“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is easy enough to look at those belief structures and shrug your shoulders, wondering at man’s distorted views of reality. The entire scientific view of illness, however, is quite as distorted (with amused emphasis). It is as laboriously conceived and interwound with “nonsense.” It is about as factual as the “fact” that God sends illness as punishment, or that illness is the unwanted gift of mischievous demons.

The scientific framework is basically, now, just as senseless, though within it the facts often seem to prove themselves out, also. There are viruses, for example. Your beliefs become self-evident realities. It would be impossible to discuss human suffering without taking that into consideration. Ideas are transmitted from generation to generation—and those ideas are the carriers of all of your reality, its joys and its agonies. Science, however, is all in all (underlined) a poor healer. The church’s concepts at least gave suffering a kind of dignity: It did (underlined) come from God—an unwelcome gift, perhaps—but after all it was punishment handed out from a firm father for a child’s own good.

In a way, that concept puts a psychological devil in place of the metaphysical one. If life itself is seen scientifically as having no real meaning, then suffering, of course, must also be seen as meaningless. The individual becomes a victim of chance insofar as his birth, the events of his life, and his death are concerned. Illness becomes his most direct encounter with the seeming meaninglessness of personal existence (all quite intently).

You affect the structure of your body through your thoughts. If you believe in heredity, heredity itself becomes a strong suggestive factor in your life, and can help bring about the precise malady in the body that you believed was there all along, until finally your scientific instruments uncover the “faulty mechanism,” or whatever, and there is the evidence for all to see.

1. Seth certainly touched upon a question that’s loaded with ethical and legal dilemmas; many of these have grown out of recent scientific advances in genetics. Some moral philosophers, medical geneticists, physicians, lawyers, and religious leaders believe that those who carry genes for serious genetic diseases do not have the right to reproduce. Others of similar background maintain just the opposite—that the right to recreate one’s kind is inalienable. Questions abound involving amniocentesis (examination of the fluid in the womb to detect genetic defects in the fetus); therapeutic abortion; artificial insemination; reproduction by in vitro fertilization; embryo transfer (surrogate motherhood); the responsibilities of the legal, medical and religious communities; whether mentally retarded, genetically defective people should receive life-prolonging medical treatment, and so forth. Years are expected to pass before our legal system alone catches up with the scientific progress in genetics—but, ironically, continuing advances in the field are bound to complicate even further the whole series of questions.