“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) The Roman Catholic Church seized upon art, inserted its own strong symbolism, provided art with a recognizable religious, social, and political value. (Pause.) It became, however, a supercharged symbol itself of churchly opulence, and this applies also, for example, in the past to architecture. What good were ornate cathedrals, replete with carved angels, saints, and gargoyles, gleaming with glazed colorful windows, when the people lived in hovels and labored in the fields? So the buildings in America were to be prim and proper, undecorated, when the country was established. Even clothes began to become less colorful, as for example in the Puritan’s straight garb.

(9:48.) In those previous “decadent” European centuries, a man’s or a woman’s worth was indisputably settled by the circumstances of birth. Nothing from that point on could change the intrinsic value of the individual. There were endlessly complicated, multitudinous religious and cultural justifications for such a situation, so that the entire affair seemed, often, even to the most intelligent of men, self-evident.