유란시아 책
III 부. 유란시아의 역사
86:0.1 (950.1)
THE evolution of religion from the preceding and primitive worship urge is not dependent on revelation. The normal functioning of the human mind under the directive influence of the sixth and seventh mind-adjutants of universal spirit bestowal is wholly sufficient to insure such development.
86:0.2 (950.2)
Man’s earliest prereligious fear of the forces of nature gradually became religious as nature became personalized, spiritized, and eventually deified in human consciousness. Religion of a primitive type was therefore a natural biologic consequence of the psychologic inertia of evolving animal minds after such minds had once entertained concepts of the supernatural.
86:1.1 (950.3)
Aside from the natural worship urge, early evolutionary religion had its roots of origin in the human experiences of chance—so-called luck, commonplace happenings. Primitive man was a food hunter. The results of hunting must ever vary, and this gives certain origin to those experiences which man interprets as good luck and bad luck. Mischance was a great factor in the lives of men and women who lived constantly on the ragged edge of a precarious and harassed existence.
미개인의 제한된 지적 시야가 너무나 우연에 관심을 집중했으므로, 운수가 그들의 삶에서 변함없는 요소가 됐다. 원시 유란시아인은, 생활수준을 위해서가 아니라 살기위해서 투쟁했으며;중요한 역할을 우연{偶然}이 담당하는, 위험한 생애를 살았다. 알 수 없고 볼 수 없는 불행에 대한 변함없는 두려움이, 모든 쾌락을 효과적으로 가릴 수 있는 절망적 구름을 이 미개인 머리 위에 드리웠으며;그들은 불운을 가져올 무슨 일을 저지르지 않을까 하는 변함없는 두려움 속에서 살았다. 미신에 사로잡힌 미개인은, 행운이 연속되는 것을 늘 무서워했으며;그런 행운은 재난의 어떤 전조{前兆}라고 생각했다.
86:1.2 (950.4)
The limited intellectual horizon of the savage so concentrates the attention upon chance that luck becomes a constant factor in his life. Primitive Urantians struggled for existence, not for a standard of living; they lived lives of peril in which chance played an important role. The constant dread of unknown and unseen calamity hung over these savages as a cloud of despair which effectively eclipsed every pleasure; they lived in constant dread of doing something that would bring bad luck. Superstitious savages always feared a run of good luck; they viewed such good fortune as a certain harbinger of calamity.
86:1.4 (950.6)
Early man lived in uncertainty and in constant fear of chance—bad luck. Life was an exciting game of chance; existence was a gamble. It is no wonder that partially civilized people still believe in chance and evince lingering predispositions to gambling. Primitive man alternated between two potent interests: the passion of getting something for nothing and the fear of getting nothing for something. And this gamble of existence was the main interest and the supreme fascination of the early savage mind.
86:1.5 (951.1)
The later herders held the same views of chance and luck, while the still later agriculturists were increasingly conscious that crops were immediately influenced by many things over which man had little or no control. The farmer found himself the victim of drought, floods, hail, storms, pests, and plant diseases, as well as heat and cold. And as all of these natural influences affected individual prosperity, they were regarded as good luck or bad luck.
86:1.6 (951.2)
This notion of chance and luck strongly pervaded the philosophy of all ancient peoples. Even in recent times in the Wisdom of Solomon it is said: “I returned and saw that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill; but fate and chance befall them all. For man knows not his fate; as fishes are taken in an evil net, and as birds are caught in a snare, so are the sons of men snared in an evil time when it falls suddenly upon them.”
86:2.1 (951.3)
Anxiety was a natural state of the savage mind. When men and women fall victims to excessive anxiety, they are simply reverting to the natural estate of their far-distant ancestors; and when anxiety becomes actually painful, it inhibits activity and unfailingly institutes evolutionary changes and biologic adaptations. Pain and suffering are essential to progressive evolution.
86:2.2 (951.4)
The struggle for life is so painful that certain backward tribes even yet howl and lament over each new sunrise. Primitive man constantly asked, “Who is tormenting me?” Not finding a material source for his miseries, he settled upon a spirit explanation. And so was religion born of the fear of the mysterious, the awe of the unseen, and the dread of the unknown. Nature fear thus became a factor in the struggle for existence first because of chance and then because of mystery.
