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Ringing in a Happy New Year!

Dear UBr's.  So much material is coming in already that it behooves us to start up the bulletin announcements, ideas, articles, and news before 2010 even begins.  So, let's make it a wonderful new year! And how about we get things underway ... (Editor)

The December 19th GGC Holiday Party Was Celebrated in Sebastopol

 All GGC members and friends were invited to 1100 High School Road, Sebastopol, CA 95472.  A sit down dinner was served by Denis Baker, Larry Geis, and Stephen Zendt at the Sebastopol property on Sat., December 19.  Decorations abounded, Christmas music played, and readers from as far north as Eureka joined together to celebrate the season.  The dinner of poached salmon, French onion soup, and green beans was cooked to perfection with the management of our resident gourmet cook - Denis Baker.  Larry decorated the outside as well as the inside of this beautiful property.  The white elephant sale was as silly as ever with people receiving everything from a marshmallow shooter to an elegant kaleidoscope. It was a very fun and festive gathering for all. Thank you Larry Geis, Denis Baker and Stephen Zendt for providing us with such a good time!   (report by Sara Blackstock)

(Public art in Sebastopol, CA.)

Upcoming US and International Events
--Lot's Happening so mark your New calendars:

The Urantia Fellowship's Executive Committee and General Council (GC) Meeting will be held January 29th to 31st, 2010, near the San Francisco Airport at the Marriott. Executive Committee (EC) Dates: Jan 28th - 31st -- GC Dates: Jan 29th - 31st 
The San Francisco Airport Marriott is at 1800 Old Bayshore Highway, Burlingame, CA
http://www.marriott.com/ hotels/travel/sfobg-san- francisco-airport-marriott/

   The Executive Committee will meet on Thursday Jan 28th from 7-11 PM and on Friday Jan 29th from 9 AM - 5 PM. The GC will meet Friday Jan 29th from 7-11 PM and again on Saturday Jan 30th from 9 AM - 5 PM, & meeting will end at noon, Sunday the 31st.
   EC meetings are generally open to all Councilors who are there and wish to attend.  GC meetings are generally open to any local readers who wish to attend.
   There is a community reception/social planned on that Saturday evening at the hotel starting at 7:00 PM.
   To reserve your room at the SF Airport Marriott hotel, please call Marriott Reservations at 800-228-9290 or 650-692-9100.
   Use the event name: The Urantia Book Fellowship, The reference #:  1-YXCEHP. Rooms are $109.00 a night, single or double. A free airport shuttle is provided.

February 27, 2010, Saturday - Study Intensive: 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM with lunch, possibly at Tery McCade's apartment community meeting room in Berkeley, CA.

March 27, 2010, Saturday - Women's retreat: will take place at Sara Blackstock's house in Benicia, CA. That same day, March 27, 2010, Saturday, a Men's retreat is being planned, with location yet to be determined.

April 17 or 24, 2010, Saturday - Community Planning Meeting: It will include a presentation from the Urantia University, possibly at Dolores Nice's home in Redwood City.  Schedule to be verified with the Urantia University presenter.

God Consciousness & Cosmic Morality: Living the Gospel, July 21-July 26, 2010, at Techny Towers, a conference and retreat center located in Chicago's North shore. To volunteer for service please contact Lara Amyx at 772-466-7950 or lara10@bellsouth.net

UBtheNEWS: First Annual Education for Outreach Conference
   The four-day conference will be held Thursday, July 29 (starting 10:00 am) - Sunday, Aug. 1 (ending 4:00 pm) in the Boulder, CO area. Your feedback on all aspects of conference planning, is very much welcomed. Contact: halbert@ubthenews.com

The First International United Urantia Family Festival: Montreal, Quebec
   It will be held next summer from July 1-5, 2010. Urantia Book readers from all sectors of the UB community are invited including the Foundation, the Association, the Fellowship, Urantia Canada and also the Unaffiliated readers. Contact: Diane Labrecque, dianelabrecque@osauna.com or http://www.tuuff.info/ to register or for more information.

August, 21, 2010, Saturday - Golden Gate Circle's Jesus Birthday celebration.  Sara suggests the Carquinez Strait Regional Shoreline Park in Port Costa, near Crockett, CA. Stay tuned for final details.

Oct. 1 - 3, 2010 Friday - Sunday - St. Dorothy's retreat.

Prayer Request …

   Jay Newbern asked me to ask for prayers for his mother, Janice Newbern of Anderson, Indiana. Janice is 94 years old on New Year's Day. She had hip surgery early this week, due to a fall. Although the surgery itself went well, Janice has not responded mentally in the way that had been hoped, while she is in a post-surgical rehabilitation facility.
   Her daughter, Jay's sister Penny, is the primary caregiver. This came on rather startlingly, as Mrs. Newbern had been able to drive and to handle all her own affairs. It may be that the stress of the move, of falling, having surgery, then being moved into the rehab facility, has brought on the appearance of pre-Alzheimer's symptoms.
   In any event, I ask your prayers for Janice Newbern, for Penny and for Jay.
Sincerely, Stephen Zendt 

