178. The faith of any church is like a seed from which all its dogmas grow. It is like the seed of a tree that generates all the tree's features including its fruit. It is like human seed that generates descendants and families one after the other.

If you know a church's primary faith - the one they say is so crucial that it will bring you salvation - then you comprehend the nature of that church.

The following example may illustrate this point: Imagine a faith or belief that says nature created the universe. From that belief come many other beliefs: what we call God is really the universe; nature is its essence; the ether is the highest god the ancients called Jupiter; the air is the goddess the ancients called Juno, the one they made into a spouse for Jupiter; the ocean is a god below the others whom we, like the ancients, could call Neptune; and because nature's divinity extends even to the center of the earth, there is a god there whom we, like the ancients, could call Pluto; the sun is a royal hall for all the gods to meet in when Jupiter calls a council; fire is life from God; birds fly in God, animals walk on God, fish swim in God; thoughts are only modifications in the ether, just as speaking those thoughts involves modulations in the air; and different types of love are just incidental changes in our mental condition caused by the rays of the sun flowing into them. Among these beliefs there is also the view that life after death, heaven, and hell are myths made up by the clergy to win honor and wealth; but although they are myths, they are nevertheless useful and should not be openly ridiculed, because they serve the public by putting simple minds on a leash so that they obey their civic leaders. Still, those who are captivated by religion are unrealistic people, their thoughts are delusions, their actions are amusing, and they are subservient to the clergy in that they believe in things they do not see and see things that lie outside their mental range.

These derivative beliefs and many others like them are contained in the original belief that nature created the universe. They come out when the full implications of that belief are explored.

I have listed all this so you may know that the modern-day church's faith (which in its inner form is a faith in three gods, but in its outer form is a faith in one God) has squadrons of falsities inside it. There are as many falsities to be brought out as there are baby spiders in the egg case produced by a mother spider.

Anyone with a mind made truly rational by light from the Lord sees this. No others are going to see it, though, when the door to that faith and its offspring has been bolted shut by the principle that it is wrong for reason to examine its mysteries.

813. Germans in the Spiritual World

As everyone knows, in any country that is divided into a number of regions there are different kinds of people that live in the different regions. Local populations can be as different from each other as the people who live in all the various climates on earth. Yet there is a commonality among people who live under the same monarch and the same set of laws.

The subdivisions are more distinct in Germany than they are in the other countries that surround it. There is indeed a German empire, and all in the nation are subject to its authority. Nevertheless, the leaders of each province have a great deal of power in their own territories.

Germany contains larger and smaller states. The leader of each is like a monarch there. Religion, too, is divided in Germany. Some states are Lutheran; some are Calvinist; some are Roman Catholic. Given such diversity in both leadership and religious affiliation, Germans and their minds, inclinations, and lives are more difficult to generalize about from eyewitness experience in the spiritual world than other peoples and nationalities. Because a commonality exists wherever people speak the same language, though, the nature of Germans can to some extent be seen and described if various different concepts are brought together.