Episode:God the Father—Nature of God (Part 4)
The discernment of supreme beauty is the discovery and integration of reality: The discernment of the divine goodness in the eternal truth, that is ultimate beauty. Truth, beauty, and goodness are divine realities, and as man ascends the scale of spiritual living, these supreme qualities of the Eternal become increasingly co-ordinated and unified in God, who is love.
Keywords: Urantia, God, Goodness, Truth, Beauty
Summary by Kermit
Commentary after Review
The idea that the love of God is experienced by his children through the personal coordination of the divine qualities of truth, beauty and goodness is referenced throughout the revelation. Having explored the love of God in the previous week’s reading, we began the concluding episode of our series on the nature of God with a somewhat intricate explication of the manner by which God’s goodness is can be viewed in relation to God’s love. Listen to the archive for the full details. In short, reflect on God’s goodness as the unity element of the individuality, associativity, unity triplet that is love, i.e. beauty, truth, goodness respectively. As we approach our reading, reflect on the word “good”, note its ubiquitous and casual use in daily life and consider suitable alternatives to hone your own precision of language.
2:6. The Goodness of God
The revelators’ present the beauty, truth, goodness triplet in association with the physical, intellectual, and spiritual levels of reality respectively. God’s goodness in its fullness is found only in personal religious experience. The true essence of religion is a faith trust in God’s goodness. The substance of God is the full threefold spherical wholeness of love. The unity essence (goodness) of love is where the genuine concept of morality is discovered. The good and the moral while not strictly synonymous are functionally related, the nature of which is complex but well deserving of reflective thought and attempted recognition.
In downstepping the existential triplet of beauty, truth, goodness we arrive at the experiential triplet: fact, truth, goodness, wherein the perfect and existential goodness is perfectness and it’s experiential expression is perfectingness. Recognizing this difference is essential in the contemplation of God, lest we commit the folly of applying perfectness to material-temporal affairs or even the reverse of applying perfectingness to the existential Father. Lacking this discrimination, the term goodness when applied to material affairs will continue to prevent a greater understanding of the true nature of that which is moral. Instead of the word “good”, find alternative terms to describe the appropriateness of material affairs.
Evolutionary religion can become ethical, but ethics is not morality. The olden idea of Deity dominated by a kingly morality, was upstepped by Jesus to the family morality of parent and child. The improved understanding of these two terms can have benefit in cultivating a personal wholeness of top down morality redounding to improved systems of ethics in progressing civilization.
Again we find Bible passages assembled by our author reflecting the recognition of the genuine goodness of God. With the insights provided by the revelation we can recognize deeper meanings in the scriptures of old. One example: In Psalms we find, “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up the wounds of the soul” depicts the disrupted spiritualized mind (brokenhearted) restored to unity.
The king-judge did foster a respect for law in the collective. Jesus uplifted the Hebrew concept of God as a Father to the nation, to the idea of God as a Father to each person.
The facets of wholeness expressed in God’s righteousness and truth are transcended by God’s love, an actuality element of which is goodness. The unreality of the atonement doctrine is exposed as a philosophic assault on the unity and free-willness of God. God as a Father transcends God as a judge and the personal always trumps the impersonal.
The perfect divine unity forever prevents God from manifesting wrath, vengeance, or anger. We attempted to unpack the well known passage, “God loves the sinner but hates the sin.” Of course this statement is only true in a philosophic sense. Listen to the full discussion in the archive.
2:7. Divine Truth and Beauty
The final section of our paper and series engages the other two elements (beauty and truth) of the existential triplet beauty, truth, goodness. Much of the section presents us with the challenge of attempting to grasp the existential aspects of the nature of God in the face of our experiences in a time space domain of relativity with respect to these existential aspects. As we have often mentioned, failure to discriminate between these existential and experiential realities becomes most problematic when the experiential is evaluated with the yardstick of the existential.
Our discussion attempted to elucidate the reconciliation of these relativities in the recognition of the distinctions between the truths of existential eternity and those of experiential eternity. The revelators note that different segments (superuniverses) of time-space creation exhibit markedly distinct manifestations of truth due to the wide variety of plans and techniques of the Creator Sons and their Creative Spirit consorts.
The false science of materialism is dismissed for its partiality (potentially evil). Truth being replete and symmetrical is beautiful and when sought becomes the quest for the divinely real.