Announcement …

   Stacey Harlan is in the process of forming a study group in Susanville, CA. Interested readers should contact him at 925-628-3361 or stacey8357@msn.com.    Thank you for adding this to your list! Stacey

An Important New Source Find

   It's for the section 7 titled, "Morals, Virtue, and Personality" in Paper 16, Seven Master Spirits (pg. 192).  It's a seven page article from the March 1939 issue of Scientific Monthly, called "A Scientific Basis for Moral Action." The writer is Dr. Max Schoen.  The funny thing is, I've only been able to access bits and pieces of it on books.google.com., but it's definitely the source. It mentions -- just like 16:5 (pg. 190) -- that the selective response of an animal is limited to the motor level of behavior. It says further that animals learn only by leaping, while humans can learn from looking as well as from leaping. I'm now just waiting for a friend of mine who has access to JSTOR to scan the article for me. Here's the site where the article can be accessed by JSTOR members: http://www.jstor.org/pss/16597

Details: "A Scientific Basis for Moral Action," by Max Schoen in The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Mar., 1939), pp. 246-252 (article consists of 7 pages) Published by: American Association for the Advancement of Science.
   I'm so pleased to have finally found this source. I think the reason it was so difficult to find is that it's a journal article.  So now I think I've pretty much found the major sources for Part I. I believe a lot of Part I is original, but sections such as 16:7 ("Morals, Virtue, and Personality") were obviously derived -- you can tell by the way they're written.  (by Matthew Block, published on SocAdmin 11/23/09).

More about UB Paper 16:

  Emmanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)

   Jeff Wattles once told UB students that some sections of Paper 16 were Kantian philosophy, for example, "the a priori assumptions which make it possible for man to function as a rational and self-conscious personality in the realms of science, philosophy, and religion." (16:6.10, pg. 192) For further reading, I recommend Professor Wattles essay, Religious Experience, Fanaticism, and Kant, available on his website: http://www.personal.kent.edu/~ jwattles/relexprk.htm

   "I define fanaticism as the highly energized pursuit of ideals through religious or non-religious thinking, feeling, and doing that are distorted by being cut off from balancing wisdom.  Fanaticism, in other words, is a brand of folly.  Since my purpose is not to point a finger but to point to a way out, I will content myself simply saying that the balancing wisdom comes from integrating spiritual experience with science (including an understanding of history), a critical philosophy, sensitivity to beauty, and ethics.  This definition is consistent with the tenor of Kant's thought, except for my claim that genuine religious experience helps heal, not encourage, fanaticism."

   Among Jeff's three principles of prayer in the article:

   "In seeking to know the will of God, one should not expect prayer to replace an intelligent study of the situation and an exhaustive effort to make the necessary adjustments.  One does not expect the Deity to do one's homework, and one needs to be prepared carefully to work out the details of what is to be done.  Scientific and philosophic thinking have a role to play in the prayer process.  They are taken to the limit, not marginalized, by the responsible person seeking the will of the Creator of a universe where, despite mystery and uncertainty, one may observe dependable laws of matter and mind."

  Defending the Enlightenment (by Richard Wolin)

(an excerpt from Fall 2008 issue of   HTTP://WWW.DISSENTMAGAZINE. ORG/ISSUE/?ISSUE=83)
Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists by Susan Neiman; Harcourt, 2008, 480 pp $27

   In 2001 Susan Neiman published Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. One of her goals was to nudge philosophy away from the seminar rooms and scholarly journals, where it revels in arcane themes, and back into the public sphere, its proper dwelling ground. Philosophy was born in the marketplace of Athens, where Socrates and his adversaries would debate topics such as the nature of courage, justice, virtue, and truth.  …
   Today philosophy has succumbed to mind-numbing specialization. The connection to everyday life has been all but severed. By tracing philosophical discussions of evil from the Lisbon earthquake to the Holocaust, in Evil in Modern Thought Neiman sought to counter this trend: to render philosophy worldly again by demonstrating its capacity to treat vital and topical themes. The results were widely and deservedly acclaimed. But her efforts also benefited, in ways that could not have been foreseen, from the Zeitgeist. For as the book went to print, two hijacked airliners smashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon, resulting in the deaths of nearly three thousand innocents. Evil, as personified by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, had once again become eerily topical.

   Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists is a sequel to Evil in Modern Thought. It, too, is concerned with the task of making philosophy timely and accessible again. However, here Neiman's point of departure is no longer evil but moral perplexity-specifically, the moral disorientation of the contemporary left. As Neiman sees it, the problem is that the terrain vacated by the left's aversion toward moralizing and morality in general has been filled by the political right. By voting Republican, large swaths of white, middle-class Americans have sacrificed their economic self-interest in favor of a party with whose values they could identify-or so they thought. Until quite recently, the right has been maddeningly successful at providing a coherent moral narrative, much of which consists of blaming the left for the nation's post-1960s problems and failings: social permissiveness, loss of authority, cultural anarchy, the decline of the family, and so forth.

