“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The official mentioned, by the way, that there was indeed no direct evidence connecting past flu shots with the occurrence of a rather bizarre disease that some of those inoculated with the flu vaccine happened to come down with.⁴ All in all, it was quite an interesting announcement, with implications that straddle biology, religion, and economics. “The flu season” is in a way an example of a psychologically-manufactured pattern that can at times bring about a manufactured epidemic.

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. [They are also told] to pay homage to God. Christianity has become, however, a tangled sorry tale, its cohesiveness largely vanished. Such a religion becomes isolated from daily life. Many individuals cannot unify the various areas of their belief and feeling, and at Christmas they partially recognize the vast gulf that exists between their scientific beliefs and their religious beliefs. They find themselves unable to cope with such a mental and spiritual dilemma. A psychic depression often results, one that is deepened by the Christmas music and the commercial displays, by the religious reminders that the species is made in God’s image, and by the other reminders that the body so given is seemingly incapable of caring for itself and is a natural prey to disease and disaster.

Many people, caught between such conflicting beliefs, fall prey to physical ills during the Christmas season particularly. The churches and the hospitals are often the largest buildings in any town, and the only ones open on Sunday without recourse to city ordinances. You cannot divorce your private value systems from your health, and the hospitals often profit from the guilt that religions have instilled in their people.

I am speaking now of religions so intertwined with social life and community ventures that all sense of basic religious integrity becomes lost. Man is by nature a religious creature.

Organized religions are always attempts to redefine that kind of feeling in cultural terms. They seldom succeed because they become too narrow in their concepts, too dogmatic, and the cultural structures finally overweigh the finer substance within them.

The more tolerant a religion is, the closer it comes to expressing those inner truths. The individual, however, has a private biological and spiritual integrity that is a part of man’s heritage, and is indeed any creature’s right. Man cannot mistrust his own nature and at the same time trust the nature of God, for God is his word for the source of his being — and if his being is tainted, then so must be his God.