“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] (Pause.) All of your reasoned activities — your governments, societies, arts, religions and sciences — are the physical realization, of course, of inner capacities, capacities that are inherent in man’s structure. [...]

[...] He puts his sciences and religions, his languages, together in multitudinous ways, but there must always be a translation of inner information outward to the world of sense. [...]

[...] Ancient religions, for example, speak of nature’s spirits, and such terms represent memories dating from prehistory. [...]

(9:13.) Various old religions picked up the idea of the Lumanians’ fierce god figure for example, in whom they managed to project their concepts of force, power, and violence, this god who had meant to protect them when nonviolence would not allow them to protect themselves.

[...] There is a member of the class — and (with obvious amusement) I will close my innocent eyes so that I do not give the secret away — but there is a class member who is indeed a fine Jesuit, handling problems of great weight, having to do with the nature of religion. [...] All of these counterparts are dealing with the nature of religion. They are experiencing versions of religion because it interests them.

[...] If you want to study the nature of religion and do a good job of it, then you must be among other things a skeptic and a believer, and an Indian and a Jew, say. [...]

Persons displaying such abilities have had to be strong personalities in order to hold up under a barrage of varying disreputable distortions thrown upon them by science, or religion, and particularly in the past, even by governments. [...]

[...] They are natural methods of perception that cannot be legislated away by governments, cannot be ripped out of people’s make-ups by religions or by sciences. [...]

[...] It is a tribute to that belief that it has lingered in your country, and operated with such vitality in the face of quite opposing beliefs officially held by both science and religion.

[...] (Long pause.) Those who follow with great strictness the dictates of either science or religion can switch sides in a moment. [...]

[...] The same consciousness gave birth to all of your religions, therefore; the various frameworks through which the peoples of different times could express themselves and grow. In all cases the religions began with the beliefs prevailing, spoke through the dictums of the times, and then expanded. [...]

(10:48.) True religion is not repressive, as life itself is not. [...]

[...] Your religions granted man a soul, while denying any to other species. [...]

[...] Your religions tell you that man is sinful: The body is not to be trusted; the senses can lead you astray. [...]

[...] Your religions stress sin. [...]

In our terms, then, it’s certainly foolish for scientists to expect that the peoples of the world are simply going to dispense with religion just because scientists want them to, calling them “deluded” or worse. It’s just as foolish for those who are religious, even though they outnumber the scientists by far, to expect most scientists to embrace religion, to surrender their agnosticism or atheism, to give up their mechanistic, reductionist views of life—their attempts to use a series of “logical” steps to reduce the human being, say, to his or her ever-lower components, right down to the atomic level. [...]

[...] For to me, and to Jane also, I’m sure, Three Mile Island and Jonestown-Iran represent powerful extremes or directions in large-scale human behavior: certain aspects of religion and science seemingly at opposite poles of the human psyche, as it were.

[...] Actually, I thought, our concepts of religion and science aren’t as contradictory as at first they may seem to be. [...]

[...] To Jane and me these particular aspects of science and religion represent the way large-scale events can escape their well-meaning creators and literally take on lives of their own. [...]

[...] We are introducing a different kind of consciousness as normal, as natural, and as good, broadening the frontiers of psychology, religion and science as well—again, to whatever degree.

Young people in particular will alter the fields of endeavor, going into the arts or sciences or religions, and expanding them. [...]

[...] Both religion and science, parents and schools, stress that idea, and it is one of the most important causes of mental alienation, spiritual and physical distress.

[...] That belief is a basic one in your society—your religions and your sciences. [...]

(“I haven’t had too much time to think of questions, but today we were talking about the relationships between Jonestown and Three Mile Island — how those two events stand for the extremes of religion and science.” [...]

“Both religion and science are based upon such beliefs. [...]

[...] I may say that Buddhism does indeed come closer in essence to reality than other religions. [...]

[...] The fact remains that millions of human beings who follow and practice Buddhism are told, as many religions tell their followers, “Better worlds are to come, so ignore this agony, and this hunger, and this pain, and the murder in the streets. [...]

[...] It is not to any religion’s benefit that people starve. [...]

Religion still serves within your time as such a uniting and also “disruptive” framework. [...]

You should be able to apply my comments about religion—the Jews and Arabs and so forth—easily to many of your own questions involving contemporary world behavior. [...]

[...] I believe you know this and now I will interpret your dream for it has to do with religion. [...]

[...] Underneath you are frightened that these abilities will lead you along the paths that you have lead, that despite all your deliberations you will lead to another religion signified by the Buddha. [...]

[...] He says through his religions that he has a soul indeed, without even asking what a soul is, and often he seems to regard it, again, as an object in his possession.

[...] We will go into this particular matter in a portion of the book dealing with religion and the god concept.

[...] As I wrote near the beginning of this appendix, to go very far into religious history would lead away from the subject matter I planned to cover; but to us science is as far away from Seth’s philosophy in one direction as religion is in the opposite direction. [...] According to Judaism and Christianity, among many religions, man could seek forgiveness and salvation; he had a soul. After Darwin, he learned that even his physical presence on earth was an accident of nature. [...]

(For some years now, organized religion as a whole has been suffering from a loss of faith and members, stripped of its mysteries by science, which, with the best of intentions, offers in religion’s place a secular humanism — the belief that one doesn’t need blind faith in a god in order to be morally concerned for the common welfare; paradoxically, however, this concern is most of the time expressed in religious terms, or with religious feeling. [...]

[...] Jane and I certainly aren’t turned on to realize that a major religion, for instance, teaches the “facts” of man’s basically corrupt and sinful nature; surely a religion in the best sense can offer beliefs superior to those! [...]

(But, I asked Jane recently, why do our sciences and religions take it all so seriously? [...]

[...] The dimensions of the self begin to shrink enough, and it is at that point, in your terms, that the search for a private God or religion begins to emerge. [...]

Unfortunately, such a belief is promoted by many religions. [...]

[...] Many dictatorial religions pointedly refuse to allow their congregations to indulge in any type of play at all, and frown upon it as sinful. [...]

[...] They do not simply provide you with a basis for your religions, sciences, and civilizations. [...]

This further unites all species in a cooperative venture that has remained largely invisible because of beliefs projected outward upon the world by both your sciences and religions, generally speaking. [...]