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"When the
progress of events on an evolutionary world indicates that the time
is ripe to initiate a spiritual age, the Trinity Teacher Sons always
volunteer for this service. You are not familiar with this order of
sonship because Urantia has never experienced a spiritual age, a
millennium of cosmic enlightenment. But the Teacher Sons even now
visit your world for the purpose of formulating plans concerning
their projected sojourn on your sphere. They will be due to appear
on Urantia after its inhabitants have gained comparative
deliverance from the shackles of animalism and from the fetters of
materialism." (231)
Both in the
western world, and the formerly communist world of eastern Europe,
the fetters of materialism are well and truly broken relative to
what things were like during the first third of the 20th century.
Certainly the process is not yet complete but we are well past the
first major steps to the burying of materialism.
Much of the
credit for our new freedom rests with the bizarre but empirically
confirmed findings of quantum theory. Quantum theory was already
well advanced in the 1930's when the Urantia Papers were being
received--but was little understood outside of a highly specialized
group of enthusiastic physicists.
However, in
recent years, the entertainment industry has exploited and
publicized the most outrageous proposals of quantum physics by
producing "Star Wars" types of film and TV adventure
series--and thus made the concepts of time warps and wormholes a
constituent of even children's vocabularies. At a level above,
quantum phenomena, such as Bose-Einstein condensates that are large
enough to be visible to the naked eye, still amaze us by behaving as
a wave and particle at the same time. This and other demonstrations
have now broken the major barriers separating the sub-atomic and
macro worlds.
Prior to these
relatively recent discoveries, it had been possible for materialists
to claim that the bizarre nature of the sub-atomic world was
irrelevant for what, to them, was a real, solid world of
dependable facts. But now, the indeterminacy of the quantum world
has reached out to include the "reality" of the
materialists' world.
Along with the
breakdown of the strict causality relationship essential to
materialism, our confession to believing in God no longer labels us
as weird and gullible simpletons.
One result of
this new found freedom to search beyond the boundaries of the
directly observable, is the New Age movement, a collection of people
searching for something deeper and more meaningful than the
godlessness of the materialism in which they were reared. For many,
the lack of spiritual values which they discern in orthodox religion
has sent them on a fruitless search "outside of
themselves." While in reality, that for which they search must
be sought within.
Many adherents of
orthodox religion, too, are searching--a search made more necessary
by state-introduced universal education that has removed much child
education as being the sole prerogative of the church.
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