“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.

To a large degree, however, and for many people, he did remove the idea of God’s injustice, even if he removed the image of God in the process. The idea of one God as a superman would not carry again the same weight as it had before. For your species, the questions behind the conventional God the father were at least brought out into the open.

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.