—MO September‚ 1973 NO.271B—DFO

Copyrighted September‚ 1973 by The Children of God P.O. Box 31, London WC2E 7LX England, or B.P. 752 75123 Paris Cedex 03 France

COMMENTARY ON ITS INTERPRETATION:

1. ABRAHIM: "I SHALL SHOW EVEN MORE THAN THIS UNTO DAVID!"...

2. "O GOD, HAVE MERCY upon thy father! Thy hand hangs heavy upon me!"...

3. WHY WONDEREST THOU at these things?—It is nothing to what I have shown thy father, and greater things than these shall he yet see!"

4. ABRAHIM DOESN'T LIKE THE FILM! He said, "This is nothing compared with the truth! They know not the truth! They resist the truth!" In other words, he's saying, the answer is right there in the Bible, it's simple, but that's not the answer the scientists want.—It's so close and yet so far! The Lord apparently doesn't like anything that's not the whole truth‚ because a little deception and a little truth, a mixture of truth and lies, can be even more deceitful.

5. ABRAHIM ALSO DIDN'T LIKE MY ATTITUDE: I was marvelling that at last they were coming through and discovering these things, but I guess I was admiring them too much‚ and that's always akin to worship. After all this whole thing that they had—the story and picture itself—was all imaginary, whereas what Abrahim shows me is all the truth! He considered the film a lie because it was fiction. Even if it had some truth and elements of truth and ideas of truth in it, he still didn't like it. Abrahim's a little intolerant!

6. (PROPHECY:) "O THE UNDERSTANDING THAT I HAVE GIVEN UNTO DAVID THY FATHER, beyond that of other men!"

7. BUT THEY'RE GOING TO GET AN ANSWER, and it's going to be just like the truth, only it'll be from the wrong source‚ the wrong "he": Even the Devil, a magnificent created being, created by God, and so powerful!

8. THEY'RE REALLY PLAYING WITH FIRE! IMAGINE GOING INTO THE SPIRIT WORLD WITHOUT GOD, without the Lord! I'd be scared to death about some of the things that have happened to me if I didn't know the Lord! It's just like their ghosts and phantoms are not going to vanish because they have no power over their fears.

9. BUT THE MOMENT THE LORD'S CHILDREN ARE TEMPTED TO FEAR WE IMMEDIATELY THINK OF GOD AND THE FEARS VANISH!— Anything that is not of the Lord just vanishes! Isn't it amazing the power the Lord gives us! Almost the Devil's total power is in fear. They were all living in terror, total fear, except when Chris had a little real love, and that's the only time he had any peace, and that's the only time she had any peace—when he loved her! "Love casts out fear... there is no fear in love... for God is Love!"

10. IT WASN'T UNTIL THE LAST SCENE THAT IT DAWNED ON ME WHAT THE SEA LOOKED LIKE: MOLTEN LAVA IN A VOLCANIC CRATER! THE LAKE OF FIRE! The whole thing was like a manifestation of Hell in the spirit world! You see, the communists want to see, and they want to know.— But like Adam and Eve in the Garden they already knew good and the only new thing really revealed to them was evil.— And, of course, knowing evil then gave them the knowledge of what good really was, by contrast!

11. BUT HERE THEY'RE DELVING INTO THE SECRETS OF THE SPIRIT WORLD and the supernatural and what are they going to find? If God lets them see anything, and the Devil is used to show them anything, if they don't want the truth, then of course they're going to find the delusion, the hell!

12. I THINK THAT WAS THE MOST AMAZING FILM I'VE SEEN YET! But they don't really want the answers they're finding.

13. STRANGELY ENOUGH, THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT CHRIS' MOTHER OR FATHER ANYWHERE IN LEM'S ORIGINAL BOOK‚ "Solaris".— The movie adds these. This is extremely significant! Neither does the book show him entering the world of the spirits nor reversing within his own spirit during his illness or when dying. There is nothing in the book about his illness or the things he saw when he was either delirious or dying.—The two or three Haris and his mother, etc.

