If you know a church’s primary faith—the one they say is so crucial
that it will bring you salvation—then you comprehend the nature of that
church.
The following example may illustrate this point: Imagine a faith or
belief that says nature created the universe. From that belief come many
other beliefs: what we call God is really the universe; nature is its essence;
the ether is the highest god the ancients called Jupiter; the air is the god-
dess the ancients called Juno, the one they made into a spouse for Jupiter;
the ocean is a god below the others whom we, like the ancients, could
call Neptune; and because nature’s divinity extends even to the center of
the earth, there is a god there whom we, like the ancients, could call
Pluto; the sun is a royal hall for all the gods to meet in when Jupiter calls
a council; fire is life from God; birds fly in God, animals walk on God,
fish swim in God; thoughts are only modifications in the ether, just as
speaking those thoughts involves modulations in the air; and different
types of love are just incidental changes in our mental condition caused
by the rays of the sun flowing into them. Among these beliefs there is
also the view that life after death, heaven, and hell are myths made up by
the clergy to win honor and wealth; but although they are myths, they
are nevertheless useful and should not be openly ridiculed, because they
serve the public by putting simple minds on a leash so that they obey
their civic leaders. Still, those who are captivated by religion are unrealis-
tic people, their thoughts are delusions, their actions are amusing, and
they are subservient to the clergy in that they believe in things they do
not see and see things that lie outside their mental range.
These derivative beliefs and many others like them are contained in
the original belief that nature created the universe. They come out when
the full implications of that belief are explored.
I have listed all this so you may know that the modern-day church’s
faith (which in its inner form is a faith in three gods, but in its outer
form is a faith in one God) has squadrons of falsities inside it. There are
as many falsities to be brought out as there are baby spiders in the egg
case produced by a mother spider.
Anyone with a mind made truly rational by light from the Lord sees
this. No others are going to see it, though, when the door to that faith
and its offspring has been bolted shut by the principle that it is wrong for
reason to examine its mysteries.179 7. The result is the abomination of desolation and the affliction such as
has never existed before and will never exist again, which the Lord foretold in