“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Why then did such a theory originate? Darwin was initially a religious man. Like many others, his religious background held out nonsensical propositions. It saw a good God, a just savior, who nevertheless never thought twice about sending down death and destruction as punishment for sin.

Darwin was faced with the proposition of a kind god who was more cruel than any human being, and with supernatural power behind him to boot—so Darwin tried to justify God’s ways to man.

Nature took the place of the devil in an insidious sleight-of-hand that initially Darwin himself never expected. He wanted to show that God was not responsible for the world’s cruelties. Darwin loved nature in all of its aspects, yet he could not reconcile its beauties and splendors with the course of its events. He could not bear to see a cat play with a mouse, without blaming God who would permit such cruelty. He tried to wipe God’s hands clean, as he understood the nature of God through his early beliefs—but in so doing he wiped the soul from the face of nature.

Those theories of Darwin, however, formed part of the suggestive background in which you and Ruburt and millions of others matured. Each person interpreted those beliefs in an individual fashion. Sexual, economic, social and even religious behavior became tinged by these concepts.

The value of the artist was deprecated. Contemplation had little part to play. As per James, it was no coincidence that the beliefs of Freud and Darwin merged so well to form western society’s idea of the self, physically and psychologically. The ideas of financial competition, advocated, came into direct conflict, Joseph, with your own inclinations to be an artist. The ideas of manliness in your society, particularly in past years, were directly tied in with Darwinian concepts and Freudian theory. They operated as suggestion that directed the actions of millions of people, and provided a framework through which they experienced their reality.

To some extent the Freudian self, as per James, more or less followed the same pattern. A man could scarcely trust his neighbor if he agreed with Darwin or Freudian concepts. Behind any altruistic impulse there had to be a selfish gain. Before all of this, however, nature was seen as primarily passive—put here by God for man’s purpose, but without possessing the uniqueness or even approaching the status of man.

Darwin managed to bring out nature’s complexity, though this had been mentioned by other men—I believe by a man called Mendel in particular. But Mendel did not catch man’s imagination. Darwin then brought nature to man’s focus in a new way, for before neither science or religion had dealt with it in a meaningful manner. The full sweep and extent of the natural world , with all of its seeming ambiguities, cruelties and splendors, had to be accepted as more than a passive package delivered into man’s hand.

Darwin’s theories, and Freud’s for that matter, will in the future be seen as any other antiquated, outmoded system—yet from their ashes will rise new ways of interpreting and experiencing reality.

Ruburt went from a strict religion, embracing both Darwin finally, and Freud also, as liberators from old doctrines—not realizing of course that he was substituting one dogma for two, period.