14. THERE IS NOTHING IN THE BOOK ABOUT HIM ENTERING THE SPIRIT WORLD and finally arriving home at his father's cabin on the surface of the Ocean. These are purely the inspirations of Tarkovsky's genius in his masterful movie version of "SOLARIS"! He makes the ending look very much like entering the spiritual heaven and the afterlife!—A stroke of spiritual genius indeed! God bless Tarkovsky for his insight!

15. GOD IS USING EVERY MEANS AT HIS COMMAND to try to get His message across, even to the Russians themselves! It's what American movie makers used to call "a moral preachment". It's most important moral is: "You better be good, or you're going to suffer for it!"—And their primary example of goodness had to do with family love and loyalty. "Take care of your wife, your children, love your father and mother! And although we don't believe in God, there may be some Higher Power which may hold you responsible and punish you for your sins!"

16. UNLIKE "2001", HE'S NOT THE CREATION OF MAN, but this Higher Being is the creation of His own evolution by some unknown means, which of course they interpret as being strictly materialistic, but they do recognise as being a superior form of life or being.

17. IT'S LIKE SOLARIS WAS A PICTURE OF PURGATORY: They were suffering for their sins‚ and yet in a way in which they could make amends and still be forgiven. Their love relationship was so natural, believable and human!

18. (ABRAHIM: "YOU ONLY APPRECIATE THESE THINGS BECAUSE YOU ARE HUMAN and you are spiritual and you are natural, and David appreciates these things.")—In other words, you find what you're looking for. I have a tendency to be a super optimist in some respects, seeing the best in everything and everybody. I guess we see what we want to see. (Abrahim: These are foolish words of thy father!)

19. APPARENTLY SARTORIUS KEPT KILLING THESE CHILDREN one by one as they came‚ showing the inhumanity of calloused science! But the humanness, love and kindness of the others impressed me the most. I liked it, and I like to forget some of the other parts.—Why remember what you don't like? You see what you want to see. The things you appreciate, you look for. I guess only God can be unbiased.

20. THE DIFFERENT MEN REPRESENTED THE DIFFERENT REACTIONS OF MOST PEOPLE: Sartorius the skeptic, dissecting, trying to understand, and killing it in the process! Snouth the philosopher, just doesn't like it, ponders it all, but doesn't want anything more to do with it. Chris the believer‚ accepts and becomes converted.

21. AMERICAN SCIENCE IS SO MUCH MORE SKEPTICAL: They wouldn't even delve into E.S.P. before the Russians got into it!—They're just now barely beginning to scratch the surface! They figured that anybody that wanted that kind of thing could "go to church" or "get religion".

22. AT LEAST THE RUSSIANS ARE HONESTLY‚ OPENLY SEARCHING for the psychic truths, which is the only way you can be a true scientist—to be open minded, to accept the possibility of anything existing, maybe even some kind of God! But most Americans said of psychic phenomena: "We know they don't exist because we never had any, anybody that says they do is just a crackpot!"

23. THE REAL PRODUCER, IS OF COURSE, THE SOVIET UNION: Nothing comes out of there that's not the official voice of the State and its leaders! Does that prove that these old leaders are becoming old bottles who, as they approach death, are reverting to religious inclinations or longings? Because it is a lot easier to be a skeptic when you're young and not in the face of daily death! But you don't understand and you fear and you long for an answer when you're about to die!

24. (ABRAHIM TO MARIA: YOU'RE GOING TO LIVE FOREVER in the spirit and the heart of your father!) I'm so glad it's so easy for us to contact our ocean, and He loves us and talks to us and is concerned about every little thing!

25. THIS FILM SHOWS SEVERAL THINGS: (1) How deep they have gotten into the exploration of ESP and the spirit world. (2) What they've discovered. (3) How they're trying to explain it. (4) How they're trying to prepare their people to understand it, so they won't be afraid. (5) They're not totally ignorant or unconscious of the religious significance and meanings, but they have scientific explanations.

