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24
THE PRACTICAL PATH.
organism which experience and observation prove to be liable to disintegration and decay. Furthermore, a perfect God must be presumed to be above longings of every kind, and cannot, therefore, be credited with the unholy desire of imposing fetters of pain and misery on his brethren.
6
Lastly, when we look into the nature of this extrasupreme deity of modern theology we only discover him to be a personification of karmic energy and power. It has been made clear in the Key of Knowledge' that the gods and goddesses of the several systems of theology which are flourishing in our midst today are only the personifications of certain mental abstractions and forces of a psychic or occult type. If the reader has read that book, he would not find it difficult to understand that the following passages disclose the attributes of the karmic force, the regulator of the destinies of all kinds of beings involved in the samsara, rather than the qualities of a perfectly blissful being such as a Siddhâtman (perfect Soul) must necessarily be :
(1) "I create...evil."-Isaiah, XLV. 7.
(2) Wherefore I gave them statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live."-Ezekiel, XX. 25.
(3) "It repented the Lord that he had made man on earth and it grieved him at his heart."-Genesis, VI 6.
(4) "Whosoever slayeth Cain vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold."-Genesis, IV, 15.
(5) "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate me."-Deut. V. 9.
* See also The Permanent History of Bharata Varsha,' by K. Narayana Iyer.
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