원시 정신은, 논리적이기는 했어도 영리하게 관련시키는 관념은 거의 없었으며;미개한 정신은 무지했고 세상물정에 전적으로 어두웠다. 어떤 사건이 다른 사건 다음에 일어나면, 미개인은 그것을 원인과 결과로 간주했다. 문명인이 미신으로 여기는 것이, 미개인 세상에서는 그저 단순한 무지에 불과했다. 원인과 결과 사이에 어떤 관계가 반드시 성립될 필요가 없음을 인류가 깨닫기까지, 오랜 세월이 소요됐다. 인간은, 행위와 그에 따른 결과 사이에서 실존의 여러 반응이 나타난다는 사실을 이제야 깨닫기 시작했다. 미개인은, 감지할 수 없고 추상적인 모든 것을 인격화시키려 애썼으며, 그리하여 자연과 우연 양쪽이 유령으로, 나중에는 신들로 인격화됐다.
86:2.3 (951.5)
The primitive mind was logical but contained few ideas for intelligent association; the savage mind was uneducated, wholly unsophisticated. If one event followed another, the savage considered them to be cause and effect. What civilized man regards as superstition was just plain ignorance in the savage. Mankind has been slow to learn that there is not necessarily any relationship between purposes and results. Human beings are only just beginning to realize that the reactions of existence appear between acts and their consequences. The savage strives to personalize everything intangible and abstract, and thus both nature and chance become personalized as ghosts—spirits—and later on as gods.
86:2.4 (951.6)
Man naturally tends to believe that which he deems best for him, that which is in his immediate or remote interest; self-interest largely obscures logic. The difference between the minds of savage and civilized men is more one of content than of nature, of degree rather than of quality.
그러나 납득하기 어려운 것을 계속 초자연적 원인의 탓으로 돌리는 것은, 두뇌를 쓰는 모든 형태의 힘든 일을 회피하려는, 게으르고 편리한 방법이나 다름없다. 운수라는 말은, 인간이 실존하는 모든 시대마다 해석할 수 없는 것을 감추려고 만들어낸 단어에 불과하며;인간이 통찰할 수 없는, 또는 통찰하기 싫어하는 현상을 가리킨다. 우연은, 사람이 너무 무지하거나 너무 나태해서 원인을 측정하지 못함을 의미하는 말이다. 호기심과 상상력이 부족할 때, 즉 인종에게 독창력과 모험심이 부족할 때에만, 사람은 자연 현상을 우연이나 불운으로 간주한다. 생명 현상을 탐구함으로 말미암아, 우연과 운수 그리고 소위 돌발사고에 대한 사람의 믿음은 조만간 무너지는 대신, 분명한 원인이 모든 결과에 앞서는, 법과 질서가 있는 우주로 대체될 것이다. 그리하여 실존에 대한 두려움은 살아가는 기쁨으로 바뀐다.
86:2.5 (951.7)
But to continue to ascribe things difficult of comprehension to supernatural causes is nothing less than a lazy and convenient way of avoiding all forms of intellectual hard work. Luck is merely a term coined to cover the inexplicable in any age of human existence; it designates those phenomena which men are unable or unwilling to penetrate. Chance is a word which signifies that man is too ignorant or too indolent to determine causes. Men regard a natural occurrence as an accident or as bad luck only when they are destitute of curiosity and imagination, when the races lack initiative and adventure. Exploration of the phenomena of life sooner or later destroys man’s belief in chance, luck, and so-called accidents, substituting therefor a universe of law and order wherein all effects are preceded by definite causes. Thus is the fear of existence replaced by the joy of living.
86:2.6 (952.1)
The savage looked upon all nature as alive, as possessed by something. Civilized man still kicks and curses those inanimate objects which get in his way and bump him. Primitive man never regarded anything as accidental; always was everything intentional. To primitive man the domain of fate, the function of luck, the spirit world, was just as unorganized and haphazard as was primitive society. Luck was looked upon as the whimsical and temperamental reaction of the spirit world; later on, as the humor of the gods.
