The Pilgrim Papers: A Pilgrim's View of Time and Space

The Pilgrim Papers

A Pilgrim’s View of Time

and Space

Milton F. Sanders

Copyright © 2011 by Milton F. Sanders.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011909204G

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4628-8285-4

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4628-8284-7

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4628-8286-1

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

My Quest

I Inaccurate and Flawed Concepts of God

II The Golden Rule

III The Question of Good and Evil

IV Positive and Negative Aspects of Religion and Politics

V The Christianity Myth

VI Spirit

VII Prophets and Prophecies

VIII The Importance and Value of Forgiveness

IX Confusion Regarding Revelation

X Love

XI Prayer

XII Worship—An abbreviated History of Human Worship

XIII Meditation

XIV What’s It All About?

XV Time, Space, Energy and Matter

XVI Fear, a Two Edged Sword

XVII This is The Way

XVIII The Difficulties of Grasping Spiritual Concepts

XIX The Courageous Soul

XX The Pursuit of Happiness

XXI Materialism, Mechanism and Secularism

XXII Freewill and Choice

The Dilemma Of Morality

The Book

THE SERMON ON THE LAKE

Dedicated

To the memory of

My late wife

Christina Sanders

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To my dearest beloved late wife Christina who blessed me with thirty-three of the happiest years of my life, who joyfully shared with me our long and delightful spiritual journey. Without her constant support and belief in our quest for a more satisfying and revealing understanding of reality, none of this work could exist. It is my fervent hope that we may one day be reunited to continue that journey.

I wish to express my deep gratitude to my dear friends, Budd and Sandra Blume for their indispensable support, aid and advice in preparing this work for publication. They have been there at every turn with encouragement and essential help in bringing this undertaking to a successful conclusion.

I also owe much to my first spiritual mentor during my formative teenage years at a boy’s school in Albion, Michigan. Though his full name was Floyd Starr, he was affectionately known to all the boys as Uncle Floyd. He was the founder and Chief Executive of Star Commonwealth for Boys. Uncle Floyd was and still is the single most influential person responsible for turning my life around. He made me aware of the consequences of my actions, stressing how they affected others and ultimately my own future life. Every Sunday Uncle Floyd gave a nondenominational sermon to all the boys assembled in the gymnasium. Each sermon was both highly moral and contained spiritual concepts that transcended basic morality. My close association with Uncle Floyd began my pursuit for a greater understanding of my true place in the universe.

And a special thanks to The Urantia Foundation of Chicago, for publishing The Urantia Book which altered the course of my life by providing more acceptable and believable answers to my questions than all my years of research and study had produced. Interested readers may secure more information about this unique publication at www Urantia.org

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Pilgrim Papers are a collection of essays dealing with a number of subjects that are widely disputed and have created much confusion among people for a very long time. Hopefully these essays will cast some new light on them.

Sandwiched in among these papers are additional short subjects or features, examples of thoughts I have explored in hopes they may offer the reader some additional things to ponder.

There is nothing new, original or unique in this book. Everything here has been said by someone before, perhaps not in the same way or with the same words, but these concepts can be found in the writings of countless serious works over centuries of time. As the author of this collection of essays, I cannot take credit for even a single idea or ideal presented here. My contribution is simply in gathering, compiling and assembling them in the order they appear here. The two things that I am obligated to take the credit or blame for is the infusion of my own particular personal philosophic viewpoints and the way I express each of the concepts. At times I feel that I have spent the last few years removing the roadblocks I erected in my own path. I discovered that while there was a good deal I needed to learn, there was also much I needed to unlearn. To be an honest seeker of truth one must recognize that what may be true today may be only partially true tomorrow.

When I have been asked just what my religion was, for a long time I found that question difficult to answer, both for the one inquiring and also for myself. That is because I have chosen not to be affiliated with any present or past organized religious movement. The reason being that so many, if not all of them, claim to be the only true religion while they also malign all others as false and fraudulent misrepresentations of the word of God. Such ecclesiastical arrogance gave me grave doubts about any of them truly having the answers I was seeking. Therefore the question of what was my religion didn’t seem to have any relevant, adequate or credible answer. The best I can offer is that I consider myself a pilgrim of time and space who has embarked on a life-long quest to find the answers to the three questions that have most intrigued and eluded me since I was old enough to ask them. They are; (1) Where did we come from? (2) Why are we here? (3) Where are we going? The great irony of all this is, I was forced to abandon the churches to find those answers and to achieve a truly personal relationship with God.

While I have the deepest respect for those who have found comfort in a particular religious belief system, I personally don’t have a religion, per se. What I do have is a religious philosophy, based upon the results of what I have discovered in searching for these answers. That philosophy includes the recognition of an intelligent creative force responsible for everything that is in existence, also its maintenance and control, and that this creative force is totally aware of all parts of its creation at all times. Much, but not all, of my philosophy is contained in these essays and features. It is my sincere hope that some of these concepts will resonate in the minds of the readers.