The lesser philosophers among us are guilty of grave error when they abstract a single aspect of reality and proclaim it the whole truth. Such is the source of the proliferation of the current day -isms which animate the zealous imaginations of so many.
Citing the example of the Hebrews who dissociated the goodness of God from the truths of science and beauty of art, our author prescribes a path for rehabilitating modern religion. To the already overly emphasized moral mandates, give equal consideration to the truths of science, philosophy, and spiritual experience, the beauties of the physical creation, the charm of intellectual art, and the grandeur of genuine character development.
As they frequently do, the author concludes the paper with a call to the best in us to respond to the challenge of our times and strive to construct a new and appealing philosophy of living out of the enlarged and exquisitely integrated modern concepts of cosmic truth, universe beauty, and divine goodness.
Re-read the final three paragraphs of this paper for the full impact of the Divine Counselor’s marching orders for us.
Notes by Brad
- "Love is too weak a word for what I feel - I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you, two F's, yes."
- A movie quote. But probably not the word we ought to use to represent divine love...
- The unity essence of love is goodness--which we consider in this episode.
- The word "good" is so dilute nowadays. Can we find the truest, highest definition
- eschew all false tangents? Penetrate through all the fog?
- Moral is equivalated to good. Why?
- Morality implies wholeness. And a personal expression of this moral wholeness is righteousness.
- Moral and good are not synonyms though.
- The word good is not a material based word. Good is a spirit word. The goodness of God is found only in the spirit world.
- A unity word. Not a word connoting the pleasantness of the arrangement of the material world.
- The goodness of God has nothing to do with material affairs.
- God isn't good because he gives me pleasant weather.
- Being humble and confessing you don't know what the word "good" means is a path toward avoiding anthropomorphizing God.
- Threefold patterns on display this evening:
- Beauty, truth, goodness ("philosophic order")
- individuality, associativity, unity
- physical, intellectual, spiritual
- health, sanity, happiness
- And there is a hierarchy to these; they aren't on the same plane.
- The substance of God is love ("God is love"), the essence is goodness.
- There are truths of existential eternity, and truths of experiential eternity.
- Hence beauty, truth, and goodness; and fact, truth, and goodness.
- Originally moral and ethical were identical (greek vs. latin), and only referred to custom.
- Be let's improve what the word ethical refers to. Even moreso what the word moral refers to.
- Ethical is about the outer life. Moral is about the inner life, where there is only one individual: YOU.
- Can you be integrous? Have you discovered your inner objective nature?
- If you think all people are corruptible, you think we're all just helpfuss visctims of antecedent causation.
- Yes, it is possible to have unassailable internal integrity.
- It's impossible for someone who has not discovered their own objective nature.
- Ancient thinkers ideas on the goodness of God--give them the benefit of the doubt!
- The Hebrews thought God the king-judge resided on Earth in the holy of holies.
- Makes a law-abiding people, sure. But it's cold.
- Of course it's cold. There is no personality in play in this concept of God.
- Justice is impersonal. Heck God as a father transcends God as a judge.
- Righteousness is grounded in facts; it is related to time.
- In contrast to being grounded in beauty, which is beyond time.
- A whole paragraph digging deeper that "God loves the sin and hates the sinner."
- Yes, yes, our author writes. But let's be more precise.
- Section 7's closing paragraph is more writing trying to help us feel the subtlety of distinction among these concepts.
- And it is subtle. It requires quiet reflective thinking.
- Can you slow down enough to reflect on this?
- This author confesses this all, as yet, feels just a bit too abstract for where he's at in life.
- Goodness is not perfectness. Goodness is perfectingness.
- Hence, what is good in one superuniverse may not be good in another.
- Divine truth, final truth, is predicated on beauty—eternity.
- Goodness is predicated on time.
- Beauty, truth, goodness: inner life. Eternity.
- Fact, truth, goodness: outer life. Time.
- Careful with the poetry. "You are stardust, cast out from the supernova."
- That's a poem proclaiming you are an outcast in the universe.
- That's not what we want to be about here.
- Charm is a more appropriate word than beauty when it's about something material.
- "What a charming sunset." Like a spell is cast on you by a ghost.
- Doesn't sound so transcendent now, does it? Exactly. That's the point being made here.
- Aim higher.
- "What a charming sunset." Like a spell is cast on you by a ghost.
- Another word: grandeur.
- Truth is coherent: associativity
- Beauty is attractive: individuality
- Goodness is stabilizing: unity.
