Angela wrote: Does anyone have ideas on what the whole of religious experience encompasses?
I propose that the whole of religious experience encompasses everything:
117:6.9 Men all too often forget that God is the greatest experience in human existence. Other experiences are limited in their nature and content, but the experience of God has no limits save those of the creature’s comprehension capacity, and this very experience is in itself capacity enlarging. When men search for God, they are searching for everything. When they find God, they have found everything. The search for God is the unstinted bestowal of love attended by amazing discoveries of new and greater love to be bestowed.
Angela wrote: I hear what you are saying. Personal religious experience is “personal” and cannot influence larger societal conditions.
Are you referring to something I said? I don’t think I ever said that personal religious experience cannot influence society. Quite the opposite. Personal religious experience has no other option but to influence society. If one’s personal religious experience is real, it will overflow into society as fruits of the spirit. If it’s unreal, it will not accomplish anything. It’s the fruits that do the influencing, and not social fruit, only spiritual fruit.
The first responsibility of any religionist is to align him/herself with God and then dedicate their life to doing his will. And his will is always outgoing, always sharing, always giving and loving, always going the second mile and the third. If you want to change society, you have to first change your own orientation and direction of identity through personal religious experience, then make contact with society and go the second mile.
5:4.3 God is not only the determiner of destiny; he is man’s eternal destination. All nonreligious human activities seek to bend the universe to the distorting service of self; the truly religious individual seeks to identify the self with the universe and then to dedicate the activities of this unified self to the service of the universe family of fellow beings, human and superhuman.
16:9.8 Unselfish social consciousness must be, at bottom, a religious consciousness; that is, if it is objective; otherwise it is a purely subjective philosophic abstraction and therefore devoid of love. Only a God-knowing individual can love another person as he loves himself.
16:7.9 Morality can never be advanced by law or by force. It is a personal and freewill matter and must be disseminated by the contagion of the contact of morally fragrant persons with those who are less morally responsive, but who are also in some measure desirous of doing the Father’s will.
102:3.4 Religious desire is the hunger quest for divine reality. Religious experience is the realization of the consciousness of having found God. And when a human being does find God, there is experienced within the soul of that being such an indescribable restlessness of triumph in discovery that he is impelled to seek loving service-contact with his less illuminated fellows, not to disclose that he has found God, but rather to allow the overflow of the welling-up of eternal goodness within his own soul to refresh and ennoble his fellows. Real religion leads to increased social service.
195:10.5 In winning souls for the Master, it is not the first mile of compulsion, duty, or convention that will transform man and his world, but rather the second mile of free service and liberty-loving devotion that betokens the Jesusonian reaching forth to grasp his brother in love and sweep him on under spiritual guidance toward the higher and divine goal of mortal existence. Christianity even now willingly goes the first mile, but mankind languishes and stumbles along in moral darkness because there are so few genuine second-milers — so few professed followers of Jesus who really live and love as he taught his disciples to live and love and serve.
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