Milton F. Sanders

THE HUBBLE ORBITING TELESCOPE WITH EARTH IN THE BACKGROUND

MY QUEST

At an early age, I developed a number of problematic issues with the organized religions I came in contact with. From the age of three I had the distinct advantage of being brought up in a number of foster homes, all with diverse religious affiliations. Since that time I have been actively and persistently searching to find some acceptable and believable answers to what I considered the three most fundamental and basic questions humanity needed to solve. Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? More simply put, what are our origins, purpose and destiny?

Since then I have studied, researched and investigated hundreds of books. I discussed at length these questions with dozens of authorities who claimed to know the answers. I explored in great depth cults, religions, philosophies, metaphysics and science, both modern and ancient. I haunted libraries and new and used book stores, collecting anything and everything that might even remotely shed some light on my quest for answers to these basic questions.

Much to my disappointment and frustration, the explanations I received raised more questions than they answered. Over the years, rather than the enlightenment I was seeking, confusion regarding my quest grew even deeper and more obscure. I began to think this crusade might turn out to be no more than a fool’s errand. Maybe there were no answers.

The religions of the world offered miracles, myths, legends and allegories. Most of them are much re-told, reinterpreted and many times translated accounts of supernatural and unexplained events of antiquity. The greater problem is that nearly all the original manuscripts and documents have been long since lost. Even those recently founded religious orders of the last two or three centuries are based on revelations to prophets, seers or priests or have been discovered in old or newly revealed records that were miraculously translated, and then later mysteriously disappeared. This makes them conveniently impossible to confirm or validate.

To add to the problem, the many subsequent religious leaders who had charge of these scriptures frequently claimed to be the recipients of special revelations that added large amounts of dogma and doctrine to the original text as well as removing anything that did not serve the new revealed concepts of that leader, priest or prophet. This serves only to create confusing inconsistencies and conflicting concepts among their followers. However, it allowed the leaders to expand their power and authority even further by explaining to the lay person that it was not necessary for them to understand, only that they accept and obey. Unquestioned obedience to church doctrine is the cornerstone of most religions of both the past and the present.

In essence, the vast majority of organized religions require followers to set aside their critical reasoning ability and accept unquestionably the dogma and doctrine presented by the priests, prophets or spiritual leaders. This same technique of religious tyranny and control has been universally employed by the hundreds of different churches, sects, denominations, cults and isms for centuries. To question any part of their canon law was considered to be sacrilege and punishable by expulsion, excommunication, or even death in some cases.

Such dictatorial decrees amount to a total abdication of a person’s sacred right and obligation to seek a personal relationship with their creator. Mandates of this type require that the lay person relinquish control of their eternal future. They insist that the followers place their entire spiritual destiny in the hands of church authorities, who, in all likelihood, have no more real knowledge of the true destiny of humanity than the laity. These authorities pass on the very same precepts, doctrines and dogma their superiors spoon-fed them during their rise through the church ranks. That is a widely accepted form of religious despotism and totally contrary to the concept of free will. To make it even more difficult for the seeker’s of spiritual truth, each of the hundreds of diverse religious factions laid claim to possess the ONE AND ONLY TRUE RELIGION.

My search in the area of philosophy yielded a number of plausible and possible answers to all three of my questions. The great problem with philosophy is that no two philosophers totally agree on the same view of reality. Each creates their own area of philosophical rationale. Consequently, in the final analysis, philosophy represents only the opinions of a few of the great thinkers of the ages. Even though they may be among the most illustrious and lofty scholars produced by humanity, they are still human and therefore subject to human error. Many of those errors have been clearly revealed by the passage of time. Granting that philosophy is, by some, considered the synthesis of all learning; it is not the ultimate guide to things spiritual.

The discipline of metaphysics delves deeply into magic, myths, mysticism, the occult and the supernatural. Metaphysics, in today’s world, serves as a substitute for revealed religion, but it is a poor substitute at best. The whole concept of metaphysics is foreign to my scientific and logic oriented mind and leaves me indifferent and unimpressed.

Science, on the other hand does, in a way, offer plausible and possible explanations about our beginnings and the origin of the physical reality in which we exist. As reassuring as that may be to a great number of people, it falls far short of satisfying my objectives.

While the accumulation of scientific knowledge may search the past to discover origins and, through discoveries, illuminate the present and suggest possible future events, it is totally inadequate to explain the purpose of our life or our ultimate destiny. Science searches out the workings of physical reality; philosophy attempts to comprehend the causes underlying that reality, while religion aspires to transcend the physical, penetrating the frontiers of the spiritual. Science deals with facts. Philosophy concerns itself with unifying life’s experiences,