“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The conventionally religious will be certain that the earthquake is a punishment for sin. The scientist will see the affair as relatively neutral —an event, however, in which man is certainly a pawn, caught by chance in a catastrophe that he would otherwise most certainly avoid. The earthquake is a mass natural catastrophe, seeming then to be perpetrated upon man and his cities by an earth that certainly does not take man or his civilization into consideration.

(10:06.) That inner knowledge is behind all of his myths. It is said that there must be something, surely, to the story of Christ, since civilization was so altered. And for one-thousand, nine-hundred and seventy-eight years Christianity has flourished in one way or another. For a time it fueled both the arts and political life. It peopled the world of man with saints, sinners, priests, and it peopled space with a God, a legion of angels, and a devil and his cohorts—so surely Christianity must be based upon fact.

When people say this of course they mean that fact is true and myth is false. If I say there was very little factual basis for Christianity’s beginning, then people will interpret this to mean that Christ’s reality had no basis in truth. That is not what I am saying. There were other religions in other times that held a sway over civilizations for far longer periods. There were changes, but in general the religions of the Egyptians and the ancient Greeks are cases in point. The longevity of those religions and their effects upon those ancient civilizations are certainly not taken by “modern men” as proof that those religions had any basis in fact. Instead, they are considered as myths, pagan stories. Those peoples considered their Gods to be quite real, to have a basis in historical fact. Those religions had as great an effect upon their cultures as Christianity has had upon your own.

The interweaving of “dream reality” with the world of facts, however, is precisely what causes a myth to begin with, and is the source of its tremendous power, for it combines the two realities into a construct powerful enough to charge civilizations with new vitality, and literally to reshape man’s course. Fact alone could never do that.