June, 2014
On Monday, June 23, 2014 Mormon judges excommunicated women’s ordination activist Kate Kelly,” a story posted on the Internet by ThinkProgress.org said.
In the ThinkProgress story, a statement released by Kelly’s group, Ordain Women, is quoted as saying that “judges within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) sent Kelly an email yesterday informing her that she has been ‘excommunicated for conduct contrary to the laws and order of the LDS Church’.”
Kelly, the ThinkProgress story said, “is reportedly no longer allowed to ‘take the sacrament, hold a Church calling, give a talk in Church, offer a public prayer in behalf of the class or congregation in a Church meeting, or vote in the sustaining of Church officers’.”
The international human rights lawyer said she was crying and sobbing so much that she “couldn’t really read all the words” of her excommunication notice. Kelly later told NBC News: “I guess I’m a delusional optimist, because to the end I thought they would do the right thing.”
Kelly is reported to have “gathered women by the hundreds to march up to the doors of a meeting of the all-male priesthood and demand entry (they were denied). Still, when her efforts were combined with what appeared to be concessions on the part of the church — including finally allowing a women to lead a prayer at one of their conferences — some concluded that the church might be shifting its traditionally hardline stance against women in church leadership,” the ThinkProgress story went on.
The Mormon Church, of course, famously excluded black men from the priesthood throughout its long history as well, until 1976, when its leader announced that he had received “a revelation” from God that black males were henceforth to be considered eligible for be priests.
No such revelation has been made by God regarding women, however, judging from the pronouncements of Mormon Church leaders on this subject.
Mormon church teaching states that men and women have been assigned different, distinct but complementary roles in human life. Women are to support the men who are in power, because “the Lord has put it that way,” the church says.
So there you have it. God—who apparently has a penis—requires all of his priests in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and the Roman Catholic Church as well) to also have a penis. Priests, and even bishops, in the Episcopal Church may, however have vaginas (but only as of a few years ago, when God apparently changed His mind with regard to certain, but to all, of his Christian denominations.)
Female rabbis are allowed in the Jewish religion, and female ulamas are allowed in the Islamic tradition, and female ministers are allowed in most other Christian denominations, such as the Lutheran Church or the Presbyterian Church. The Baptist church is not too fond of the idea, and God appears to be very strict when it comes to both the Mormon and the Catholic Church.
So how does this work? Does God give different directions to different religious denominations? Or are some denominations violating the Law of God by allowing some of their leaders to have vaginas? Or is it the other way around? Are some denominations violating the Law of God by requiring all priests to have penises?
What do you think God wants with regard to all of this?
Here we go again. Another revolution. Not to make light of the fighting and the killing in any way, but is this the Revolution du jour? Must our civilization endure this process over and over and over again?
The news now is of the insurrection in Iraq by revolutionaries among Islamic militant fighters. CNN reports that “vast swaths of northern Iraq, including the cities of Mosul and Tal Afar, have fallen as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, advances toward Baghdad. The ISIS militants want to establish a caliphate, or Islamic state, in the region, stretching from Iraq into northern Syria.”
What is going on here? I don’t mean, just in Iraq. I mean, on our planet. I mean, all over the place at one time or another, since the beginning of time.
The answer is found in the book The Storm Before the Calm, which can be found in its entirety on this website. That book tells us that a search on Wikipedia under the word “revolutions” brings up a virtually endless catalogue of uprisings.
It starts with the popular revolt in the Sumarian city of Lagash that deposed King Lugalanda and put the reformer Urukagina on the throne in 2380 B.C., and ends with the revolutions that overturned governments in the Arab world in 2011.
It encompasses, in between, hundreds of others, including the Fall of the Roman Empire, the First of the Wars of Scottish Independence, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the revolution in India, the Boer Revolt, revolutions all over South America, the European Revolutions of 1848, the revolutions in modern Hungary, in Yugoslavia, in Haiti, the dissolution of the Soviet Union by 1991, and…
…okay, just take my word for it. This is a tiny portion of a list that goes on and on and on…and ON. We’ve been “revolting” since the beginning of governance.
Will it ever end? Not until the human race launches The Last Revolution. What is needed to bring a stop to the killing and the fighting is not American intervention in Iraq (which some are now calling for), not more military might to oppose military might that seeks to overthrow military might; not more of the same to try to cure what it actually presents.
What is needed here is not a revolution on the ground, but a revolution in the mind. It is our thinking we must change—and it is my hope that, as a species we’re finally about to become clear about that.
In the past we kept trying to change conditions on the ground, when what we needed to change was the condition in our head. Even when we did manage to change conditions on the ground (once in a while, every so often, we found a band-aid that helped), the same old (age old) problems eventually re-emerged—because nothing had been altered in our mindset.
The solution is to change our beliefs, and not keep trying to change our behaviors. Beliefs create behaviors, so if our beliefs don’t change, our behaviors never will. In the short-term, maybe, but not in the long run.
