Talk:2010-11-01-Races of Urantia
This lesson was largely addressing issues raised by another lesson by Monjoronson transmitted by Daniel Raphael.--rdavis 23:26, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 12:41 AM, JERRY LANE <nytrayn@msn.com> wrote:
Dear folks, My insight as T/R of the material is no more valid nor valuable than anyone else's, so my take on Nebadonia's latest message is only that, however unbelievable at first, coming from the being whose Holy Spirit is keeping my heart beating, this was in her own words a humble and sincere apology. While neither she nor Michael directly wrote the Urantia book's paper on the Evolutionary Races of Color, it was done under their auspices and, like good parents taking responsibility for their children's (Life Carrier's) viewpoint, they take responsibility for it as well. She said it was a mistake!--but how could this be?
It took a while but I was able to find a remembered passage in the Urantia book that may shed light on this. "Paper 116, The Almighty Supreme: If man recognized that his Creators--his immediate supervisors--while being divine were also finite, and that the God of time and space is an evolving and non-absolute Deity, then would the inconsistencies of temporal inequalities cease to be profound religious paradoxes." Since this is addressing no less than the Supreme Being, I think it might also hold for our own Creators, our own "immediate supervisors"--Michael and Nebadonia, divine but finite, having stated themselves, and often, that they too are just "out here" in time and space evolving and earning a soul just like we (hopefully) are. Her apology is just another unfathomable offer of equality with us, as is Michael's being not only our Father Spirit but also our closest friend.
From the point of view of the Life Carriers who wrote the paper--(it's interesting to go back and read it)--in this context they were assessing human evolution mainly in terms of a blending of colors--the original purpose for the programmed emergence of different colors, the addition of Adamic/Andite stock--the violet race, and even climate--something about man progressing on the cold northern plains but languishing in the tropics; nothing about any intrinsic racial superiority or inferiority. The first readers didn't react in a racist way, nor catch any implication the words would be read in that way, so neither did their Thought Adjusters for any necessary rewrite as was done with other papers. These passages were terribly mis-taken only by those in a later generation who could not, as the Urantia book itself states and Nebadonia repeated, use their wisdom's hallmark, a sense of proportion to weigh a few statements as part of over two thousand pages on subjects covering dozens and dozens of human disciplines, plus thousands of concepts unique to all of human history and literature, plus the life of Jesus; all of it hanging together with no internal inconsistency I've yet been able to find. To them a few racist-seeming remarks were enough to invalidate the whole. So this mistake was, and still may be compounded by another thing the book warns against--taking it, or any written work, in a fundamentalist way as some immaculate pronouncement by Deity Itself. Deity is not an "it" but personal and, in Michael's and Mother Spirit's case, divine but finite, as is their gift of life to us. The final test is always, as she says, within us as a resonance with Michael's Spirit of Truth; i.e. does it ring true? That is our responsibility in part and in whole. Mother Spirit has confessed to a mistake in not anticipating a possible but mistaken racist-interpretation where none was intended, and sincerely apologized. What more can we ask of her? JL
