“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For centuries, priests of one kind or another have been put in charge of “reading God’s messages,” and interpreting them to the rest of mankind, just as in later times the scientists have been put in the position of interpreting man’s own world to him—in terms quite as esoteric as those of any religion. [...]

[...] This applied not only privately, however, but to the mass-accepted revelations of all religions, that could justify righteous wars for God’s sake, or justify murder in the name of peace.

[...] Religion has made gross errors. [...]

To some extent, this also applies to religion in the same time period. [...]

[...] Those who are paranoid are, unfortunately, those who most firmly believe the worst idiocies of science and religion. [...]

THE IDEAL, THE INDIVIDUAL, RELIGION, SCIENCE, AND THE LAW

(Pause at 9:45.) “The Ideal, the Individual, Religion, Science, and the Law” (all with some humor and emphasis). [...]

[...] (Pause at 11:35.) Your concepts of personhood are now limiting you personally and en masse, and yet your religions, metaphysics, histories, and even your sciences are hinged upon your ideas of who and what you are. [...] Your religions do not explain your greater reality, and your sciences leave you [just] as ignorant about the nature of the universe in which you dwell.

[...] I kept searching through my work...disliking organized religions with their distortions and suspecting the “supernatural” that went along with it. [...]

[...] They developed arts and sciences, religions—yet it was as if no other people existed. [...]

In past times treacheries in governments or politics or religion were hidden. [...]

[...] Without giving away any “secrets,” I can write that on both occasions Seth discussed the subject in conjunction with his postulates about ideals, myths, religion, probabilities, and the simultaneous nature of time.)

(Pause.) In larger terms, there are really only scientific and religious men and women, however, and fields of science and religion would be meaningless without those individuals who believe in their positions. As those men and women enlarge their definitions of reality, the fields of science and religion must expand. [...]

[...] Science and religion have each contributed much to man’s development. [...]

[...] Eastern religions are the only ones that even remotely try to approach such a principle, and they do so in highly distorted fashions. Western religion and science promote the ideas of competition, effort, the emphasis upon the will, divorced from the imagination, so that to “give up all effort” can be read as an abdication of responsibility, an indication of laziness and sloth; or in fundamental Christian terms, the devil finds work for idle hands.

Many schools of religion and so-called esoteric knowledge have promoted the idea that sexuality and spirituality were diametrically opposed to each other.

They might have seemed like even brilliant (amused) theoretical statements, my own pronouncements, but little by little you accepted them intellectually while still being emotionally bound through habit, so that indeed, as Ruburt wrote, you almost became programmed, your questions about reality based upon the erroneous facts of Darwinism, Freudianism, or religion. [...]

[...] Individual life, religion, culture, politics, were each vastly different in each period, the concept of the self profoundly different in one era and another. [...]

[...] Alongside, however, there were always minorities, religions or cultures, who kept out of the main current and experimented along different lines. [...]

In this book he comments on our religions, sciences, cults, and on our medical beliefs as well, with an uncompromising wisdom — as if — as if he represents some deep part of the human psyche that knows better, that has always known better — as if he speaks out not only with my voice but for many many other people — as if he represents the truths that we have allowed ourselves to forget.

[...] Much of this book is concerned with the purposes of our impulses, and the reasons for their poor reputations in the eyes of science and religion. [...]

[...] Those theories, along with religion’s belief in the flawed self, have left their marks on all of our lives. [...]

Now: In one way or another religions have always followed, again, the development of your consciousness, and so they have served its purposes and yours; and they have always reflected, though distorted, those greater inner realities of your being. In historic terms, as you understand them, the “progression” of religion gives you a perfect picture of the development of human consciousness, the differentiation of peoples and nations, and the growth of the ideas of the “individual.”

[...] Your religions in a large measure have taught you to hate yourselves and physical existence. [...]

[...] At once, I told Jane, I thought that science and religion would be violently opposed to the idea, at least in the beginning, for it would challenge many rigid beliefs held by each of those disciplines. In deeper terms, of course, such a study would actually validate the sources of science and religion [just as it would confirm Seth’s material on dreams, incidentally!]. [...]

(9:45.) It is far simpler to recognize your own beliefs in regard to religion, politics or similar subjects, than it is to pinpoint your deepest beliefs about yourself and who and what you are — particularly in relationship with your own life.

At about the same time many intelligent persons were realizing that organized religions’ ideas of God, and of heaven and hell, were distorted, unjust, and smacked of children’s fairy tales. [...]

Followers of Eastern religions often feel it their duty, also, to deny the flesh, to rise above it, so to speak, into a state where nothing is desired. [...]

(In the 586th session, earlier in this chapter, Seth stated that by the year 2075 the third Christ — Paul or Saul — would have enacted the Second Coming, exerting of course a profound effect upon religion and world history. [...]

(Of course, we hadn’t known just how Seth was going to present his material in the chapter on religion on the third Christ and related data. [...]

[...] Such attitudes are unfortunately sometimes fostered by parents, schools, and religions. [...]

In various ways your religions have always implied your relationship with nature’s source, even though they often divorced nature herself from any place of prime importance. For religions have often hinged themselves upon one or another quite valid perception, but then distorted it, excluding anything else that did not seem to fit. [...]

[...] The religions do insist that man has a purpose, yet in their own confusion they often speak as if that purpose must be achieved by denying the physical body in which man has his life’s existence, or by “rising above” “gross, blunted,” earthly characteristics. [...]

(After a moment Bill said he thought his beliefs regarding religion were more or less traditional.)

(Peggy asked Seth what religion, in his opinion, came closest to God as defined by Seth.)

[...] Buddhists are perhaps closer, but no religion comes close really... [...]