As we moved into the New Millennium more than a decade ago, our species finally began to get that. More and more people began making a commitment to explore new ideas—ideas which might have been dismissed out of hand just a generation earlier—out of their clarity that humanity’s old ideas simply were no longer working. (It is arguable that they never worked.)
New choices seemed to be in order. Our prior decisions, based on old beliefs, had gotten us nowhere.
It is not a coincidence that all this is going on now, as we move into the second half of the first quarter of the 21st Century. This truly is The Storm Before The Calm. It was predicted, it was expected, and it is here. And…
…we are going to weather this storm, you and I. We’re going to give our children, and theirs, a wonderful world in which to live. We’re about to turn a page in human history.
If you’d like to know more, read The Storm Before the Calm right here on this website. I encourage you to. I invite you to. I dare you to.
Then join the Evolution Revolution by clicking on the Blue Box on the home page.
There is something you—we—can do. The question is not whether there is something we can do, the question is, will we do it…?
As part of your preparation to write this chapter, be sure to read, especially, the THIRD SAMPLE CHAPTER found here.
This is Chapter Seven of God’s Message to the World: You’ve Got Me All Wrong, the most powerful re-statement, in one book, of the 3,000 pages of the Conversations with God cosmology you will ever find. It is a book that is now re-igniting readers of CWG all over the world, getting them in touch once again with the most world-changing, life-impacting, mind-and-heart-expanding ideas about God and about Life placed before our species in many, many years.
You will not want to miss this book! And then, I hope you will choose to contribute your own “take” on the topic of Chapter 7 (the third one found in this sampling of chapters from the book) in the Comments section below.
I believe that it is humanity’s cultural story that is causing humanity’s cultural crisis. I am inviting you, here in this space, to engage in a conversation (we call it The Conversation of the Century) about what kind of new story we could be telling our children, and each other, about life on Earth in every one of its expressions.
Should we be telling them to fear God?
The invitation to write a New Cultural Story for our offspring was sent to humanity in the book The Storm Before the Calm, the first entry in the Conversations with Humanity Series. The book is published in full on this site.
Watch here to see what category of life expression we are currently exploring, then write your best idea about Humanity’s New Cultural Story as it concerns that particular area of life, co-authoring with us here on this website.
WHAT WE HOPE WILL HAPPEN HERE:
We hope that people from around the world will offer here their heartfelt thoughts about what our New Human Cultural Story might say, and how we might articulate it. Please limit each item to a single topic, and please sign your name, so that we know who wrote the entry. (We want to give credit where credit is due, and to encourage as many people as possible to contribute to this Co-Authorship.)
WHAT WE HOPE WILL NOT HAPPEN HERE:
We do not see this as a place for endless argumentation. We see it as a Gathering of Ideas, not a Back-and-Forth Debate. Statements of opinion about the entries are surely welcome, but ongoing and never-ending wrangling hoping to make a particular point will, we believe, only serve to inhibit the process of gathering as many ideas as possible. Our suggestion, then: Let this be a Brainstorming Session about what could be our Most Wonderful Tomorrow, where the general rule is: Every idea is welcome, and no one will be judged for their contribution.
Thanks for making your input here. One dream we have is to place a summary of the best of the proposals for Humanity’s New Cultural Story, as judged by our readers at the end of each year, before the world’s leaders in politics, economics, business & commerce, education, environment, and spirituality in a special online publication that we will invite them to read. So your contribution is important — and could help awaken a sleeping world.
Please make your entries below…and return often. Thank you.
If you are a regular visitor here you have no doubt noticed that The Global Conversation has changed its format. Eliminated from this page are the several individual columns that once appeared, thus creating a finer focus on the primary discussion that was the original intent of this website.
As you may know, this online newspaper is an outgrowth of the book The Storm Before the Calm. We very much hope to do two things here:
(1) Continue the explorations that began in that book (which exploration can be done in the Comment Section beneath the posting of that entire text, just below), and…
(2) Extend those explorations from there, looking in our headline stories at current news items, personal events in our day-to-day world, and the spiritual experiences of our readers as they encounter those events.
We want to see how the messages in all the Conversations with God books apply as a practical matter on-the-ground in a Mon-Fri, 9-5 world. We want to prod our readers by asking questions—and we want our readers to prod us by asking questions as well. We want to generate back-and-forth conversation about practical spirituality. And yes, we hope to ignite a global Evolution Revolution (see blue box at lower right).
As a perfect example of the kind of exchange we hope to generate, let us present in this first edition of our newly-designed newspaper a comment placed here very recently by a reader posting as “Blake.” Here is what he had to say…
Neale…You are frantically repeating yourself over what God wants. What’s up with that? Do you actually believe in that Revelation nonsense that was pounded in your head since you were a kid?
The world looks bad if your filters are set to only look at the bad. Set your filters to see love and then relax. If we fail again as a species, we will die and rise again as another life form.
All this save the world stuff isn’t getting you any brownie points with the religious peoples in the world. I learned that there are three ways to be touched by God. The first is religion, the second is spirituality and the third is connection; connection is the highest form of mastery.
