Course IV - Teaching 8: Cafh and Religions

Cafh has its own conception of the individual being and its relationship with the world and God.
This principle neither denies nor excludes different conceptions, and only represents the fulcrum that a soul needs to be steady and take necessary energy to fly.
The rest of conceptions invigorate Cafh’s conceptions. Inasmuch as the Son knows them more deeply, his idea is more accurate about how he must deal with it and with powers derived from it.
Religious conceptions in the world have created systems based on monotheism and polytheism. These systems are a result of great Revelations and Universal Traditions, but dispose of new renewing prophetic ideas. They are not in a position to give a definitive definition of problems of man in regard to life and God because they are not universal.
Great Revelations, traditions and the Word of Divine Incarnations ever have a universal character. The divine influence of these channels established between earth and heaven empty out their sap throughout the whole world.
But as soon as this divine force starts canalizing through usual dogma and priesthood, the channel becomes more important that the sap that is flowing and non-universal religions are established.
Polytheism as the result of a grand thought about the ceaseless and variable becoming logically puts every thing on its place and attains deductive precision and fundamental concepts; but, by including man in great cosmic horizons and cyclical times of return, it does not solve his present situation at all.
Polytheistic philosophical and theological thoughts are fascinating and irrefutable but as religious systems cannot cure evils of man.
Life and wish to live are the cause of suffering as a whole, illusions trapping the individual being and reducing him to successive, unending miseries. The individual being will be able to get rid of evil only by disposing of life and wish to live but, in front of these indisputable verities, man goes on to live, suffer and seek new solutions.
Polytheism, as religion, has nothing to give the man. It is as if one said to a sick person instead of helping him, “Die and you will stop suffering”.
When these religions want to attain certain practical effect, have to make use of opposite principles to their fundamental statements, and apply other systems to obtain them.
Monotheism on the other hand contains an absolute poverty of thought and its speculations are rationally inexplicable and confused and its results materialistic. Very often these religious systems, despite their efforts to deny this, rather adore a planetary, psychical, partial God than a Universal God, and their horizons are limited and of reduced significance.
But monotheistic religions have a grand feeling and express an untiring eagerness for solving evils of the world, and when do not achieve it, have to build continuously utopian kingdoms and heavens of hopes to gain time while the remedy comes.
After every war the believers of these religions wonder, “Are these results produced by the religion of love?” Since monotheism does not achieve a true solution in regard to life and God, it seeks speculative solutions going out of their faith that is totally supernatural. It copies and adapts to other philosophical systems and deductions of contrary speculative systems in order to adapt them to the feeling of their postulates.
Meanwhile, religions angrily fight each other to get real universal control but never obtain it.
Great religions contain seeds of Eternal Verities and are examples of the Mother Idea of the Race.
They are powerful psychic forces en route to carry beings toward the pure spiritual life.
But since they are not universal and need to fight one another to prevail, forcefully must subordinate spiritual life to their own arbitrary end, imposing upon the souls confessional injunctions for the divine realization.
Also, since there are several religions, for their establishment they became powers in the world by making use of prerogatives of race, economy and privileges. More than the spiritual value, they defend their psychic, ethic and liturgical privileges and defend themselves from attacks and enemies by making use of the historic continuity of their church and of their exclusive priestly organizations.
Only some few souls escape the bondage of religious systems and soar through mystique toward spiritual regions. But these souls, although very faithful to dogmatic and moral laws of their church, are bound to suffer numberless trials and misfortunes from the clergy and official adepts.
Many people would desire to get rid of these religions since they disagree with them, but a change of religion fundamentally does not solve this evil.
Religion is valuable inasmuch as it gives the soul means to soar toward the pure spiritual life, and is counteracting every time it wants to transform the spiritual life into a magical sacramental act.
Only a unique, universal religion can give mankind definitive solutions and carry the souls not toward salvation according to its creed, but toward a deifying enlightenment. Cafh waits and works for the emergence of this great universal religion in the world where spiritual values in themselves might be higher than dogmatic, traditional and eschatological values. But meanwhile Cafh certainly recognizes the value of several religions and duly respect them.
No evil is remedied by destroying and fighting it, as experience teaches us. Beings have to get rid from the psychic currents of their religions to enter the pure spiritual life of them and of the cosmos.
Cafh has a Teaching, protection and organization that by itself and by its own means lead the souls toward the desired goal but admits that any religion possesses these prerogatives to achieve it.
It just considers incompatible those ordering, contradictory aspects between Cafh and the religion practiced. Means to attain an end have to be synchronic among them in order to become effective.
Those means that Cafh possesses and offers to the Sons, and expounds before the solutions that other religions propose, were achieved by individuals who were able to find the purest spiritual results, but Cafh does not say it is in possession of the definitive solution.
Ultimately, in Cafh’s view, mystique can open horizons and give necessary spiritual definitions.
Here are its conclusions:
“If life is an evil and just by abandoning the desire of living this evil can be removed, I renounce to the world and life. I renounce as individual, as personality; but my renouncement would be in vain if consequently I did not solve the problems of men who do not renounce and must live in the world. A remedy should exist for the evil of the world when the very God transcends, attains the man and comes to him.
Evil and pain cannot exist when God really lives in man.The solution should not be to abandon the word but to divinize the world.
My renouncement does not deny the life but redeems it. To renounce to life because there are no solutions to its evils is a very poor remedy but to renounce to life after its transformation is to have attained the goal.”
With these simple postulates Cafh raises before Great Religions with understanding and respect but faithful to his place and view while expecting the Divine Incarnation to come and the establishment of the Universal Religion.