As a tutor in English, I currently help teach one of my high school students the William Golding novel, Lord of the Flies, (first published in 1954) http://www.william-golding.co.uk/library/lord-of-the-flies.aspx.  I hadn’t read the book since it was a required text when I was in high school a few decades ago. On this re-reading, I gained much more insight and benefit from Golding’s story and its archetypal theme. Golding went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 for his novels.

   At first I thought, what a great yarn, but could it actually happen? Could British boys raised in the public schools revert to a state of bloodthirsty savagery? Could young men raised like me, in homes where both parents stayed together in a solid marriage, and who received a grounding in Christian Sunday school education, lose their civilized mores so readily, ending up ruled by their fears?

   Goldman actually reveals very little about the backgrounds of these British schoolboys. Jack, who briefly succeeds in taking over the role of chief by exploiting a rule of fear and the primeval solidarity of the pig hunt, may have come from a violent, perhaps even a criminal background, or a broken home. Setting my own biases aside, I looked more closely at their situation, one fraught with frightened but repressed emotions. They were totally isolated from any civilizing influence. My empathy grew. I began to understand how it could happen to any “civilized” young person.

   Think about our own times, I reminded myself. As I considered the savagery exhibited by terrorist groups at large in Africa and the Middle East, the novel took on new significance and prescience. British boys and some women (http://abcnews.go.com/International/young-women-join-isis/story?id=29112401) now travel to Syria, Iraq and Yemen to join these terrorist groups. These young people become culturally isolated, often live in wild harsh desert landscapes, and find a group identity by focusing each other’s aroused passions on dogmatic ideologies which many Muslims say do not represent Islam. They chant slogans not so different from what the boys in Lord of the Flies used in their primitive dance, “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!” (Chapter 9)

   What I find disturbing in all the terrorist activity, and the promotion of angry fundamentalist ideologies, is how the events kindle a rage against religion among people in general. Are we so sure we want to vilify, even discard, the civilizing influences of religion because of the abuses some ignorant people have made in its name? Each of us who believe in the potential goodness of our Western civilization should work to change the focus. Here’s an article from the Huffington Post that encourages us to take our attention away from the new savagery that seeks to dominate the conversation. “Yes, religion can still be a force for good in the world.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/17/100-religious-groups-doing-good_n_5460739.html

   If not religion, we can promote a reinvigorated dedication to spiritual living that will restore hope and true progress to our civilization. Many Urantia Book readers have heard about philosopher Henry Nelson Wieman, and his wife, Regina Westcott-Wieman, authors of the book The Normative Psychology of Religion. It is now recognized that the book is a “source work,” a source of material used in Papers 99, 100, and 101, http://www.squarecircles.com/urantiabooksourcestudies/index.htm. In another book of his, The Source of Human Good, http://www.amazon.com/Source-Human-Good-Henry-Wieman/dp/1556351267, Wieman explores a theme that I hope many will see the significance of:

    "There is a creative power in history which is able to conquer and to save, but it is not any power of man, even though it works through man. In all times, both good and ill, man must live under its control if history is to be fruitful."

   Albert Schweitzer, German physician and theologian, described it this way, “One truth stands firm. All that happens in world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history. The question is, shall we make world history or only suffer it passively? Will our thinking again become ethical-religious? Shall we again win ideals that will have power over reality? This is the question before us today.”  from "Religion in Modern Civilization," (Christian Century, 21 November 1934)

   These progressive thinkers foresaw a more important role for gathering inner spiritual resources rather than depending on institutionalized religions. Perhaps they were even dimly aware that, “Jesus founded the religion of personal experience in doing the will of God and serving the human brotherhood.” (The UB, 196:2.6) Those inspired by a personal experience of their own spiritual insights will become the new leaders of a revived civilization.