The Urantia Religion - Power of Socialization

We continue our discussion of a Urantia based religion with scholar Merritt Horn, who recently gave this speech The Most Ineffective Cult The World Has Ever Seen. Merritt sites Urantia Paper 99 to illustrate our problem. It says that the purposes of group religious activities should be to dramatize the loyalties of religion; to magnify the lures of truth, beauty, and goodness; to foster the attractions of supreme values; to enhance the service of unselfish fellowship; to glorify the potentials of family life; to promote religious education; to provide wise counsel and spiritual guidance; and to encourage group worship and human friendship, conserve morality, promote neighborhood welfare, and facilitate the spread of the essential gospel of their respective messages of eternal salvation. It also lists the dangers of formalized religion as fixation of beliefs and crystallization of sentiments; accumulation of vested interests with increase of secularization; tendency to standardize and fossilize truth; diversion of religion from the service of God to the service of the church; inclination of leaders to become administrators instead of ministers; tendency to form sects and competitive divisions; establishment of oppressive ecclesiastical authority; creation of the aristocratic "chosen-people" attitude; fostering of false and exaggerated ideas of sacredness; the routinizing of religion and the petrification of worship; tendency to venerate the past while ignoring present demands; failure to make up-to-date interpretations of religion. Merritt Horn has been reading the Urantia Book since 1968. He co-founded with John Hay the Boulder School for Students of the Urantia Book, is a trustee/instructor for Urantia University Institute, serves on the Standard Reference Text Committee, and is the author of The Call of the Spirit. Join in this lively discussion!