Jesus in Rome 2. Good and Evil

The Urantia Book

document 132

2. Right and Wrong

Mardus was the acknowledged leader of the Cynics in Rome, and very befriended the scribe of Damascus. Day after day talking to Jesus every night listening to his extraordinary teachings. Among the most important conversations with Mardus, there was one whose purpose was to answer the honest question of this cynical concerning good and evil. In essence, and

My brother, good and evil are merely words symbolizing relative levels of human comprehension of the observable universe. If you are ethically lazy and socially indifferent, you can take as your standard of good the current social mores. If you are spiritually indolent without yearnings of moral progress, you can take as a standard of good practices and religious traditions of your contemporaries. But the soul that survives beyond time and emerging into eternity must make a living and personal choice between good and evil as they are defined by the true values ​​of spiritual standards set by the divine spirit that Heavenly Father has sent to reside within the heart of man. This indwelling spirit is the standard of personality survival.

Goodness, like truth, it is always relative and unfailingly is contrasted by evil. It is the perception of these qualities of goodness and truth that enables the evolving souls of men to make personal decisions of choice which are essential to eternal survival.

Spiritually blind individuals that logically follow the dictates of science, social customs and religious dogma are in danger of sacrificing their moral freedom and losing his spiritual liberty. Such a soul is destined to become an intellectual parrot, a social automaton, and a slave to religious authority.

Goodness is always growing toward new levels of increasing freedom of moral self-realization and spiritual personality scope of the indwelling Adjuster-the discovery and identification with him. An experience is good when it heightens the appreciation of beauty, augments the moral will, enhances the discernment of truth, enlarges the capacity to love and serve others, exalts the spiritual ideals, and unifies the supreme human motives of time with the eternal plans of the indwelling Adjuster, all of which lead directly to an increased desire to do the Father's will, thereby fostering the divine passion to find God and become more like him.

According to climb the universal scale of creature development, you will find greater good and lesser evil in perfect accordance with your capacity to experience the goodness and discern the truth. The ability to hold error or experience evil will not be lost completely until the ascending human soul does not reach the final levels of spirits.

Goodness is living, relative, always progressing, invariably a personal experience, and everlastingly correlated with the discernment of truth and beauty. Kindness is in recognition of the positive truth-values ​​of the spiritual level, which must be contrasted, in human experience, with negative counterpart -the shadows of potential evil.

Until you reach Paradise levels, goodness will always be more of a quest than a possession, more of a goal than an experience of attainment. But, hungry and thirsty for righteousness, you experience increasing satisfaction in the partial scope of goodness. The presence of good and evil in the world is, in itself, a positive proof of the existence and reality of the moral will of man, the personality, which thus identifies these values ​​and is able to choose between them.

When the ascending mortal reach Paradise, its ability to identify the self with true spirit values ​​has increased to the point where it is achieving perfection of the possession of the light of life. Such a perfected spirit personality becomes unified as complete, divine and spiritually with the positive and supreme qualities of goodness, beauty and truth that there remains no possibility that such a righteous spirit would cast any negative shadow of potential evil when exposed to the penetrating luminosity of the divine light of the infinite Rulers of Paradise. In all these spirit personalities, goodness is no longer partial, contrastive, and comparative; it has become divinely complete and spiritually fulfilling; it approaches the purity and perfection of the Supreme.

The  possibility  of evil is necessary to moral choice, but now evil is not necessary. A shadow is only relatively real. The current evil is not necessary as a personal experience. Potential evil acts equally well as a decision stimulus in the realms of moral progress on the lower levels of spiritual development. Evil becomes a reality of personal experience only when a moral mind makes evil its choice.