86:3.1 (952.3)
Death was the supreme shock to evolving man, the most perplexing combination of chance and mystery. Not the sanctity of life but the shock of death inspired fear and thus effectively fostered religion. Among savage peoples death was ordinarily due to violence, so that nonviolent death became increasingly mysterious. Death as a natural and expected end of life was not clear to the consciousness of primitive people, and it has required age upon age for man to realize its inevitability.
86:3.2 (952.4)
Early man accepted life as a fact, while he regarded death as a visitation of some sort. All races have their legends of men who did not die, vestigial traditions of the early attitude toward death. Already in the human mind there existed the nebulous concept of a hazy and unorganized spirit world, a domain whence came all that is inexplicable in human life, and death was added to this long list of unexplained phenomena.
86:3.3 (952.5)
All human disease and natural death was at first believed to be due to spirit influence. Even at the present time some civilized races regard disease as having been produced by “the enemy” and depend upon religious ceremonies to effect healing. Later and more complex systems of theology still ascribe death to the action of the spirit world, all of which has led to such doctrines as original sin and the fall of man.
86:3.4 (952.6)
It was the realization of impotency before the mighty forces of nature, together with the recognition of human weakness before the visitations of sickness and death, that impelled the savage to seek for help from the supermaterial world, which he vaguely visualized as the source of these mysterious vicissitudes of life.
86:4.1 (952.7)
The concept of a supermaterial phase of mortal personality was born of the unconscious and purely accidental association of the occurrences of everyday life plus the ghost dream. The simultaneous dreaming about a departed chief by several members of his tribe seemed to constitute convincing evidence that the old chief had really returned in some form. It was all very real to the savage who would awaken from such dreams reeking with sweat, trembling, and screaming.
86:4.2 (953.1)
The dream origin of the belief in a future existence explains the tendency always to imagine unseen things in the terms of things seen. And presently this new dream-ghost-future-life concept began effectively to antidote the death fear associated with the biologic instinct of self-preservation.
86:4.3 (953.2)
Early man was also much concerned about his breath, especially in cold climates, where it appeared as a cloud when exhaled. The breath of life was regarded as the one phenomenon which differentiated the living and the dead. He knew the breath could leave the body, and his dreams of doing all sorts of queer things while asleep convinced him that there was something immaterial about a human being. The most primitive idea of the human soul, the ghost, was derived from the breath-dream idea-system.
86:4.4 (953.3)
Eventually the savage conceived of himself as a double—body and breath. The breath minus the body equaled a spirit, a ghost. While having a very definite human origin, ghosts, or spirits, were regarded as superhuman. And this belief in the existence of disembodied spirits seemed to explain the occurrence of the unusual, the extraordinary, the infrequent, and the inexplicable.
86:4.6 (953.5)
The orange race was especially given to belief in transmigration and reincarnation. This idea of reincarnation originated in the observance of hereditary and trait resemblance of offspring to ancestors. The custom of naming children after grandparents and other ancestors was due to belief in reincarnation. Some later-day races believed that man died from three to seven times. This belief (residual from the teachings of Adam about the mansion worlds), and many other remnants of revealed religion, can be found among the otherwise absurd doctrines of twentieth-century barbarians.
86:4.7 (953.6)
Early man entertained no ideas of hell or future punishment. The savage looked upon the future life as just like this one, minus all ill luck. Later on, a separate destiny for good ghosts and bad ghosts—heaven and hell—was conceived. But since many primitive races believed that man entered the next life just as he left this one, they did not relish the idea of becoming old and decrepit. The aged much preferred to be killed before becoming too infirm.
거의 모든 집단마다, 유령이 된 혼의 운명에 대해서 다른 관념을 가졌다. 그리스인은, 약한 사람의 혼은 반드시 허약하다고 믿었으며;그래서 그들은 그런 무기력한 혼을 받아들이기에 적합한 장소로서 하데스를 창안했으며;튼튼치 못한 이 사람들은 그 망령{亡靈}도 작을 것이라고 추정했다. 초기 안드족속은 자기 유령이 조상의 고향으로 돌아간다고 생각했다. 중국인과 이집트인은 혼과 육체가 함께 머문다고 생각한 적이 있었다. 이집트인 가운데서는, 이것 때문에 주의 깊게 무덤을 건축하게 됐고, 시신을 보존하려 애쓰게 됐다. 심지어 현대인도 시체의 부패를 방지하려고 애쓴다. 히브리인은 각 개인의 복제{複製}된 허깨비가 스올로 내려간다고, 살았던 세상으로 돌아오지 않는다고 생각했다. 그들은 혼의 진화에 대한 교리에서 중요한 발전을 이룩했다.
