Here’s a quote from ACIM from chapter 2:1:
To extend is a fundamental aspect of God which He gave to His Son. In the creation, God extended Himself to His creations and imbued them with the same loving Will to create. You have not only been fully created, but have also been created perfect.
Now, anybody who has read TUB can easily recognize that Jesus would never say such a thing. What would be the purpose of his bestowal incarnation into a physical body with a physical mind if it were not to experience for himself the process of becoming perfected? Michael, the Creator Son may have been created perfect, but Jesus, the Son of Man, was not created perfect. He was born an imperfect creature just as we humans are born imperfect. We, just like Jesus, must make choices, climb the psychic circles and willingly participate in the process of becoming perfected, the same way Jesus the man did while living on this earth.
So to me, this is proof that Jesus did not write ACIM. The words are coming from the mind of Helen Schucman. That’s not to say that, according to her personal spiritual growth, she may have learned to recognize truth and share it. There are some truths in ACIM, but they are not the words of Jesus channeled through the mind of Helen. They are Helen’s words dressed up to appear Jesus-like. And that must be so because many of the things she says are not true, like the nonsense quoted above. Jesus would never say untrue things.
Allow me to supply some more evidence from Chapter 2:2.
The Atonement is the only defense that cannot be used destructively because it is not a device you made. The Atonement principle was in effect long before the Atonement began. The principle was love and the Atonement was an act of love. Acts were not necessary before the separation, because belief in space and time did not exist. It was only after the separation that the Atonement and the conditions necessary for its fulfillment were planned. Then a defense so splendid was needed that it could not be misused, although it could be refused. Refusal could not, however, turn it into a weapon of attack, which is the inherent characteristic of other defenses. The Atonement thus becomes the only defense that is not a two-edged sword. It can only heal.
Again, anyone who has read TUB knows that the above quote is poppycock and would never be uttered by Jesus. We know that the atonement idea is an abomination, a philosophical assault upon the unity and free-will of God. Helen states that the atonement was not necessary before the so-called separation, whatever that is, because a “belief” in time and space did not exist prior to the separation. This is amazingly irrational. She thinks that time and space are beliefs and not reality? And her concept of separation is essentially gnostic, which is also nonsense. To think that there was a sudden crack in the “absence of time and space” which resulted in a sudden belief in the “existence of time and space” is ridiculous. And that God had to somehow compensate for this problem of “time and space awareness” by implementing the atonement doctrine, which existed in the “absence of time and space”, is totally nonsensical. Jesus is not nonsensical. The atonement principal is entirely manmade, God had no part in it, but Helen would have us believe Jesus is now teaching something irrational and untrue. It’s not possible for him to do that.
Later in chapter 2 part 8, she tells the reader that the purpose of time, created by the separation from the original “absence of time and space”, is to allow us to perfect our judgment and right mindedness. How can this be true if she previously wrote that Jesus declared we were all created perfect? Of course Jesus would not say things that are so obviously contradictory, so there is no way I can believe that any of ACIM has a divine source. It obviously all comes from the mind of Helen Schucman. That’s not to say that Helen’s mind isn’t working very hard to recognize divinity, and it is also not to say that what she wrote doesn’t occasionally hint at divinity. I’m sure she has a wonderful soul and her intentions are sincere. But, I absolutely cannot accept her words as Jesus’ words. Can’t be. There’s too much confusion and contradiction for that to be true.
TUB quotes which describe the atonement principle as entirely manmade:
89:4.5 The earliest idea of the sacrifice was that of a neutrality assessment levied by ancestral spirits; only later did the idea of atonement develop. As man got away from the notion of the evolutionary origin of the race, as the traditions of the days of the Planetary Prince and the sojourn of Adam filtered down through time, the concept of sin and of original sin became widespread, so that sacrifice for accidental and personal sin evolved into the doctrine of sacrifice for the atonement of racial sin. The atonement of the sacrifice was a blanket insurance device which covered even the resentment and jealousy of an unknown god.
92:3.2 The cardinal religious ideas of incantation, inspiration, revelation, propitiation, repentance, atonement, intercession, sacrifice, prayer, confession, worship, survival after death, sacrament, ritual, ransom, salvation, redemption, covenant, uncleanness, purification, prophecy, original sin – they all go back to the early times of primordial ghost fear.
103:4.2 When primitive man felt that his communion with God had been interrupted, he resorted to sacrifice of some kind in an effort to make atonement, to restore friendly relationship. The hunger and thirst for righteousness leads to the discovery of truth, and truth augments ideals, and this creates new problems for the individual religionists, for our ideals tend to grow by geometrical progression, while our ability to live up to them is enhanced only by arithmetical progression.
121:6.5 Some phases of Paul’s teachings regarding original sin and the atonement were original with himself.
TUB quotes which describe the atonement doctrine as fallacious:
103:4.4 Jesus swept away all of the ceremonials of sacrifice and atonement. He destroyed the basis of all this fictitious guilt and sense of isolation in the universe by declaring that man is a child of God; the creature-Creator relationship was placed on a child-parent basis.
149:2.3 1. The effort to connect the gospel teaching directly onto the Jewish theology, as illustrated by the Christian doctrines of the atonement – the teaching that Jesus was the sacrificed Son who would satisfy the Father’s stern justice and appease the divine wrath. These teachings originated in a praiseworthy effort to make the gospel of the kingdom more acceptable to disbelieving Jews. Though these efforts failed as far as winning the Jews was concerned, they did not fail to confuse and alienate many honest souls in all subsequent generations.
188:4.1 Although Jesus did not die this death on the cross to atone for racial guilt of mortal man nor to provide some sort of effective approach to an otherwise offended and unforgiving God; even though the Son of Man did not offer himself as a sacrifice to appease the wrath of God and to open the way for sinful man to obtain salvation; notwithstanding that these ideas of atonement and propitiation are erroneous, nonetheless, there are significances attached to this death of Jesus on the cross which should not be overlooked. It is a fact that Urantia has become known among other neighboring inhabited planets as the “World of the Cross.”
188:4.8-9 The whole idea of ransom and atonement is incompatible with the concept of God as it was taught and exemplified by Jesus of Nazareth. The infinite love of God is not secondary to anything in the divine nature. All this concept of atonement and sacrificial salvation is rooted and grounded in selfishness. Jesus taught that service to one’s fellows is the highest concept of the brotherhood of spirit believers. Salvation should be taken for granted by those who believe in the fatherhood of God. The believer’s chief concern should not be the selfish desire for personal salvation but rather the unselfish urge to love and, therefore, serve one’s fellows even as Jesus loved and served mortal men.
188:4.13 This entire idea of the ransom of the atonement places salvation upon a plane of unreality; such a concept is purely philosophic.
2:6.5 The erroneous supposition that the righteousness of God was irreconcilable with the selfless love of the heavenly Father, presupposed absence of unity in the nature of Deity and led directly to the elaboration of the atonement doctrine, which is a philosophic assault upon both the unity and the free-willness of God.