26. IN OTHER WORDS, THEY'RE TRYING TO TELL US COMMUNISTS ARE NOT TOTALLY IRRELIGIOUS. They're conscious of the significance of religion, but in a sort of materialistic scientific way. They are actually making greater spiritual discoveries than all the churchy religions of the West! This may help them to be able to compete with Gaddafi's religious appeal!

27. THE WHOLE FILM IS LIKE A PICTURE OF THE RESULTS OF SOME OF THEIR ESP INVESTIGATIONS AND FINDINGS. I got this so strong in my sleep. Their statement about how the Solaris project was being discontinued for lack of money was almost like an appeal to continue the ESP project, or they'd be stopping just short of the goal.

28. THIS FILM IS NOT AIMED AT THE OUTSIDE WORLD as much as to their own countrymen. It was all made in Russian and had to be subtitled later in English, and has not gone over outside of Russia. Most people just can't understand it.—Its too deep for them. They don't get the meaning. They have‚ in their studies of ESP, discovered that the spiritual world exists and that it is peopled by these spirits, phantoms, ghosts, hallucinations‚ apparitions, or whatever they are!—And I think they just decided they'd have to do something to explain it!

29. IT WAS VERY, VERY WISE FOR THEM TO NOT COME OUT WITH THE FINAL ANSWER. They're saying‚ "Well, we don't fully understand, but we know these things exist, and we think they have something to do with the mind and hallucinations.—But we have lots to learn!" So if their space men run into anything more they don't understand...well, it's just more "scientific" discoveries!

30. WHAT IS SCIENCE?—KNOWLEDGE! WHAT IS THE SUPERNATURAL, THE SPIRITUAL, THE MIRACULOUS?—IT'S JUST GOD'S SCIENCE, with which man is not familiar! It's God's dimension, His knowledge. They're discovering things now they can't explain, and they've got to try to give them some basis in scientific fact, lest people revert to their old religious channel! They're afraid that when people find out there is another world and all these spiritual personalities there, they'll think communism with its godlessness is wrong, and they'll go back to their churches and old religious faith!

31. WHAT THE COMMUNISTS ARE DOING WITH THIS FILM AND ESP IS RATHER LIKE INNOCULATIONS OR VACCINATION-SHOTS: They're willing to let you have a little bit of the disease, a vaccination, so that you build up an immunity to religion and don't fall for the whole works! Very‚ very clever! I consider it the smartest and wisest approach to spiritism I've ever seen in a movie. They are really trying to explain it: "What are we going to do about these `beings'?—How do we explain them?—What is the cure?"

32. VERY LIKELY THE COSMONAUTS HAVE HAD SOME EXPERIENCES THAT THEY'RE NOT TELLING US ABOUT, and they don't want to let it get out of hand! Some of our Western astronauts thought they heard voices, and they said the two British scientists on the bottom of the ocean got delirious.—Maybe they were seeing a death angel! When you're down there and groggy from lack of oxygen and under great emotional strain and about to die, you could very easily get into the spirit and see things!—Spirits!

33.—IN SOLARIS, CHRIS SENT A BRAIN MESSAGE TO THE BIG BRAIN, THE OCEAN; THAT WAS HIS REPENTANCE, HIS CONFESSION! In other words, he was cleaning out all these old past sins. They as good as told him to admit to the Brain all these mistakes, to make an open disclosure of his past—transmit this whole thing to the Brain.—"Then maybe he'll let you alone!" That's when the spirits all left and the Brain was satisfied: Chris was forgiven!

34. ABOUT THAT TIME HE BEGAN TO GET SICK WITH THE FEVER: WHAT I THINK IS‚ HE MUST HAVE DIED and either while he was delirious or actually dead, it was then in the spirit he went back and visited his mother and he was at home, for she was dead!—Which again shows how realistic things are in the spirit world because she was living in a house, the same house she used to live in. Then he showed up again sick in bed in the space station after that, his mother was there, too, and so were three or four Haris!

