Month: August 2018
Why Burning Man is a Very Bad Sign
by JR Watkins
Long before The Burning Man festival in Nevada became chic, it became clear to me that this pantheistic celebration of “nothing” was concerning – if it ever became mainstream.
History shows that societies live or die by its spiritual progress. Many cultures have ended up as dust in history because they failed to develop a clear concept of spiritual faith and a subsequent philosophy that results from a mature religious ideal. Mankind can, as a matter of principle, be judged by its spiritual maturity.
Burning Man is the antithesis of God. It is purely man-made and man-centered, and plays to the more animalistic tendencies of human nature. It celebrates unbridled liberty and self-determination based on the individual desired. It is the celebration of the secular ideal that man does not need religion, or God, and is in fact, the center of reality.
There is no God as a supreme and loving creator at Burning Man, but you are more likely to experience the culmination of Humanism as performed in the symbolic Burning Man, who himself represents a belief in nothing, free from the shackles of traditional religious truth which calls on us to serve God and his will, and not our temporal desires of the flesh.
Burning Man is, more than anything else, a pretense for partying, plain an simple. But it is cloaked in some kind of new secular celebration reminiscent of golden calves and idol worship.
That such spoiled children of time would delude themselves into trying to erect Burning Man into a national symbol of the “freedom of self,” reflects something of today‘s culture as it is embraced among the secular societies of the world: the worship of things.
Forget not that many who attend this festival sway great influence in our culture. And if they believe in the sanctimony of Burning Mans’ central philosophy, which is that there is nothing to believe in but self, then how much of this adopted philosophy of living permeates through the influence these people have back home in their communities of Silicon Valley.
Execs from Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants attend this festival, and this has spurred more interest in bringing others into the fold. Indeed, the most influential people on the planet right now are active proponents of the new secular age, the age of Burning Man.
But what does this portend for mankind in this current age?
Burning Man will be ‘viral’ this year, you can count on it. and the next, and the next. Millennials who have no grounding to traditional faith will be most susceptible to this false philosophy of human ebellishment; young and fertile minds who don’t know any better, are lured and dazzled into adopting this very dangerous philosophy.
My first thought would be to show up and start handing out Urantia Books, but the book is much too precious for me to see it end up in a bond fire.
My only other thought is to write this blog to help alert the faithful that this event is much more dangerous than you think. And we cannot hope that the spiritually illiterate will be wise to this dark event.
Let us hope this is not what it appears to be, because if it is, I fear we are truly entering a dark spiritual age.
What is the difference between God and The Supreme Being?
Many people understand the concept of a perfect Deity, an existential Creator, but some people might not grasp the nature of a Supreme Being, or they do not yet understand the difference between an existential Creator and an experiential Deity.
Back in the theoretical ‘beginnings of things’, we can grasp the concept of Deity being perfect; in fact the only personal being in the entire cosmos who is existentially perfect “in all His ways,” the I AM, is God. He was “born” perfect.” though I use the term “born” because finite beings must have theoretical beginnings. In reality, God, an eternal Deity, has always been existentially perfect.
But God desires to be more than perfect of his own right, and by divesting his perfection through creation, God becomes experientially perfecting.
In a sense, The Supreme Being is in the embryonic stage of existence, and this process involves personality growth through the experience of each and every part of the whole. Each of us, a unique and original spiritual expression of Gods’ infinite personality become parts of this whole, which is the Supreme Being – that stage when God has exhausted every possible expression in his creation.
Each of us, as we ascend towards perfection through actual living experience, represent the attempt of God to move from being existential to experiential.
So we pray to a personal Father who is the existential Creator, the perfect and highest personality in the universe. But the Supreme Being is still yet to come only because God, the existential Deity, isn’t done experiencing every facet of personality existence, which he does through his created personalities of time and space, including his mortal children of time and space (that would be you and me).
The Supreme Being represents the whole of Deity expression as yet incomplete, unfinished, and since we are part of Deity because we are a part of God (or he is part of us), it is in our choosing of perfection attainment (i.e., being a better person) that determines how, where and when Gods’ final expression of experiential AND existential perfection will merge and find complete expression in the Supreme Being.
When you view creation as being a body, with God as the Mind, and each of us as a living cell in this body, then it becomes more clear that the parts of creation contribute to the whole of creation, the someday emergence of God’s next phase of existence, the Supreme Being.
This truth alone should forever dispel the human notion that life is worthless.
OLD ROME, MEET NEW ROME
There is a particular paragraph from paper 195 of The Urantia Book that deserves important consideration.
Take a quick read of the paragraph below and ask yourself if the revelators are trying to send us a message as to what might be to come IF humanity continues on its current path.
(195:3) “Even a good religion could not save a great empire from the sure results of lack of individual participation in the affairs of government, from overmuch paternalism, overtaxation and gross collection abuses, unbalanced trade with the Levant which drained away the gold, amusement madness, Roman standardization, the degradation of woman, slavery and race decadence, physical plagues, and a state church which became institutionalized nearly to the point of spiritual barrenness.”
Perhaps not so much in the U.S., but certainly when we look to many so-called progressive European countries like The UK, Germany, the Netherlands, even in more despotic places like Iran, much of Southeast Asia, and in U.S. cities like New Orleans, San Francisco and Chicago, there are clear signs that mankind is moving not forward, but backward, and this despite all of our technical advances.
The good news is that as the world becomes more intertwined through commerce and the sharing of culture, world-wide brotherhood is attainable, as is disclosed here in this statement from Paper 72:
“The pouring out of the Spirit of Truth provides the spiritual foundation for the realization of great achievements in the interests of the human race of the bestowal world. Urantia is therefore far better prepared for the more immediate realization of a planetary government with its laws, mechanisms, symbols, conventions, and language —all of which could contribute so mightily to the establishment of world-wide peace under law and could lead to the sometime dawning of a real age of spiritual striving; and such an age is the planetary threshold to the utopian ages of light and life.”
There is a fork in the road, the secular road leads to more unrest, the other, one based on spiritual ideals, leads towards more cooperation between cultures and nations, but much of it will depend, according to the revelators, on applying spiritual pressure to solve our problems, as stated so clearly at the end of Paper 195:
“A lasting social system without a morality predicated on spiritual realities can no more be maintained than could the solar system without gravity.”
“…Without God, without religion, scientific secularism can never co-ordinate its forces, harmonize its divergent and rivalrous interests, races, and nationalisms. This secularistic human society, notwithstanding its unparalleled materialistic achievement, is slowly disintegrating. The chief cohesive force resisting this disintegration of antagonism is nationalism. And nationalism is the chief barrier to world peace.”
“…The inherent weakness of secularism is that it discards ethics and religion for politics and power. You simply cannot establish the brotherhood of men while ignoring or denying the fatherhood of God.”
“…Secular social and political optimism is an illusion. Without God, neither freedom and liberty, nor property and wealth will lead to peace.”
If you are wondering what it was like to see the Roman Empire collapse, look around you. It’s happening now.
The question is will this new revelation, The Urantia Book, survive the social disintegration long enough to have a future influence once society begins to put itself back together?
