Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1491

1491. It is thus not through any present or future sect or moral association that the principle of world redemption is to be furthered or terrestrial mankind to be "saved". All such sects and associations, no matter how great and high are the ideals that they may wish to represent, are already dying because of their "dictatorship", their prescribed laws and the beginnings of their inevitable separation and isolation from the society or mankind that they believe they should save. One does not "save" or "rescue" beings, improve or heighten morality in people from whom one isolates and dissociates oneself. All raising of the level of morality and the resultant "salvation of the world" or creation of real peace is not a question of "dictatorship", of mental restriction or imprisonment of other people and the ensuing direct or indirect proclaiming of oneself and one's association or sect as the only thing needful, and of all other sects and societies as more or less hotbeds of ungodly, "lost souls". The absolute principle of world redemption is thus in no way whatsoever a question of fragmenting terrestrial mankind as a whole by creating more or less strongly competing sects or mental or spiritual "dictatorships", which from their very inception are predestined to wage war with all other morally charged organisations in the world owing to their members' deluded idea that they are to some extent the "Latter-Day Saints", the absolute "salvation of the world" or the only way to bliss. No religious association that emerges after this will ever be able to grow large enough to prevent it from drowning, almost like a microbe, in terrestrial mankind's crowd of four billion incarnated and discarnated souls. Even "Buddhism", the Earth's largest religious movement – which ran its course at the absolutely most favourable point in time for acquiring converts when the individuals were still at a stage where they had a particular ability to "believe" – has managed to number only about five hundred million incarnated souls, and has long since passed its peak. Like ecclesiastical Christianity, it is on the decline wherever academic and scientific evolution is making its entry. But if both Christianity and Buddhism, and incidentally Islam too, thus culminated at a time when the numerically strongest of these world movements at its peak had conquered and made followers of only a quarter of all incarnated terrestrial human beings, while the other religions culminated with an even smaller fraction of the Earth's population as their followers, what moral movement of today does one think could cherish a hope of outdoing the results of these movements? Is it likely that a modern missionary movement that has already started, a moral association or other form of religious society could ever be alive and vital enough for it to be able to gather, like a conqueror, the Earth's two billion incarnated souls into its membership file? How could this come about at a time when evolution no longer goes in the direction of "forming flocks", which means reducing people to "uniformity", but goes in precisely the opposite direction, namely in the direction of "individualisation", which in turn is the same as liberating the individual souls from the weight of the flock, from its traditional dogmas, its out-dated traditions, its customs and its dictatorship.