P.B.'s Answers to Professor Floriano's Questionnaire (Verona):
(1) God is Father of us all.
(2) Man's highest goal is to find his relationship to God.
(3) Man is a creature or babe of God.
(4) Man's duty toward God is to learn what is God's will and to obey it.
(5) Sin is the departure from the will of God.
(6) There was a historical descent of man from a state of innocence (not goodness) into one of pollution or sin.
(7) Man fell into it through his wanting experience, and thus came into physical and intellectual pollution.
(8) Suffering is God's will, partly to educate man and partly to punish him for his sin or downfall.
(9) But it is also God's will for man to enjoy. We do not see him only suffering.
(10) Man's greatest good is to learn God's will and obey it; his greatest evil is to remain in ignorance of it.
(11) There is a Providence which takes care of us all from the very beginning to the very end.
(12) Contemporary society's good is its claim to search for truth (through intellect) and its bad is its excessive extroversion.
(13) Man will get worse but then later he will get better than now.
(14) Nature is the visible world made by God, and supreme nature is the invisible world. Both work together as one. Both are in us.
(15) The evolved man like others has need of a religion and of a church according to the degree of his evolvement. Why? Because it is religion which begins to teach him his relationship to God, and it is through religious feeling that he begins to become aware of it.
(16) By religion I mean any system of worship and ideas which leads man to know his relationship to God. This relationship can be a revealed one.
(17) How can anyone know that a revealed religion is true? He cannot know; he can only accept or reject it. For if he knows enough to judge whether it be true or not, then he does not need a revealed religion.
(18) Each established church and each obscure sect can claim to give out religious revelation. Its members must accept it as such. Others who reject it can do so only from the point of view of human intellect; their judgement is only reasoned opinion, not revelation.
-- Notebooks Category 12: Reflections > Chapter 4 : Reflections On Truth > # 216