86:4.8 (953.7)
Almost every group had a different idea regarding the destiny of the ghost soul. The Greeks believed that weak men must have weak souls; so they invented Hades as a fit place for the reception of such anemic souls; these unrobust specimens were also supposed to have shorter shadows. The early Andites thought their ghosts returned to the ancestral homelands. The Chinese and Egyptians once believed that soul and body remained together. Among the Egyptians this led to careful tomb construction and efforts at body preservation. Even modern peoples seek to arrest the decay of the dead. The Hebrews conceived that a phantom replica of the individual went down to Sheol; it could not return to the land of the living. They did make that important advance in the doctrine of the evolution of the soul.
86:5.1 (953.8)
The nonmaterial part of man has been variously termed ghost, spirit, shade, phantom, specter, and latterly soul. The soul was early man’s dream double; it was in every way exactly like the mortal himself except that it was not responsive to touch. The belief in dream doubles led directly to the notion that all things animate and inanimate had souls as well as men. This concept tended long to perpetuate the nature-spirit beliefs; the Eskimos still conceive that everything in nature has a spirit.
유령이 된 혼의 말을 들을 수 있고 그 혼을 볼 수 있지만, 만질 수는 없다고 생각했다. 꿈꾸는 종족의 삶은 점차 진화하는 영계의 활동을 발전시키고 확장하여, 마침내 죽음은 “유령을 포기하는 것”으로 간주됐다. 거의 동물이나 다름없는 부족들을 제외하고, 모든 원시 부족은, 어떤 혼 개념을 발전시켜왔다. 문명이 진보되면서, 미신 같은 이런 혼 개념은 무너지고, 혼은 하나님을 아는 필사 정신과 거기에 내주하는 신성한 영 곧 사고 섭리사가 공동으로 창작한다는 새로운 혼 관념을 얻으려고, 사람은 계시와 개인 종교 체험에 전적으로 의존한다.
86:5.2 (954.1)
The ghost soul could be heard and seen, but not touched. Gradually the dream life of the race so developed and expanded the activities of this evolving spirit world that death was finally regarded as “giving up the ghost.” All primitive tribes, except those little above animals, have developed some concept of the soul. As civilization advances, this superstitious concept of the soul is destroyed, and man is wholly dependent on revelation and personal religious experience for his new idea of the soul as the joint creation of the God-knowing mortal mind and its indwelling divine spirit, the Thought Adjuster.
86:5.3 (954.2)
Early mortals usually failed to differentiate the concepts of an indwelling spirit and a soul of evolutionary nature. The savage was much confused as to whether the ghost soul was native to the body or was an external agency in possession of the body. The absence of reasoned thought in the presence of perplexity explains the gross inconsistencies of the savage view of souls, ghosts, and spirits.
진화 초기에, 잠자는 것은 유령이 된 혼이 육체에서 떠날 수 있음을 증거하는 것으로 간주됐고, 잠자는 사람의 이름을 말하거나 소리침으로써 다시 불러올 수 있다고 믿었다. 다른 형태의 인사불성에 빠졌을 때 혼은 더 멀리 있다고, 아마 영구히 도망치려한다고--즉 죽음이 임박했다고-- 생각했다. 꿈은, 잠자는 동안 혼이 일시적으로 육체를 떠나서 체험하는 것이라고 생각했다. 미개인은, 깨어서 겪는 체험의 일부분과 마찬가지로, 꿈도 똑같이 현실이라고 믿는다. 옛 사람은 혼이 몸속으로 돌아올 시간을 갖도록, 잠자는 사람을 급히 깨우지 않는 풍습을 지켰다.
