“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Western religion and science promote the ideas of competition, effort, the emphasis upon the will, divorced from the imagination, so that to “give up all effort” can be read as an abdication of responsibility, an indication of laziness and sloth; or in fundamental Christian terms, the devil finds work for idle hands.

Parts of original Christianity did indeed speak of this “letting go of effort.” [...]

The flu season intersects with the Christmas season, of course, when Christians are told to be merry and [wish] their fellows a happy return to the natural wonders of childhood, in thought at least. [...] Christianity has become, however, a tangled sorry tale, its cohesiveness largely vanished. [...]

[...] Christianity has conventionally treated illness as the punishment of God, or as a trial sent by God, to be borne stoically. [...]

[...] Christianity, however, officially asks children of sorrow to be joyful and sinners to find a childlike purity; it asks them to love a God who one day will destroy the world, and who will condemn them to hell if they do not adore him.

[...] The same unfortunately applies to the Eastern concept of nirvana, and to the Christian idea of heaven. [...]

[...] The three Christs material particularly affects him that way, for to deny the conventional idea of Christ is to antagonize not merely Catholicism but basic Christian belief. [...]

[...] One strong portion of him knows well that Christian theology is far from any entire answer, that Christ was not the son of the only God; the other portion of Ruburt is still affected by those beliefs, and he did not realize it.

In those terms, then, Christianity and your other religions are myths, rising in response to an inner knowledge that is too vast to be clothed by facts alone. [...]

[...] The Christian scientist is caught in between. [...]

The creativity for which Ruburt was praised as a child—the writing of his poetry, for example, became more and more frowned upon by the church as he became older, and in particular when the poetry contained concepts that did not fit Christian dogma. [...]

(Now the noise in the fireplace was fluctuating.) There you run into problems involved with Catholic or Christian devotion, the natural feedback needed in the development of creative work, and the striking originality of creative ventures that strike out on their own, forming their own paths. [...]

[...] The female elements in the Church were always considered suspect, and in the early times of Christianity there was some concern lest the Virgin become a goddess. There were offshoots of Christianity that did not survive, in which this was the case. [...]

Organized religion has committed many important blunders, yet for centuries Christianity provided a context accepted by large portions of the known world, in which experience could be judged against very definite “rules” — experience once focused, chiselled, and yet allowed some rich expression as long as it stayed within the boundaries set by religious dogma.

[...] For all its many errors, at its best Christianity proclaimed the ultimate meaning for each person’s life. [...]

(Pause.) Now in medieval times organized religion, or organized Christianity, presented each individual with a screen of beliefs through which the personal self was perceived. [...]

[...] The same applies to Christianity itself, for all of the seemingly historical events connected with the official (underlined) Christ did not happen in physical reality. [...]

Christianity for many centuries served as an amazingly creative organizational framework, that expressed the vast complexity of the soul’s reality. [...]

[...] Instead, while carrying the belief in man’s potential, Christianity smothered the thesis beneath a slag heap of old guilt. [...]

The Christian concept of heaven with its riches, God and his bounty, the source of nature itself—all of this in our terms was a symbolic structure describing in storybook terms the attributes and characteristics of Framework 2.

[...] He will return to straighten out Christianity, which will be in a shambles at the time of his arrival, and to set up a new system of thought when the world is sorely in need of one.

[...] (Jane paused, a hand to her eyes.) He created them in so far as he found himself forced to admit certain facts: In that world at that time, earthly power was needed to hold Christian ideas apart from numberless other theories and religions, to maintain them in the middle of warring factions. [...]

[...] The “new religion” following the Second Coming will not be Christian in your terms, although the third personality of Christ will initiate it.

[...] Now I do not know offhand when St. Patrick was roaming—at a time however before Christianity was introduced—you lived in the country now called Ireland... before the Christian Era...as a man given much to wandering and without a permanent abode.

Ruburt found great comfort in the church as a young person, for if it created within its members the image of a Sinful Self, it also of course provided a steady system of treatment—a series of rituals that gave the individual some sense of hope the Sinful Self could be redeemed, as in most of Christianity’s framework through adherence to certain segments of Christian dogma. [...]

[...] Other portions of his teachings did not follow the main line of Christian thought, and were buried.

(She said the “buried” material about Christ and mainline Christian thought had to do with occult [meaning hidden] teachings and the Essenes, who were one of the four major Jewish sects known to exist in the Holy Land early in the first century, A.D. [see chapters 21 and 22 in Seth Speaks.]

[...] (Louder:) “The devil finds work for idle hands” — an old Christian dictum.

Unfortunately, certain aspects of Christianity were stressed over others, and that dictum was based upon the belief in a wicked self that needed to be disciplined and diverted into constructive activity. [...]

[...] As you know, your western world followed its own mixture of Christianity, Darwinism, and Freudian psychology. [...]

[...] When you read the news or hear it, however, because of cultural beliefs you are programmed to behave in a certain fashion, in a fashion that validates, seemingly, the concepts of Freud and Darwin, and the most unfortunate aspects of Christian pessimism.

(Gnosticism was a selected system of religion and philosophy, uniting features of Platonism, orientalism, Christianity, and dualism. It embraced pre-Christian times and later, and took several forms. [...]

[...] Christianity was but a distortion of this main truth — that is, organized Christianity as you know it. [...]

(11:55.) The concept itself existed long before Christianity’s initiation, and was told in various forms throughout the centuries and in all civilizations. [...]

[...] In your terms he was—in your terms from this standpoint—he was a fanatic against the Christians for religious, political and economic reasons. [...]

The personality however, tell him, lived according to his lights, possessed a primitive love of nature, and did, now, inspire others with heroism under the conditions chosen In the second existence mentioned, he was again a leader, but had learned the two-tongued nature of power, and allowed the Christians to win. [...]