35. SARTORIUS‚ THE TOUGH SCIENTIST, WAS TRYING TO DISPROVE IT ALL, OR FIND A CURE! He couldn't say it didn't exist, but was trying to figure it out, and how to get rid of it. He was trying to find a "cure for immortality" and "these resurrections"!—Again they used religious terms trying show an inter-relationship with what some people call religion but he calls science. They're trying to imply that all these religious beliefs could be based on scientific facts.

36. THEY WERE CONSTANTLY RELATING IT ALL TO RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND SPIRITUAL PHENOMENA, but trying to explain it all in the terms of science.—Which is fine with me, if they can explain it.—But I don't think they have exactly the right motive. It's like they're saying: "We're now admitting these things do exist, but we're not ready to accept your religious explanation." One of the things that made Abrahim so furious was that they weren't willing to accept the explanation God's already given in the Bible, but were trying to find some other explanation.

37. THEY WILL FIND AN ANSWER EVENTUALLY AND IT'S GOING TO BE SATANIC!—But they're going to have very scientific reasons for it all! When the scientist said, "She's just a copy‚ an imprint!"—he was still trying to prove she was just an impression or creation of his mind‚ she didn't really exist. But they did make their final appearance—all of his old haunts that had been plaguing him because of his past sins.

38. ACCORDING TO THIS FILM, TODAY'S COMMUNISTS SEEM TO CONSIDER ONE OF THE GREATEST SINS OF MANKIND IS WIFE DESERTION AND/OR CHILD DESERTION. In about three different cases the man's chief sin was portrayed as being a desertion of a wife or woman and/or her child. Then these creatures like them came back to plague them because of their desertion.—And they were really also trying to explain what sin is!

39. SOVIET SCIENCE IS NOW EVIDENTLY COMING TO THE POINT THAT THEY'RE CONFESSING THEY'RE HAVING PROBLEMS explaining materialistically such human emotions as love, happiness, guilt, right and wrong, the instinctive sense of good and evil, and then finally the miracle of life and miracle of death‚ things they can't quite explain in materialistic terms.—And they've got them all rolled into this picture!

40. THE DRESS SHE WORE had no opening for her to get out of it, as though she were something supernatural. But she did finally get out of it when she started to become human because he loved her.

41. LOVE BEGAN TO HELP HER TO EXIST, TO ALMOST RECREATE HER! Love has creative power, because God is love and He is the Creator!—And with His help our faith can also create! This they were implying about their hallucinations: If you believe it, it exists!

42. THEY SAID IT HAPPENED MOSTLY AT NIGHT: "THEY" COME IN THE DARK! This is so often true with spirits: They like to come at night during the miracle of sleep! The mystery of sleep!—That's another thing they're trying to solve! Don Quixote said, "Both peasant and king are equal in sleep!" Sleep is like death, and these are tremendous mysteries which science is trying to solve and explain.

43. AT LAST WHEN CHRIS HAD HIS FINAL VISION OF ALL THE SPIRITS AT ONCE‚ it was as though they were making their final appearance to say farewell. Then they all left and Hari said in her note that she had begged them to help her to leave.

44. IT WAS AS THOUGH THE SPIRITS WERE SATISFIED: CHRIS HAD MADE REPARATION AND THEY FORGAVE HIM. That's very, very Scriptural! I don't doubt a bit that in the afterlife the others that didn't accept Christ's atonement are going to have to suffer for the very sins they committed!

45. THAT WAS THE WHOLE IDEA OF THE "GREEN DOOR": THEY WERE STILL SUFFERING FOR THE SAME SINS they'd had in life. So of course, that would apply to people whom we have hurt or offended. Certain ghosts are condemned to remain in a certain house or place, and certain families are condemned to have these ghosts haunt them because of the sins of the past or of their fathers. In other words, these spirits either are themselves being punished‚ or those who've been wronged want satisfaction, they want reparation, they want repentance! They want people to be sorry so they can forgive them. So in Solaris, when obviously through what happened he was sorry, he showed a spirit of repentance, then they all forgave him and disappeared!