86:5.10 (954.9)
Early in evolution sleep was regarded as proving that the ghost soul could be absent from the body, and it was believed that it could be called back by speaking or shouting the sleeper’s name. In other forms of unconsciousness the soul was thought to be farther away, perhaps trying to escape for good—impending death. Dreams were looked upon as the experiences of the soul during sleep while temporarily absent from the body. The savage believes his dreams to be just as real as any part of his waking experience. The ancients made a practice of awaking sleepers gradually so that the soul might have time to get back into the body.
86:5.11 (954.10)
All down through the ages men have stood in awe of the apparitions of the night season, and the Hebrews were no exception. They truly believed that God spoke to them in dreams, despite the injunctions of Moses against this idea. And Moses was right, for ordinary dreams are not the methods employed by the personalities of the spiritual world when they seek to communicate with material beings.
86:5.12 (954.11)
The ancients believed that souls could enter animals or even inanimate objects. This culminated in the werewolf ideas of animal identification. A person could be a law-abiding citizen by day, but when he fell asleep, his soul could enter a wolf or some other animal to prowl about on nocturnal depredations.
86:5.13 (955.1)
Primitive men thought that the soul was associated with the breath, and that its qualities could be imparted or transferred by the breath. The brave chief would breathe upon the newborn child, thereby imparting courage. Among early Christians the ceremony of bestowing the Holy Spirit was accompanied by breathing on the candidates. Said the Psalmist: “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.” It was long the custom of the eldest son to try to catch the last breath of his dying father.
86:5.14 (955.2)
The shadow came, later on, to be feared and revered equally with the breath. The reflection of oneself in the water was also sometimes looked upon as proof of the double self, and mirrors were regarded with superstitious awe. Even now many civilized persons turn the mirror to the wall in the event of death. Some backward tribes still believe that the making of pictures, drawings, models, or images removes all or a part of the soul from the body; hence such are forbidden.
86:5.15 (955.3)
The soul was generally thought of as being identified with the breath, but it was also located by various peoples in the head, hair, heart, liver, blood, and fat. The “crying out of Abel’s blood from the ground” is expressive of the onetime belief in the presence of the ghost in the blood. The Semites taught that the soul resided in the bodily fat, and among many the eating of animal fat was taboo. Head hunting was a method of capturing an enemy’s soul, as was scalping. In recent times the eyes have been regarded as the windows of the soul.
86:5.16 (955.4)
Those who held the doctrine of three or four souls believed that the loss of one soul meant discomfort, two illness, three death. One soul lived in the breath, one in the head, one in the hair, one in the heart. The sick were advised to stroll about in the open air with the hope of recapturing their strayed souls. The greatest of the medicine men were supposed to exchange the sick soul of a diseased person for a new one, the “new birth.”
86:5.17 (955.5)
The children of Badonan developed a belief in two souls, the breath and the shadow. The early Nodite races regarded man as consisting of two persons, soul and body. This philosophy of human existence was later reflected in the Greek viewpoint. The Greeks themselves believed in three souls; the vegetative resided in the stomach, the animal in the heart, the intellectual in the head. The Eskimos believe that man has three parts: body, soul, and name.
86:6.2 (955.7)
Very early in the history of mankind the realities of the imaginary world of ghosts and spirits became universally believed, and this newly imagined spirit world became a power in primitive society. The mental and moral life of all mankind was modified for all time by the appearance of this new factor in human thinking and acting.
86:6.4 (955.9)
As evolution progressed, good luck became associated with good spirits and bad luck with bad spirits. The discomfort of enforced adaptation to a changing environment was regarded as ill luck, the displeasure of the spirit ghosts. Primitive man slowly evolved religion out of his innate worship urge and his misconception of chance. Civilized man provides schemes of insurance to overcome these chance occurrences; modern science puts an actuary with mathematical reckoning in the place of fictitious spirits and whimsical gods.
86:6.6 (956.2)
But at last the mind of primitive man was occupied with thoughts which transcended all of his inherent biologic urges; at last man was about to evolve an art of living based on something more than response to material stimuli. The beginnings of a primitive philosophic life policy were emerging. A supernatural standard of living was about to appear, for, if the spirit ghost in anger visits ill luck and in pleasure good fortune, then must human conduct be regulated accordingly. The concept of right and wrong had at last evolved; and all of this long before the times of any revelation on earth.
