Paper 100 Overview: Religion in Human Experience

Religious experience transforms ordinary people into idealistic personalities with power. Religion helps everyone progress by fostering the growth of each person, and each person's growth is enhanced by the achievement of all others. Spiritual growth is stimulated by close association with other religious individuals, and religion enhances the common activities of daily life.

Religion produces growth in meanings and values, while building personal character and spiritual connection. Jesus showed the highest example of religious living through his balanced personality and character traits. His kindness touched hearts while his strength amazed followers, and he continues to unify human experience and coordinate human efforts today.

The experience of active religious living transforms average individuals into personalities with idealistic power. Religion helps everyone progress by fostering the growth of each person, and the progress of each person is increased through the achievement of all others. Spiritual growth is stimulated by close association with other religious people.

Love provides the soil for religious growth and offers both an objective lure beyond oneself and the highest personal satisfaction. Religion makes the ordinary tasks of daily life more meaningful and noble. It helps people find purpose in everyday activities.

When purely personal evaluations are raised to the level of absolutes, evil results. Children evaluate experiences based on pleasure, while maturity is shown by replacing personal pleasure with higher meanings. Some people are too busy to grow and risk spiritual stagnation, while prejudice and ignorance block growth.

Children should develop their own religious experience rather than having adult experiences forced on them. Educational growth is shown by enhanced ideals, greater appreciation of values, new meanings of values, and increased loyalty to supreme values. Children are permanently impressed by the loyalties of the adults in their lives, and loyal persons are growing persons.

Spiritual development depends on maintaining connection with spiritual forces and sharing with others what has been received from spiritual benefactors. Spiritual progress begins with recognizing spiritual poverty and having hunger for perfection, desiring to know God and do his will. Spiritual growth starts with awakening to needs, understanding meanings, and discovering values.

The evidence of spiritual development is seen in a personality motivated by love, active in unselfish service, and devoted to worshiping divine ideals. Spirituality shows how close someone is to God and how useful they are to others. Spirituality enhances the ability to find beauty in things, truth in meanings, and goodness in values.

Religion is not a technique for finding peace of mind but an impulse for organizing the soul for dynamic service. It involves the complete dedication of oneself to loving God and serving humanity. Religion will pay any price necessary to reach the ultimate goal and eternal prize.

For religious people, the word "God" symbolizes the approach to supreme reality and recognition of divine value. Values are never static, as reality means change and growth. The greatest value in human life consists of growth in values, progress in meanings, and understanding how these experiences relate to each other in the cosmos.

Religious living is devoted living, and devoted living is creative, original, and spontaneous. New religious insights arise from conflicts that lead to choosing better reaction habits to replace older, inferior patterns. New meanings only emerge through conflict, which continues when people refuse to accept higher values with better meanings.

Religious challenges are inevitable since growth cannot occur without mental conflict and spiritual unrest. The major problem of religious living is unifying the powers of personality by putting love in charge. In physical life, senses tell us things exist, mind discovers meanings, and spiritual experience reveals true values. You can best discover the values in others by understanding what motivates them.

The world is filled with lost souls, not in the religious sense but in direction, wandering confused among different beliefs in a frustrated philosophical era. Too few have learned how to create a personal philosophy of living to replace religious authority. Religious growth progresses from stagnation through conflict to coordination and from insecurity to undoubting faith.

Loyalty to supreme ideals may develop gradually or suddenly, as in a crisis. Most dramatic religious conversion experiences are psychological, but sometimes they have spiritual elements too. Emotion alone creates false conversion; true faith is also needed. The healthier spiritual approach involves reflective worship and prayers of thanksgiving rather than seeking mystical experiences.

Evolutionary religions and revealed religions may differ in method but are similar in motive. Religion is not a specific function of life but a way of living. True religion is wholehearted devotion to something the religious person considers supremely valuable for themselves and all humanity. The outstanding characteristics of all religions are unquestioning loyalty and complete devotion to supreme values.

The qualities that show human response to religious impulse include nobility and grandeur. Religious people are aware of universe citizenship and feel connected to superhuman power sources. They feel thrilled and energized by belonging to a superior fellowship of God's children. True religion is living love and a life of service that adds new meaning to all of life.

Although average people cannot hope to reach the high perfection of character that Jesus achieved while living on earth, every believer can develop a strong and unified personality following Jesus' example. The most unique feature of Jesus' personality was not just its perfection but its balance and unified completeness. The most effective way to present Jesus is simply to say, "Behold the man!"

Jesus' unfailing kindness touched hearts, while his strong character amazed his followers. He was truly sincere with nothing fake about him. He was always refreshingly genuine and never pretended to be something he wasn't. He lived the truth he taught and felt compelled to share saving truth with his generation, even when this caused pain.