46. THE FINAL ONE HE HAD OFFENDED‚ HOWEVER, WAS HIS FATHER:—He had neglected and talked rather rudely to his father just before he left for the space station.—He had hurt him deeply and caused him to weep. So he had to make amends to him.

47. IN THE SPIRIT HE GOES BACK HOME TO HIS FATHER, who is apparently dead and a spirit himself by this time, but who is still living in what looks like their old home. He falls on his knees at his father's feet obviously in repentance and asking for forgiveness, the Prodigal come home! It was raining inside instead of outside, like in the inside—out world of the "Green Door"! Then we see that "home" is this island being created in the Brain Himself!—A return to God and reunion with the great mind of God!

48. IN OTHER WORDS, THIS WAS A SIGN OF THE BRAIN'S FORGIVENESS. LIKE GOD‚ the Ocean was forgiving him and allowing these past things and places and people he loved to be restored to reality! What's the best idea of Heaven?—One of the greatest things of all is the reunion with loved ones!—And God Himself! Chris had arrived in the "heaven" of the Brain, the mind of God, and was restored to his loved ones! I'd say the implication was that his wife and mother lived there also.

49. THEY'RE TRYING TO SHOW THAT IMMORTALITY COULD EXIST IN YOUR MIND in the psychic: "This can all happen. It can be scientific. Your mind (which we call spirit) could be eternal. In other words, maybe there is an eternity in the mind! How clever of the enemy!—Creating for them their own heaven and making it all sound very, very scientific!: "There's life after death and consciousness after death. Your mind and thoughts do go on, and they can recreate loved ones for you in the heaven of the great consciousness of the Brain!"

50. SEE WHAT AN IMITATION IT IS. A CLEVER, CLOSE COUNTERFEIT of the real thing without giving God the glory! But whenever there is a copy, somewhere there must be the original reality! The Devil knows the kids today are getting into all kinds of spiritual things that are leading them to God and that Soviet science can't deny. So they have got to have a substitute‚ or explain it somehow in scientific terms. They cannot deny it.—They've got to admit it.—How can they let religion have anything more than they've got?—"We can now offer you our version of pie in the sky!—It does exist, and we can offer it to you through the subconscious, the mental, etc."

51. GOD TO THE COMMUNISTS IN SOLARIS SEEMS TO BE A SCIENTIFIC ULTIMATE, a Materialistic Entity which is above their present natural understanding, but which has somehow scientifically created itself!—The ultimate in evolution! This Something has somehow, somewhere eventually evolved in a sort of God by what they would consider the "natural" means of evolution: "If there is a God, then He has evolved through natural scientific means from material sources‚ and therefore is not supernatural or mystical! He's just a Superior Intelligence‚ a superior type of Being, and has nothing to do with religion or churches!" (I'll at least nearly agree with the latter!)

52. THEY ARE TRYING TO PROVE THAT SPIRITS AND PSYCHIC PHENOMENA ARE SCIENTIFICALLY POSSIBLE AND EXPLAINABLE. But they are at the same time inadvertently proving that God and the spirit world are scientifically possible! Like computers: What they're trying to prove is that man is capable of creating things like a brain—and maybe even human beings eventually! But what they're actually proving is that man was created by some Higher Power who already knows how to do it and has already done it in the human brain! (Prophecy: "Thank You for these wonders and mysteries Thou dost reveal unto David!")

53. BECAUSE OF THE CHURCHES' LACK OF ACTUAL EXPERIENCE IN THE SPIRITUAL, ESTABLISHED RELIGIONS ARE TOTALLY UNREAL AND IRRELEVANT, not a matter of experience whatsoever, just a matter of the theoretical "in the stars!" The practice of churchianity has made God so distant they can't even relate Him to their own experience!