86:6.7 (956.3)
With the emergence of these concepts, there was initiated the long and wasteful struggle to appease the ever-displeased spirits, the slavish bondage to evolutionary religious fear, that long waste of human effort upon tombs, temples, sacrifices, and priesthoods. It was a terrible and frightful price to pay, but it was worth all it cost, for man therein achieved a natural consciousness of relative right and wrong; human ethics was born!
86:7.1 (956.4)
The savage felt the need of insurance, and he therefore willingly paid his burdensome premiums of fear, superstition, dread, and priest gifts toward his policy of magic insurance against ill luck. Primitive religion was simply the payment of premiums on insurance against the perils of the forests; civilized man pays material premiums against the accidents of industry and the exigencies of modern modes of living.
86:7.2 (956.5)
Modern society is removing the business of insurance from the realm of priests and religion, placing it in the domain of economics. Religion is concerning itself increasingly with the insurance of life beyond the grave. Modern men, at least those who think, no longer pay wasteful premiums to control luck. Religion is slowly ascending to higher philosophic levels in contrast with its former function as a scheme of insurance against bad luck.
86:7.3 (956.6)
But these ancient ideas of religion prevented men from becoming fatalistic and hopelessly pessimistic; they believed they could at least do something to influence fate. The religion of ghost fear impressed upon men that they must regulate their conduct, that there was a supermaterial world which was in control of human destiny.
문명화된 현대 종족들은, 행운 또는 흔히 일어나는 생활상 변동을 유령이 야기한다는 두려움에서 막 벗어나고 있다. 인류는, 유령과-영 때문에 불운이 생긴다고 해석하는 사슬에서 해방상태를 성취하고 있다. 그러나 사람들은, 인생의 변천이 영적 원인으로 이뤄진다는 잘못된 교리를 포기하는 한편, 인간의 모든 불평등을 잘못된 정치적 적응과 사회적 부당행위 그리고 산업 사회의 경쟁 탓으로 돌리도록 명령하는, 거의 똑같은 정도로 그릇된 가르침을 놀라울 만큼 기꺼이 받아들이는 태도를 보여준다. 그러나 새로운 입법{立法}, 자선행위의 증가, 그리고 산업 재구성의 향상은, 그 자체가 아무리 좋더라도, 혈통이라는 사실과 삶에서 생기는 우연을 고쳐주지는 않을 것이다. 오직 사실을 납득하고, 자연 법칙 테두리 안에서 현명하게 조종하는 것만이, 사람으로 하여금 원하는 것을 이룩하고, 원하지 않는 것을 피하게 해줄 것이다. 과학적 행동으로 이끄는 과학 지식이, 소위 우연히 생기는 재난에 대한 유일한 대책이다.
86:7.4 (956.7)
Modern civilized races are just emerging from ghost fear as an explanation of luck and the commonplace inequalities of existence. Mankind is achieving emancipation from the bondage of the ghost-spirit explanation of ill luck. But while men are giving up the erroneous doctrine of a spirit cause of the vicissitudes of life, they exhibit a surprising willingness to accept an almost equally fallacious teaching which bids them attribute all human inequalities to political misadaptation, social injustice, and industrial competition. But new legislation, increasing philanthropy, and more industrial reorganization, however good in and of themselves, will not remedy the facts of birth and the accidents of living. Only comprehension of facts and wise manipulation within the laws of nature will enable man to get what he wants and to avoid what he does not want. Scientific knowledge, leading to scientific action, is the only antidote for so-called accidental ills.
86:7.5 (957.1)
Industry, war, slavery, and civil government arose in response to the social evolution of man in his natural environment; religion similarly arose as his response to the illusory environment of the imaginary ghost world. Religion was an evolutionary development of self-maintenance, and it has worked, notwithstanding that it was originally erroneous in concept and utterly illogical.
86:7.6 (957.2)
Primitive religion prepared the soil of the human mind, by the powerful and awesome force of false fear, for the bestowal of a bona fide spiritual force of supernatural origin, the Thought Adjuster. And the divine Adjusters have ever since labored to transmute God-fear into God-love. Evolution may be slow, but it is unerringly effective.