“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Religious laws deal with sin, whether or not a crime is committed (pause), and religious concepts usually take it for granted that the individual is guilty until proven innocent. And if you have not committed a crime in fact, then you have at least sinned in your heart — for which, of course, you must be punished. A sin can be anything from playing cards to having a sexual fantasy. You are sinful creatures. How many of you believe that?

The law in your country says that you are innocent until proven guilty. In the eyes of that law, then, you are each innocent until a crime is proven against you. There usually must also be witnesses. There are other considerations. Often a spouse cannot testify against the other. Opportunity and motive must also be established.

(9:29.) All of these qualities and attributes are given you by natural law. You are a cooperative species, and you are a loving one. Your misunderstandings, your crimes, and your atrocities, real as they are, are seldom committed out of any intent to be evil, but because of severe misinterpretations about the nature of good, and the means that can be taken toward its actualization. Most individual people know that in some inner portion of themselves. Your societies, governments, educational systems, are all built around a firm belief in the unreliability of human nature. “You cannot change human nature.” Such a statement takes it for granted that man’s nature is to be greedy, a predator, a murderer at heart. You act in accordance with your own beliefs. You become the selves that you think you are. Your individual beliefs become the beliefs of your society, but that is always a give-and-take.

They feel isolated and alone, unappreciated, filled with rage which is being constantly expressed — in many cases, though not all — through a steady series of minor social crimes. This applies whether or not major crimes are committed; so the simple expression of aggression without understanding does not help.

[...] As long as you can extinguish a human consciousness forever, then murder and killing are crimes. [...] As long as you believe in the reality of violence, then violence is a crime, and you reap its fruits. [...]

What is the difference between a crime and a sin, as most of you think of those terms? [...] It certainly can punish you for a crime. [...]

[...] I do want to point out that few crimes are committed for “evil’s sake,” but in a distorted response to the failure of the actualization of a sensed ideal.

[...] And murder, therefore, is a crime and must be dealt with as such because you have created it and you must deal with it. You have created the crime. [...]

[...] No god created the crime of murder, and no god created sorrow and pain. [...]

[...] Crime after death is not punished. There is no crime to be punished, but between those last two statements lies a world of understanding, and knowledge that must be attained. [...]

By the time he realizes the truth of the second statement, neither crime nor punishment affect him.

[...] Man’s inventiveness, often a partner to his duplicity, has also invented, then, a method to insure that no crimes can be hidden, and has taken steps to shine a spotlight upon those areas of life that blot man’s experience. [...]

[...] So your culture believes that by publicizing crimes of whatever nature, you will somehow eradicate them.

Now to some extent, because of beliefs, because of the public’s new knowledge through television of new nefarious acts, some governments do refrain from the more spectacular crimes. [...]

[...] If God could tell a man to slay a son, and if private revelation were granted validity, then “divinely inspired crimes” might not only be legion, but might also take man’s energies away from accepted Godly pursuits—like fighting the infidels or heretics at home (all louder).

[...] Divinely inspired crimes could only be acceptable against the enemies of organized Christendom, or against its own subservients. [...]

[...] The headlines speak of problems between nations, mass and private crime, illness. [...]

[...] I do not want to shock you, but there are quite as many cases of honest heroism as there are crimes committed. [...]

How many crimes have you each personally encountered? [...]

He has no such crime, or crimes, to repent of, or to punish himself for. [...]

[...] The cause, whatever it is, can then cover any number of crimes, and no particular individual need bear the blame alone. [...]

[...] To some extent capital punishment is the act of a fanatical society: The taking of the murderer’s life does not bring back the victim’s, and it does not prevent other men from [committing] such crimes. [...]

No one is fated, however, to suffer in one life for any crimes committed in another. [...]

[...] Do you seek out stories of lurid crime, or look for further incidents of political chicanery? [...]

[...] The question in such instances is the reason for such a person’s overconcern and alarm in the first place—why the intense interest in such possible catastrophes, or in crime or whatever?—and the answer lies in an examination of the person’s feelings and beliefs about the nature of existence itself.

[...] But that it seems so could hardly be psychological crime. [...]

(Long pause.) You may have overall reasons for a particular illness, however, that have nothing to do with crime or punishment, but may instead involve an extraordinary sense of curiosity, and the desire for experience that is somewhat unconventional — usually not sought for — exotic, or in certain terms even grotesque.

[...] It is not a psychological arena composed of crime and punishment. [...]

You are afraid you will be thought of as a gentleman of leisure—at the worst a moral crime most certainly in light of the beliefs that originated at the time the Protestants first abandoned the Roman Catholic Church. [...]

[...] (Louder:) The Protestants have always thought that artists were decadent, that contemplation was dangerous, and that leisure was a crime. [...]

Again, no one is punished for crimes committed in a past life, and in each life you are unique. [...]

[...] Even given their undeniable accomplishments, why didn’t the Eastern countries create ages ago the immortal societies that could have served as models for those of the West to emulate — cultures and/or nations in which all the mundane human vicissitudes (in those terms) had been long understood and abolished: war, crime, poverty, ignorance, and disease?

[...] Now his face, as you conceive of it in your own subconscious, is the voice and the face of unreasoning punishment that can be lowered upon you without warning—the unpredictable punishment for crimes that you cannot remember having committed. [...]