“Such judgments are very simplistic, and ignore the great range of human motivation and experience. If you are bound and determined that “GOD” creates only “good”, then any physical deficiency, illness or deformity becomes an affront to your belief, threatens it, and makes you angry and resentful. If you become ill you can hate yourself for not being what you think you should be — a perfect physical image made in the likeness of a perfect God.

If on the other hand you carry the idea too far — that illness can also be a learning process — then you can fall into the other extreme, glorifying sickness or disease as a necessary ennobling experience in which the body is purged so that the soul can be saved.

Following such a belief, you will confuse suffering with saintliness, desolation with purity, and the denial of the body as spirituality and a badge of holiness. Under such conditions you can even seek out illness to prove to yourself the strength of your own spirituality — and to impress it upon others. The same kind of moral value judgment can be placed in almost any area of human activity, and will of course have social repercussions. Those reactions will add to the prevailing beliefs and in turn affect the individual.

You may believe that wealth is a result of a moral virtue, and comes from “God’s” direct benevolence. As a result, poverty becomes evidence of a lack of morality. “God” made so many people poor that obviously no man should dare try to change the situation — that rationale is often used. The poor, then, following these beliefs, are looked down upon as are the diseased.

What sin did the poor person or the sick person commit? That question, often asked unconsciously — if not consciously — brings you back to beliefs in punishment that have nothing to do with the concept of natural guilt, but with those distortions placed upon it. There is also a connection with misinterpretation of the Bible. Christ as you think of him was simply saying that you form your own reality. He tried to rise above the idea-systems of those times, yet even he had to use them, and so the connotations of sin and punishment distorted the message given.

Some of you will have a contradictory belief that poverty is virtuous,and that wealth is a vice and represents evidence of a spiritual lack.

This belief in your society also harks back to the Bible and Christ’s association with the poor rather than the rich. In all such cases, however, blanket moral judgments are being applied that involve feelings of guilt in which individual experience is forgotten.”

Seth on contradictory beliefs surrounding races and false Spirituality:

“Here the exotic is romanticized, the foreign held up, the picturesque seen as the real. Black skin or brown skin becomes the criteria of spiritual perfection, and poverty a badge of honor to be worn not only proudly, but often to be used as an aggressive tool. The people who follow these belief systems think that they are right. Their living style,community affiliations, and political leanings will be in direct oppositionto the “white-wealthy” ethic.

Now if you happen to be black or brown, poor, and believe in this system, you will at least feel secure within it. If you are instead white and wealthy and hold such beliefs, you will think yourself quite inferior in-deed, and do everything in your power to show how picturesque, and liberal and open-minded, and black or brown you can be, while still being white, fairly well-off, and perhaps secretly addicted to your Christianity.

You will doubtlessly have Buddhas tastefully displayed, and Indian beads.”

~ Excerpts from: The Nature of Personal Reality