Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 5, sect. 1809

1809. What then are these phenomena that can arouse so much antipathy or downright persecution and hatred? Indeed, the entire problem is in actual fact merely a question of love. It is a question of how much sympathy or fellow-feeling one is charged with and can express. Despite the fact that the entire evolution of life, when it comes to mankind's welfare, is a matter of sympathy or love, since all terrestrial human misery, wars, accidents, sufferings, poverty, hunger and squalor are due solely to a lack of sympathy or neighbourly love, there is within this mankind, as previously mentioned, a vast wave of antipathy, hatred and persecution towards any sympathy or love that is outside the traditional mating love or love of offspring. The amount of sympathy between two beings of the same sex one will or can tolerate is thus very limited, while one fully accepts sympathy between beings of opposite sexes, even in cases where this sympathy results in seduction, divorce, shame and disgrace. All this clandestine sexual debauchery, this sexual pleasure that is often degraded to an article of commerce and bought by people who have already made a solemn promise of marital fidelity and responsibility, where this debauchery causes immeasurable sufferings and anguish and destroys homes, disrupts the protection and the upbringing of children of this marriage, is not nearly as great and sensational an object of gossip as two beings of the same sex looking at one another too warmly or giving one another a handshake that was too long, according to the gossips' accepted concepts, despite the fact that their doing so has not given rise to the very slightest trouble or misfortune for any being whatsoever. This latter phenomenon is thus a far easier victim of gossip than the former. And one has to be rather advanced in evolution in order to resist the temptation to spread such a sensation, despite the fact that by doing so one damages society or one's neighbour far more than the beings one is speaking ill of do in the given situation. These analyses are not put forward here in order to criticise clandestine sexual pleasure or the gossips and the followers of gossip, but, on the contrary, solely in order to show life as it really is and thus not as one believes or imagines it must be because of old traditions or handed-down, now out-dated, moral concepts. Now it ought to be established as a fact for every truly intellectual and honest researcher that there is something distorted and completely unsound, something unfinished in terrestrial mankind's sympathetic faculties. If these sympathetic faculties were perfect there would be no war, need or misery. Hatred and persecution would exist only within the animal kingdom.