“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

So do not think you are being spiritual when you are being long-faced—and do not think you are being spiritual when you berate yourself for your sins. The seasons within your system come and go. The sun falls upon your face whether you think you are a sinner or a saint. The vitality of the universe is creativity and joy and love and that is spirituality. And that is what I shall tell the readers of my book.

[...] The sun falls upon your face whether you think you are a sinner or a saint. [...]

Now: the message of the Christ entity was, in religious terms “You are all children of God—the ‘sinner’ as well as the saint.” Indeed, according to the original Christ thesis, while a man could sin, no man was identified as a sinner. [...]

[...] Christ well knew that that statement was indeed true, but men who condemned themselves, who considered themselves sinners, would not know what to ask for, except punishment to relieve their guilt. [...]

Because of the beliefs of religion, the child expected God to show his power through some disastrous act by which sinners would be punished. [...]

[...] It peopled the world of man with saints, sinners, priests, and it peopled space with a God, a legion of angels, and a devil and his cohorts—so surely Christianity must be based upon fact.

[...] If you move from sinner to saint or saint to sinner, from Buddhism to fundamentalism of the Christian kind, or from one sect to another, seemingly with a diverse belief system, your growth and transformations are still being provided for by a religious structure.

This distorted picture depicts a species of sinners innately driven by evil, sometimes demonic, forces. [...]

If a man was a sinner, still there was a way of redemption, and the immortality of the soul went largely unquestioned, of course. [...]

[...] The church provided a cosmic drama in which even the life of the sinner had value, even if only to show God’s compassion. [...]

[...] (Pause.) The saint and the sinner (pause) each had access to great depths of possible heroism or despair. [...]

The entire question brings out, however, those more important issues of self-righteousness, for in its name crimes are perpetrated that the self-confessed “sinner” would never attempt.

Hellfire, for example, hardly presents any desirable extension, but there was before hell always the hope that the sinner would repent, and even if hell became the feared future existence, it still preserved the nature of the human consciousness involved. [...]

The sun will shine upon you whether or not you think you had a good day or a bad day, and it will shine upon “the sinner” and the religious man; it will shine upon you without judgment. [...]

[...] There was no distinction made: to be sinful was of course to be a sinner, and in that home there was no time to foster any kind of independence—the children had to follow strict schedules, toe the mark. [...]

[...] Churches wanted sinners galore, but shied away from saints, or any extravagant behavior that did not speak of man’s duplicity. [...]

Illness was suffered, was sent by God to purge the soul, to cleanse the body, to punish the sinner, or simply to teach man his place by keeping him from the sins of pride. [...]

[...] (Pause.) Man the sinner took over from man the child of God. [...]

So the intelligent adult now knows, does he not, that no one individual but superior being exists as God in some heaven, threatening hell to the sinners and disbelievers? [...]

[...] Christianity, however, officially asks children of sorrow to be joyful and sinners to find a childlike purity; it asks them to love a God who one day will destroy the world, and who will condemn them to hell if they do not adore him.