling places---temples----that high spirit can live in. Because we are born with certain animal instincts, (by design for survival purposes), there necessitates the battle between the flesh and the spirit. This often gives us a feeling of separation from the higher personalities of the universe. Because we are so often limited in our ability to perceive higher truth, we are given to receiving truth from physical teachers-----such as Father. I just read the paper "The Birth of Jesus and the Consummation of God's Will". Several decades ago, when I would read such papers, they appealed to my sense of truth. I accepted these words because they were above my level of understanding about such matters. It was only later, beginning in 1986, 13 years after first reading Divine Principle and Unification Thought, that I begin to question my understanding of universal truth.

The question that I have asked over and over again on this site----has never been answered or replied to is: What causes a person to accept and believe something he either reads or hears?

Now, think about this question before the emotion of fear and rejection arises. It's okay to honestly examine the basis for our beliefs. In Fact, this is what God intended us to do. It does not mean that some evil force is attacking us. That is just pure superstition caused by fear.

When we were physical children, we believed in the Easter Bunny and Santa Clause. As we grew older, we learned that this was just a myth. When we were fundamental Christians, we believed in Salvation through the Crosss---that it was God's intention that Jesus CAME to die in order to ransom us back from the devil. This is also a partial myth. What complicates our understanding is the fact that there actually was a rebellion, a betrayal, and subsequent retardation of the heavenly scheme for planetary progression.

Rev. Moon has put forth his understanding of these events through this speech. But, what makes you or I accept that it is true? The only logical answer for a thinking man is that it is LOGICAL TO ME AND THAT'S WHY I BELIEVE IT. Because God is invisible, it can only be proved to the person believing it.

Point is, for a Religionist-------we must use all of our faculties in order to arrive at what we consider to be TRUTH. And, in the end, that truth can only be our truth. We can't make anyone else believe it because we can't live inside their mind. When we come to the understanding that we don't have to FEAR using the mind and soul that God gave us individually. God wants us to be free to live, free to think, free to choose, free to worship, free to LOVE. That's what the Free Will Gift is all about. Whether we abuse our gift or live lives of spirit-led living faith in obedience to the Will of God for our lives----is our choice. No Heavenly being, including God---will interfere with our free will, as long as we are living sincerely and trying to practise Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. When we know that we are truly free to experience the universe-------we also know that we can find truth in many places. It is up to us to compare and thus find the higher pathways to Paradise.

If you are a serious student, such as I am, and like to read, then I submit this paper from my favorite book. Because the book is so thick, and takes years to read, I respectfully extracted this one. I wish that there was an old missionary, just one, on this site, that was in to deep thought. Perhaps there are readers out there from the 1975 World Mission Group that are still active in their search for God. Because few blog on this site, I often wonder if everyone has returned to their secular lives or are still in their mission countries. Oh well. I'll just keep on blogging into cyber space:

 

"All too long has man thought of God as one like himself. God is not, never was, and never will be jealous of man or any other being in the universe of universes. Knowing that the Creator Son intended man to be the masterpiece of the planetary creation, to be the ruler of all the earth, the sight of his being dominated by his own baser passions, the spectacle of his bowing down before idols of wood, stone, gold, and selfish ambition—these sordid scenes stir God and his Sons to be jealous for man, but never of him.

The eternal God is incapable of wrath and anger in the sense of these human emotions and as man understands such reactions. These sentiments are mean and despicable; they are hardly worthy of being called human, much less divine; and such attitudes are utterly foreign to the perfect nature and gracious character of the Universal Father.

Much, very much, of the difficulty which mortals have in understanding God is due to the far- reaching consequences of the Lucifer Rebellion and the Caligastia betrayal. On worlds not segregated by sin, the evolutionary races are able to formulate far better ideas of the Universal Father;  they suffer less from confusion, distortion, and perversion of concept.

God repents of nothing he has ever done, now does, or ever will do. He is all-wise as well as all-powerful. Man's wisdom grows out of the trials and errors of human experience; God's wisdom consists in the unqualified perfection of his infinite universe insight, and this divine foreknowledge effectively directs the creative free will.

