The Urantia Book полностью

70:8.9 (793.1) 7. Vocational—as vocations multiplied, they tended to establish castes and guilds. Workers divided into three groups: the professional classes, including the medicine men, then the skilled workers, followed by the unskilled laborers.

70:8.10 (793.2) 8. Religious—the early cult clubs produced their own classes within the clans and tribes, and the piety and mysticism of the priests have long perpetuated them as a separate social group.

70:8.11 (793.3) 9. Racial—the presence of two or more races within a given nation or territorial unit usually produces color castes. The original caste system of India was based on color, as was that of early Egypt.

70:8.12 (793.4) 10. Age—youth and maturity. Among the tribes the boy remained under the watchcare of his father as long as the father lived, while the girl was left in the care of her mother until married.

70:8.13 (793.5) Flexible and shifting social classes are indispensable to an evolving civilization, but when class becomes caste, when social levels petrify, the enhancement of social stability is purchased by diminishment of personal initiative. Social caste solves the problem of finding one’s place in industry, but it also sharply curtails individual development and virtually prevents social co-operation.

70:8.14 (793.6) Classes in society, having naturally formed, will persist until man gradually achieves their evolutionary obliteration through intelligent manipulation of the biologic, intellectual, and spiritual resources of a progressing civilization, such as:

70:8.15 (793.7) 1. Biologic renovation of the racial stocks—the selective elimination of inferior human strains. This will tend to eradicate many mortal inequalities.

70:8.16 (793.8) 2. Educational training of the increased brain power which will arise out of such biologic improvement.

70:8.17 (793.9) 3. Religious quickening of the feelings of mortal kinship and brotherhood.

70:8.18 (793.10) But these measures can bear their true fruits only in the distant millenniums of the future, although much social improvement will immediately result from the intelligent, wise, and patient manipulation of these acceleration factors of cultural progress. Religion is the mighty lever that lifts civilization from chaos, but it is powerless apart from the fulcrum of sound and normal mind resting securely on sound and normal heredity. 9. Human Rights

70:9.1 (793.11) Nature confers no rights on man, only life and a world in which to live it. Nature does not even confer the right to live, as might be deduced by considering what would likely happen if an unarmed man met a hungry tiger face to face in the primitive forest. Society’s prime gift to man is security.

70:9.2 (793.12) Gradually society asserted its rights and, at the present time, they are:

70:9.3 (793.13) 1. Assurance of food supply.

70:9.4 (793.14) 2. Military defense—security through preparedness.

70:9.5 (793.15) 3. Internal peace preservation—prevention of personal violence and social disorder.

70:9.6 (794.1) 4. Sex control—marriage, the family institution.

70:9.7 (794.2) 5. Property—the right to own.

70:9.8 (794.3) 6. Fostering of individual and group competition.

70:9.9 (794.4) 7. Provision for educating and training youth.

70:9.10 (794.5) 8. Promotion of trade and commerce—industrial development.

70:9.11 (794.6) 9. Improvement of labor conditions and rewards.

70:9.12 (794.7) 10. The guarantee of the freedom of religious practices to the end that all of these other social activities may be exalted by becoming spiritually motivated.

70:9.13 (794.8) When rights are old beyond knowledge of origin, they are often called natural rights. But human rights are not really natural; they are entirely social. They are relative and ever changing, being no more than the rules of the game—recognized adjustments of relations governing the ever-changing phenomena of human competition.

70:9.14 (794.9) What may be regarded as right in one age may not be so regarded in another. The survival of large numbers of defectives and degenerates is not because they have any natural right thus to encumber twentieth-century civilization, but simply because the society of the age, the mores, thus decrees.

70:9.15 (794.10) Few human rights were recognized in the European Middle Ages; then every man belonged to someone else, and rights were only privileges or favors granted by state or church. And the revolt from this error was equally erroneous in that it led to the belief that all men are born equal.

70:9.16 (794.11) The weak and the inferior have always contended for equal rights; they have always insisted that the state compel the strong and superior to supply their wants and otherwise make good those deficiencies which all too often are the natural result of their own indifference and indolence.