Human suffering….personal and general. This is one of the greatest issues humanity has faced philosophically, religiously, socially, and personally. What is its cause? What is its solution?
The primitives, including many ancient and modern evolutionary religions, offer a profoundly important answer. They believe that God causes suffering as a form of punishment. More enlightened ones believe God allows suffering for a similar reason. But both do indeed require God to believe either one of those, rather than random luck or misfortune or fate or any other form of impersonal cause. And between the lack of belief in God and the belief in one God, there came the many gods of nature and natural order (sun, moon, water, earth, harvest, underworld, stars, etc.), each with their own quirky and unpredictable appetites and whims of good and bad fortune. These evolutionary steps in the progressive realization and appreciation for God’s nature, purpose, plan, and power are, we are told, natural as delivered by the Adjutants, experience, wisdom, and the Light within.
Yet many of our fellows refuse to believe in any God that would cause OR allow suffering and thereby, reasonably, reject the God of those evolutionary religions which persist in this definition and description of an angry God or an indifferent God. More and more people are rejecting these primitive notions…and yet the number of those who believe in God and heaven and angels remains a high majority. Even those who intellectually reject any god, do so primarily in rejection of institutional, evolutionary church beliefs, demands, creeds, and doctrines…rather than any real embrace of a mechanistic, accidental physical universe resulting in human life and free will and love as the obvious result of whatever happened however it happened.
I find this very encouraging actually and evidence of the Son’s Spirit and its accelerating effects in conjunction with the Adjutants and the God Fragment. The very concepts of God and creation and life and the human dual nature of material and spiritual are demonstrating more and more influence on the each and upon the all. While many still despair at the suffering the each and all endure, still is there functional progress in our beliefs in, or in many cases our personal response to, God and a much truer concept of reality. Hardly replete or integrated or deep perhaps…but when we consider a time span of only 4000 years since Machiventa came to re-establish monotheism, any student of religious history can identify the arc of rising consciousness of Deity and the progressive concepts related thereto.
The answers to the questions ‘what causes suffering’ and ‘what is the solution to suffering’ were determined by the experiential wisdom of the human mind some 2600 years ago during a mysterious age of enlightenment we are told in the Papers. And indeed, human historical records have demonstrated this reality. The Tao and the Buddha and others determined that suffering comes from self importance and its solution comes by the importance of all others, both individually and collectively. This profound understanding and knowledge of truth and universal reality is not new or news to any student of philosophy.
While many found and still find this concept easy enough to understand, they also find it difficult to implement due to the apparently opposing dual nature of human life. Altruism and self sacrifice for the welfare of others is not an especially natural state of mind, or not so for the materially oriented mind. The self still seeks for a personal payoff or reward the more materially grounded and minded we remain. The gods of judgement and wrath sprung forth in many religions as a method to give incentive to ‘obey’ the ‘higher’ nature. But as science and experience explain more and more of the causes for the natural order of life, including rain, seasons, sunrise and sunset, and many other previous phenomena blamed on the gods and as foundation for the religious life, such incentives lost power over mind…and behaviors.
The Gospel OF Jesus inserted altruism and care of and for others as an ‘outcome’ of the religious life which became focused on the love of a paternal God for all children in creation. The familial concept on Urantia does not originate with Jesus (think Garden and the Prince before) but it is an entirely new concept in the modern era of the past 2000 years or 100 generations of human history. And while this Good News was radical and changed many in its time, the repetition of this Gospel by the Son’s Spirit and the flood of the God Fragment to our world has been far more radical in its influence in the evolutionary religious experience of each human mind, delivering insight through personal revelation and relationship with God, directly to the each, and subsequently affecting the whole.
The cause of suffering is the lack of love…love of God and one another. The solution to suffering is love…love of God and one another.
The Urantia Papers is a gift to explain all of this in important and new ways because of the success of the gift of Michael’s bestowal and the gift of his Spirit to our world. I have great confidence in Michael’s success on this Shrine of Nebadon.
I hope we might share text which details the story of progressive evolutionary religious truths and the certainty of our planetary rulers and ministers success in the mortals epochs of time as we certainly, if inexplicably, traverse toward the inevitability of Light and Life.
Cheers! 
"Live loyally today—grow—and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole."
(Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if that’s what people feel called to do.)