The Universal Father  never does anything that causes subsequent sorrow or regret, but the will creatures of the planning and making of his Creator personalities in the outlying universes,  by their unfortunate choosing, sometimes occasion emotions of divine sorrow in the personalities of their Creator parents. But though the Father neither makes mistakes, harbors regrets, nor experiences sorrows, he is a being with a father's affection, and his heart is undoubtedly grieved when his children fail to attain the spiritual levels they are capable of reaching with the assistance which has been so freely provided by the spiritual-attainment plans and the mortal-ascension policies of the universes.

The infinite goodness of the Father is beyond the comprehension of the finite mind of time; hence must there always be afforded a contrast with comparative evil (not sin) for the effective exhibition of all phases of relative goodness. Perfection of divine goodness can be discerned by mortal imperfection of insight only because it stands in contrastive association with relative imperfection in the relationships of time and matter in the motions of space.

The character of God is infinitely superhuman; therefore must such a nature of divinity be personalized, as in the divine Sons, before it can even be faith-grasped by the finite mind of man.

THE REALIZATION OF GOD

God is the only stationary, self-contained, and changeless being in the whole universe of universes, having no outside, no beyond, no past, and no future. God is purposive energy (creative spirit) and absolute will, and these are self-existent and universal.

Since God is self-existent, he is absolutely independent. The very identity of God is inimical to change. "I, the Lord, change not." God is immutable; but not until you achieve Paradise status can you even begin to understand how God can pass from simplicity to complexity, from identity to variation, from quiescence to motion, from infinity to finitude, from the divine to the human, and from unity to duality and triunity. And God can thus modify the manifestations of his absoluteness because divine immutability does not imply immobility; God has will—he is will.

God is the being of absolute self-determination; there are no limits to his universe reactions save those which are self-imposed, and his freewill acts are conditioned only by those divine qualities and perfect attributes which inherently characterize his eternal nature. Therefore is God related to the universe as the being of final goodness plus a free will of creative infinity.

The Father-Absolute is the creator of the central and perfect universe and the Father of all other Creators. Personality, goodness, and numerous other characteristics, God shares with man and other beings, but infinity of will is his alone. God is limited in his creative acts only by the sentiments of his eternal nature and by the dictates of his infinite wisdom. God personally chooses only that which is infinitely perfect, hence the supernal perfection of the central universe; and while the Creator Sons fully share his divinity, even phases of his absoluteness, they are not altogether limited by that finality of wisdom which directs the Father's infinity of will. Hence, in the Michael order of sonship, creative free will becomes even more active, wholly divine and well-nigh ultimate, if not absolute. The Father is infinite and eternal, but to deny the possibility of his volitional self-limitation amounts to a denial of this very concept of his volitional absoluteness.

God's absoluteness pervades all seven levels of universe reality. And the whole of this absolute nature is subject to the relationship of the Creator to his universe creature family. Precision may characterize trinitarian justice in the universe of universes, but in all his vast family relationship with the creatures of time the God of universes is governed by divine sentiment. First and last—eternally—the infinite God is a Father. Of all the possible titles by which he might appropriately be known, I have been instructed to portray the God of all creation as the Universal Father.

In God the Father freewill performances are not ruled by power, nor are they guided by intellect alone; the divine personality is defined as consisting in spirit and manifesting himself to the universes  as love. Therefore, in all his personal relations with the creature personalities of the universes, the First Source and Center is always and consistently a loving Father. God is a Father in the highest sense of the term. He is eternally motivated by the perfect idealism of divine love, and that tender nature finds its strongest expression and greatest satisfaction in loving and being loved.

In science, God is the First Cause; in religion, the universal and loving Father; in philosophy, the one being who exists by himself, not dependent on any other being for existence but beneficently conferring reality of existence on all things and upon all other beings. But it requires revelation to show that the First Cause of science and the self-existent Unity of philosophy are the God of religion, full of mercy and goodness  and pledged to effect the eternal survival of his children on earth.

 We crave the concept of the Infinite, but we worship the experience-idea of God, our anywhere and any-time capacity to grasp the personality and divinity factors of our highest concept of Deity.

The consciousness of a victorious human life on earth is born of that creature faith which dares to challenge each recurring episode of existence when confronted with the awful spectacle of human limitations, by the unfailing declaration: Even if I cannot do this, there lives in me one who can and will do it, a part of the Father-Absolute of the universe of universes. And that is "the victory which overcomes the world, even your faith."

Presented by a Divine Counselor of Uversa.]