Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 5, sect. 1618

1618. As such situations arise very often, neither the materialist's material knowledge and know-how nor any social position that may ensue from this can ever make him feel entirely safe or secure. And with this insecurity, along with the fact that one cannot possibly build up a real world culture with unshakable security and well-being for people on the basis of purely materialistic knowledge and know-how, it is established as fact that this knowledge and know-how are not the ultimate answer. We have seen that at the same time as this knowledge reached its culmination, it led to the culmination of the killing principle. Wars, world wars and the mass-production of millions of increasingly ingeniously thought-out machines of murder – from the primitive stone axe to the atom bomb of the twentieth century – have become the all-outshining objects of interest, precisely because people believe that with these they could create security or so-called "lasting peace". But the result of this was and will continue to be nothing but the fact that mankind – mutilated and tortured by its own physical knowledge and know-how as a mass of hungry, freezing, mentally and physically broken invalids – discovers the inadequacy or insufficiency of its physical materialistic knowledge and know-how to truly protect the being's perfect experience of life or appearance on the material plane of existence. And here we have arrived at the situation that is portrayed in "The Bible" as the "parable of the prodigal son" and as the "death" that was to be the consequence of "the eating of the tree of knowledge" and "the exclusion from the tree of life". "The eating of the tree of knowledge" is, as we have already long since shown through previous analyses in "Livets Bog (The Book of Life)", the same as the entire material evolution that the living beings have gone through from mineral to plant, from plant to animal, and from animal to terrestrial human being. The same analyses have in a similar way also taught us that the terrestrial human being is a being in whom animal characteristics have become something "evil" that gives the beings an unhappy fate and engenders within them an irresistible longing for a better existence in which humaneness and love are principal factors.