Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1354

1354. These precepts and ideals have thus long since ceased being merely religious creeds. In modern culture they have become materialistic phenomena that the beings cannot circumvent in the maintenance of their daily life, in their particular social position and in their moral standing, quite regardless of whether they themselves are religious or not. While for the Jewish people in Palestine these precepts were "religious", for the modern human being of today they appear as "political" precepts, which here means "judicial", physical precepts. The highest precepts of "The New Testament" or the world redeemer's interpretations of moral commands, however, can be expressed only as "religious" precepts for the individual "believers" of today's modern civilisation. But here too something remarkable happens: the interest in these New-Testament ideals or commands as something "religious" degenerates. Followers of these ideals will thus gradually leave the churches, sects and other religious communities based on these ideals, and follow more secular or material interests. The ideals are encapsulated in terminologies and wordings that have not changed in step with evolution or lived experiences. The wordings become obsolete and unbelievable, and cannot satisfy a psyche that has gradually been filled with material experiences from daily life and with new questions arising from these experiences, questions that these wordings are neither adapted to answer nor capable of answering. However wonderful and perfect these traditional wordings may have been for the psyche of the people of that age to whom they were given, they must, however, inevitably be doomed to become "obsolete", if only because human evolution or lived experience did not stop or remain standing on the step for which the wording and terminology of these ideals was adapted, but as a perpetually running stream, continued flowing on and on. It is naturally a matter of course that the wording or terminology had therefore to gradually lose its meaning and become increasingly inadequate for the mankind of later centuries with all the material of experience it had acquired during these centuries. And we then also witness here the "materialism" or the so-called "irreligiousness" arising from this, which is reflected in a fundamental "want of faith" or denial of all religious traditions as expressions of reality. These beings claim – with varying degrees of justification – that these traditions are expressions of mere naivety and superstition, like so many notions from the past that have not yet been interpreted or analysed scientifically. These "irreligious" beings therefore turn to material research, which in reality is merely a quest for the "hidden" or "lost truth" in the antiquated terminology and in the traditional, more or less imperfect "dogmas". And it is this "lost truth" that these people again begin to find or believe that they find in the form of "political" ideals, also including scientific ideals or answers. So the religious force of these people, after being liberated from or having outgrown their "religious past", has now become linked to a "materialistic present". Their attitude is now no longer the "religious" worship of a spiritual phenomenon of thought that they cherished quite intimately alongside their official daily material interests. On the contrary, it has now formed a part of or become one with these material interests. The latter have thereby become "idealised". But this "idealisation" is not aimed at or directed towards a higher "religious" state, but towards a more perfect, or presumably more perfect, "physical" existence.