54. THIS PICTURE REALLY RELATES THE SPIRITUAL TO THE HUMAN and the physical. In other words, in soviet science ESP experiments and this film they think they're disproving God and religion by proving these so—called "spiritual" things are natural, real and materialistic instead of spiritual: "They're scientific and materialistic, and therefore acceptable‚ but not the theorisms of religion!"

55. BUT WHAT THEY'RE ACTUALLY DOING WITHOUT REALISING IT IS TO PROVE THAT THE "SPIRITUAL", AS WE CALL IT‚ IS REAL, or "materialistic" as they call it! They're as good as saying that these ghosts, since they materialise, must be of some unknown material essence, or composed of these neutrinos, etc.

56. IN OTHER WORDS, THERE MUST BE AN EXPLANATION, SINCE WE HAVE SEEN THEM! They must exist, but simply of materials with which we are not familiar. Well, of course!—The "materials" with which they are not familiar are what we call the spiritual essences, the spiritual "materials" of the spirit world! In other words, they're saying: "The miracles we have discovered can all be explained.—They all have a scientific basis."

57. WELL, IF THEY HAVE A SCIENTIFIC BASIS AND CAN BE EXPLAINED, THEN THEY EXIST!—What is the difference?—What is the difference between Jesus the Superior Being, a Super–Intelligence from outer space, going around healing people in a supposedly "religious" way, and the fact that there is a Power in existence which can be scientifically explained or proven which can heal!

58. BUT LEM IS SAYING that to give scientific materialistic answer to the miraculous—as he's doing in Solaris—these are "heresies" to established religion!—And he's right!—They are heresies to the bigoted churches, just because he doesn't use their dogmatic religious terminology!—But not to us! So he gives all the credit to Marx.

59. IF THEY CAN GET THE "SPIRITUAL" INTERPRETED IN "SCIENTIFIC" TERMS, PEOPLE WILL ACCEPT IT.—And that's exactly what the Devil is going to do! He's going to demonstrate his Supernatural power by explaining that this power is purely "scientific", and that he's only using "scientific" power! He's going to say that it is not "spiritual", because the whole world has been so de-spiritualised and de-religionised that they will no longer accept anything "spiritual" or "religious" as being "scientific" or true.

60. SO HE'S GOT TO MAKE HIS POWER AND ITS CONSEQUENT RELIGION IN SOME WAY SOUND SCIENTIFIC. He's got to have a scientific explanation for his talking image, the Super Computer! It's got to be a creation of man! He also has to have some scientific explanation for his "resurrection", "wounded unto death but did live"!—The Super Man!

61. THE ANTICHRIST'S "RESURRECTION" WILL POSSIBLY BE A SUPPOSED MARVEL OF SOVIET SCIENCE in that they have brought this guy back to life! When all the time behind it the Devil knows what they don't know, that he is inspiring it! It's his power and spirit that makes it all possible, and they and the Beast and the image are all under his control. (See Revelation 13) But that's where they make their mistake!

62. THE ESTABLISHMENT RELIGIONISTS OF THE WORLD have classified everything into an "either-or" "one–or-the-other" category. In other words, it's gotta be good or evil, black or white, Christian or communist! Therefore the communists fail to realise the fact that there could be something and somebody else in between which is "neither-nor"!—Neither totally churchistic‚ traditional religion, nor is it totally atheistic, materialistic Marxism!

63. THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE WHICH IS CLOSER TO THE TRUTH THAN EITHER one of them, a blending of the two, such as a "Christian-communists" or a "scientific–spiritualist"! Because the only view they have of religion is the churches, they of course cast them out as false‚ which they are! Then they're left with nothing but their materialistic Marxism, no alternative—but us! They're like the Taoists: They know everything has to be either positive or negative, nothing in–between, no neutrals.