   In Neiman's view the left has succumbed to moral confusion. Its anti-authoritarian disposition-a 1960s inheritance-has brought with it a fatal aversion to moral prescription. The counterculture was avowedly hedonistic-an ethos that clashed volubly with WASP America's well-ingrained, "think right, live right," puritanical habitudes. In many respects, the wounds exposed during this divisive, landmark Kulturkampf have yet to heal.

   The other debility afflicting the left concerns the fractious communitarian egotism of identity politics. Identities surely count. Collective self-assertion is often the only recourse for groups that have been systematically and unjustly excluded from the public life ... identity politics often rebuffs reason in favor of brute, existential claims concerning group interest. As a European friend once uncharitably pointed out: "Identity politics: that's what they had in Germany between 1933-1945."  …


Europe in 1815, during the Age of Enlightenment (from Rick Steves).

   THE SOLUTION Neiman favors is a surprisingly orthodox one: a return to the values of the Enlightenment. The heart of her lucid and impassioned study is what one might call a labor of conceptual reclamation. Attention to values and the primacy of moral insight are two aspects of the Enlightenment worldview that Neiman prizes and that she seeks to actualize as a remedy for the left's current state of moral enfeeblement.

… [Thus] her attempt to recapture reason for the ends of the political left …
   But what did the philosophes actually mean by "reason," a term whose self-evident veneer belies an underlying complexity? For edification, Neiman turns to the work of Immanuel Kant, whose 1784 essay "What is Enlightenment?" remains a model of concision and insight. Kant followed the model of the German dramatist G. E. Lessing, who vaunted truth's character as a quest and process rather than as a definitive result. As Lessing observed, "If God were to hold in his right hand all the truth and in his left the unique ever-active quest for truth . . . asking me to choose, I would humbly take his left."
   Kant defines reason as having the courage to employ one's own understanding rather than relying on the wisdom of another. He suggests that the ethos of Enlightenment may be encapsulated in the maxim, "Dare to be wise!" … Through his teaching and writing, he sought to cultivate the value of autonomy, which he viewed as an indispensable prerequisite for the virtues of active citizenship. In this way, the program of Enlightenment would succeed in putting an end to tyranny and oppression in all of its shapes and guises.  …
   In the nineteenth century, Enlightenment ideals were coopted by "scientism": the conviction that the only valid claims to truth are those that can be scientifically validated. Science has produced miracles-just visit the neonatology ward of your local hospital. But it has also produced horrors: mechanized warfare, mass death, environmental devastation, and the risks of nuclear annihilation. The Enlightenment thought that science and technology were veritable panaceas: harbingers of a realized utopia.
   Today we know better.

Nazareth Archaeology: a New Discovery
http://www.usatoday.com/news/ world/2009-12-21-jesus-house- nazareth_N.htm?obref=obnetwork       (for the full article, below is an excerpt)

   In Christian belief, Nazareth is where Jesus grew up and where an angel told Mary she would bear the child of God. At the time, previous discoveries suggest, it probably was a hamlet of about 50 poor Jewish families. It is now the largest Arab city in northern Israel, with about 65,000 residents.
   Archaeologists are not claiming it is the house where Jesus lived, but a young Jesus may have played around the house with cousins and friends, Yardenna Alexandre, excavations director at the Israel Antiquities Authority said. "It's a logical suggestion."
   Alexandre's team found remains of a wall and a system that appeared to collect water from the roof. Based on clay and chalk shards, the dwelling appeared to house a "simple Jewish family," she said.
   The finding isn't a groundbreaking archaeological discovery, but it adds context to Jesus' life, said Jodi Magness, professor of archaeology and early Judaism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. "Like all of us, Jesus was a product of his world," she said.
   "That's important for people who want to better understand Jesus' teachings."
   "It's good to remember that Jesus grew up as a poor Jew in a poor town," said Stephen Chapman, associate professor of the Old Testament at Duke Divinity School. "His life was not about having great material possessions, but about living for God in this humble and modest way."   (article courtesy of Chris Fallows)



Sierra Nevada Full Moonrise
A Prayer for the New Year ...

   Father, I reach out my hands this morning in submission to your authority, as I confidently claim back the ground of my life that my fears, depressions and despair have invaded. Prayerfully, I recognize the hand of God reaching out from heaven and joining my prayers with his great power.

   I cry out this morning as I recognize how so many lives could be changed if people would just simply return to a simple faith life.

   I cry out asking you to forgive us for the many times we have charged ahead fully confident in our own natural abilities to make things happen without pausing to seek the wisdom and love in your view on the subject. We seem to have drifted so far from simply trusting Jesus. We are ripe, fertile fields waiting for the presence of the Lord to impact our lives, and instead we are being crippled by the inability to fully trust in God to do what he says he will do. We are so fearful as human beings of giving up control that we sell out our lives to a lukewarm faith even when you wait to give each child of God a personal encounter with yourself.

   I cry out to be transformed into a passionate believer -- no longer willing to settle for less, but resolutely determined to seek all you have to give us.
   When you identify pride as the culprit, I ask you to replace it with humility -- when you see ego and selfish ambition, I ask you to replace it with the attitude of a servant's heart.


  

Thanks for tuning in and please -- Stay tuned!  Dave Holt, Editor and GGC VP.