“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Rob and I were hardly religious in conventional terms. We haven’t been to a church in years, except to attend weddings or funerals. I was brought up a Catholic, but as I grew older I found it more and more difficult to accept the God of my ancestors. Irony whispered that He was as dead as they were. The heaven that had sustained me as a child seemed in my teens to be a shallow mockery of meaningful existence. Who wanted to sit around singing hymns to a father-God, even if He did exist, and what sort of intelligent God would require such constant adoration? A very insecure, appallingly human kind of God indeed.

The alternative, that of hellfire, was equally unbelievable. Yet the conventional God of our fathers apparently sat without a qualm with the blessed in heaven, while the devil tortured the rest of the unlucky dead. That God, I decided, was out. I would not tolerate Him as a friend. For that matter He didn’t treat His son too well either, as the story goes. But Christ you could at least respect, I thought. He’d been here; he knew how it was.

Before I was twenty, then, I’d left behind me that archaic God, the Virgin, and the communion of saints. Heaven and hell, angels and devils, were dismissed. This particular group of chemicals and atoms I called “me” would fall into no such traps—at least none that I could recognize.