64. WELL, THE DIFFERENCE IS THAT THE SO–CALLED RECOGNISED ESTABLISHED-CHURCH POSITIVES ARE MOSTLY ACTUALLY PART OF THE NEGATIVES—the Devil's crowd—and neither one of them‚ neither atheist nor religionist, has yet discovered the spiritual realities of the true God!

65. IT'S THE CASE AGAIN OF THE POT AND THE KETTLE CALLING EACH OTHER BLACK! Well, they are both right!—They're both black, and both are cooking on the same hellfire and both are blackened and blinded by the same fiendish smoke, and there's the Devil's brew in both of them! They're both poisonous!—Both the atheist and the religionist!

66. BUT WHAT THEY'RE IGNORING IS THE FACT THAT THERE COULD BE A NICE CLEAN POT ON A NEW STOVE ON A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FIRE WITH A WHOLE NEW BREW that's good and healthful‚ cooked by somebody that neither one of them know—God! We are always caught in the middle-in-between! That's not going to make either the communists or the churches happy!

67. IN FACT, THE STOVE IS IN AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT HOUSE run by an entirely different housekeeper—the true God!—Neither the communists' materialistic "Devil" nor the churches' false "God", but the real God!

68. I SAT HERE THINKING AND SOMEWHAT REGRETTING THAT I HADN'T GOTTEN MORE EDUCATION and didn't understand more of these big words and couldn't write more eruditely in terms that the intelligentsia would understand! But it came to me so clear: "If you had, you'd be writing like they do, so that your readers would have to sit with the dictionary in one hand trying to figure it out!"

69. WHEREAS GOD GIVES ME SUCH SIMPLE LANGUAGE AND PICTURES that everybody, even a child, can understand! He made me simple so I could write for the simple‚ then everybody could understand—except those who don't want to! That's the difference between knowledge and wisdom! ("Behold how I have simplified these things for David, and made them plain unto thy father!")

70. BECAUSE THE CHURCHES ARE TIED TO THEIR DOGMAS AND TRADITIONS, THEY HAVE BECOME STATIC! But since the materialists limit themselves to the material, that makes them static too! They are saying that the material is infinite, and in a sense that could be true‚ because the Spirit created the material, and it is able to make it eternal or terminate it, whatever!—But someday it will destroy it!

71. SNOUTH IS SAYING‚ "DON'T CLOSE YOUR MIND TO THE POSSIBILITY OF THERE BEING SOMETHING SPIRITUAL, SOMETHING LIKE GOD!—Of course, not the God of the religionists and all their malarkey, but the God of science, the real God!"

72. WHEN I WAS PREACHING IN THE PARK IN CHICAGO I once said‚ "The churchy accuse us of not being worshipers or followers of their god, and they're right! We're not followers of their god, the god the churches have created for themselves out of their own imaginations who is not the true God!"

73. THE CHURCHES HAVE GOT A CONCEPT OF GOD WHICH IS SISSIFIED, a sort namby–pamby Sunday-School-poster type of kindly old gentleman with bushy grey hair and long white beard, a Santa Claus that loves everybody and brings everybody presents especially the church people! Well, Santa Claus is not my idea of God! In fact, my God's getting bigger all the time, and more and more beyond my comprehension!

74. BUT LOOK HOW THE WORLD IS BEING PREPARED FOR A MECHANICAL GOD, an Electronic Brain, a Computer Deity, which they will then be willing to worship because it is their own creation, the work of their own hands!

75. ("HOW CAN MOSES AND DAVID BE ONE?—They don't even understand that‚ so how can they understand who God is?")—They're trying to comprehend God!—Ha!

76. THE SOLARIS' DESCRIPTION OF GOD IN LEM'S OWN MATERIALISTIC TERMS IN THE BOOK WOULD VERY WELL FIT THE DEVIL! He calls him the "imperfect God" the "despairing God", the "baby God"‚ the "childish God"!—A God inspired with childish caprice and mischievous pranks, etc.! He's trying to explain who he thinks maybe the Ocean is‚ but he doesn't know.—And he makes "him" sound like the Devil!

Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family