Rudolf Steiner in 1918 on the mental sickness of atheism, the calamity of non-Christianity, the mental defect from denying the spiritual

There is in Man an inclination to know the Divine.

The second inclination in him - that is, in the Man of this era - is to know the Christ.

The third inclination in Man is to know what is usually called the Spirit, or also the Holy Ghost.

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1. Where a Man denies the Father God - denies a Divine Principle in the world as such - there is an actual physical defect, a physical sickness, a physical flaw in the body.

To be an atheist means to the spiritual scientist to be sick in some respect... an actual sickness in a man who denies what he should be able to feel, through his actual bodily constitution. If he denies that which gives him a healthy bodily feeling, namely that the world is pervaded by Divinity, then he is a sick man, sick in body.

2. There are also many who deny the Christ. The denial of the Christ as is denial of something that is essentially a matter of destiny and concerns man's soul-life.

To deny God is a sickness; to deny the Christ is a calamity.

3. To deny the Spirit, the Holy Ghost, signifies dullness, obtuseness, of a man's own spirit.

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So - atheism denotes an actual pathological defect. Failure to find in life that link with the world which enables us to recognise the Christ, is a calamity for the soul. To be unable to find the Spirit in one's own inmost being denotes obtuseness, a kind of spiritual mental deficiency, though in a subtle and unacknowledged form.

Edited from: https://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/atheism-is-actual-physical-defect.html 
Entire text at: http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/FndChr_index.html#sthash.ddQ5kd7d.dpuf