structure. Therefore to deny the existence of God is to deny everything
having to do with the church. The denial itself is what cuts them off; that
is, they cut themselves off. God does not cut them off.
They are damned as well because those who are cut off from the
church are also cut off from heaven. The church on earth and the angelic
heaven act as a unit, just like the inner and outer self, and like the spiritual
part and the physical part in each of us. God created us in such a way that
our inner self is in the spiritual world and our outer self is in the physical
world. Therefore to make us permanent and everlasting beings, God
made us citizens of both worlds so that the spiritual part of us, which
belongs in heaven, could be planted in the physical part belonging to this
world the way a seed is planted in the ground.
[ 2 ] People who cut themselves off from the church and from heaven
by denying the existence of God close their inner selves on the side of the
will and shut themselves off from its positive love. (The will in us is a ves-
sel for love and becomes its dwelling place.) Their inner selves on the side
of the intellect, however, they are unable to close, because if they could
and did they would no longer be human; but [evil] love in their will does
befuddle their higher intellect with false ideas. As a result, their intellect
becomes virtually closed to truths related to faith and good qualities
related to goodwill and becomes more and more closed to the Lord and
the spiritual teachings of the church. As a result, those denying the exis-
tence of God lose their partnership with angels in heaven. Once that is
gone, they establish a partnership with satans in hell and think what the
satans are thinking. All satans deny the existence of God and have absurd
thoughts about God and about the church’s spiritual teachings; and so do
people on earth who are in partnership with them.
[ 3 ] Such people come into their spirit, so to speak, when they are at
home alone and let their thoughts be guided by their pleasure in the evil
and the falsity they have conceived and given birth to in themselves. In
that state, their thought about God is that he does not exist—God is
only a word intoned in the pulpit to constrain the lower classes to obey
the laws of justice that are society’s rules. The Word, the source of minis-
ters’ pronouncements about God, they see as a haphazard and fanciful
text to which authorities have attributed holiness. The Ten Command-
ments or the Catechism they see as a little book that is to be tossed aside
once it has been worn out by the hands of the young. After all, that book
prescribes that we honor our parents, that we not murder, whore, steal,
or testify falsely, and who does not know all that from civil law? The
church they think of as nothing more than a herd of uneducated,
singke
(singke)
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