Which are you Neale?
First let me say, my friend, that I am not trying to “earn any brownie points with the religious people in the world.” If I were, I would hardly have offered the world a book of my personal conversations with God.
Second, and most important, I want to respond to your suggestion to me. You have said: “Set your filters to see love and then relax.” My response is a series of questions: Is this what Moses did? Is this what Jesus did? Is this what Muhammad did?
As Mewabe pointed to in his own response to your posted Commnet, is this what you would have had Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. do? After all, he was a man of the cloth, a minister. What business did he have poking his nose into the politics of his day?
And what about Saint Elizabeth of Portugal? Was she “setting her filters to see love, and then relaxing” when twice in the 14th Century she placed herself in the middle of a battlefield between opposing armies, both times stopping a war and causing terms of peace to be arranged?
Is this the kind of “relaxing” you have in mind, Blake? Or is there a place in the lives of Spiritual Messengers to be spiritual activists such as those above? Can those with a deeply spiritual inclination see the perfection of all the conditions around them—as a perfect Contextual Field in which to seek to create the next highest version of Perfection, inviting everyone to a new level in the expression of Divinity?
It is true that, as you say, “The world looks bad if your filters are set to only look at the bad.” But what if you see a circumstance as neither “good” or “bad,” but simply “what is” — and then merely choose to change “what is” so that it more closely represents Who You Are now? Is that not the whole purpose of life, and the entire Agenda of the Soul? If not, what is?
If we pass by an alley in which we see a person being attacked and crying for help, should we simply walk on as we “set our filters to see love, and relax?”
What say ye, Blake?
In a statement of enormous clarity, God has revealed to humanity the cause of all of its dysfunction.
“All behaviors are created by beliefs,” God said in the book The New Revelations. Even “automatic reactions” are based on what you believe is occurring, is about to occur, or could occur, He said. All behaviors are sponsored by beliefs.
“You cannot make a long-term change in behaviors without addressing the beliefs that underlie them,” God said, and then repeated the statement, because the brevity of that statement belies its importance. You cannot make a long-term change in behaviors without addressing the beliefs that underlie them.
Then God offered a fascinating insight into world events in the 21st Century. “Those societies that are now causing, and that have historically caused, the most upheaval in your world are those societies that have focused on beliefs,” She said.
“Most humans try to change things by focusing on behaviors. They keep thinking they can make things better by doing something. So, everyone is running around trying to figure out what they can do. The focus is on doing something, rather than on believing something.
“But radical forces within your societies have always sought to change things by using the power of thought, not action, for they know that thought produces action. Get a person thinking a certain way and you can get a person to act a certain way. It is not easily done the other way around.”
God offered killing as an example. You can rarely get a person to go out and kill another person simply by telling him to do so, the Deity said. You have to give him a reason. And “reason” exists only in thought. And thought is always based in Belief. So, if you want to get one person to kill another, the fastest way to do that is to give him a belief that supports the action, and can sponsor it.
One such belief, God said, might be that killing is what God wants, that it is doing the Will of God, and that one will be rewarded in heaven for doing it.
“That could be a very powerful belief, a very powerful incentive. And so, while most of the world is seeking to bring about change by telling people what to DO, those who truly know how to motivate people are bringing about change by telling people what to believe. Do you get it?”
God’s statement concluded with this observation: “Your world is facing enormous problems right now, and you must solve the problems at the level of belief. You cannot solve the problems at the level of behavior. Seek to change beliefs, not behaviors. After you change a belief, the behavior will change by itself. You can take whatever action you want to take to alter someone else’s behavior or to stop it, but unless you alter the beliefs that produced such behavior, you will alter nothing and stop nothing.
God ends chapter 18 of CWG book 3 saying:
“Your Grandest ideas are as yet unexpressed, and your grandest vision unlived.
But wait! Look! Notice!! The days of your blossoming are at hand. The stalk has grown strong, and the petals are soon to open. And I tell you this: The beauty and the fragrance of your flowering shall fill the land, and you shall yet have your place in the Garden of the Gods.”
I’d like to lighten things up a bit today. No complaining. No calling people out.
Today I would like to compliment humanity! I’d like to take notice of what we are doing right…what is actually working!
Of course, the largest thing to point out is that there are so many of us having the conversations that could change our world! We are actively talking about spirituality in politics, we are talking about the environment and its economic and social impact. And we are doing more than talking. We are actually deciding that we are the ones who can do something about what we see.
We are doing things large and small. People like Marianne Williamson are moving from their comfort zones and entering the political fray. Housewives like me are moving out of the house and onto the blogosphere and into the streets and honoring our hippy heritage! We are turning off lights, installing water efficient toilets, walking, biking, driving fuel efficient cars. We are taking care of our bodies. I, personally, have not used shampoo (baking soda and water only!) for over a year; I do not drink soda, I have gone to a naturopath to lower my blood pressure instead of using drugs. We are recycling and re-using. We are noticing what the human impact is having on creatures large and small, and all of nature.
In other words, we are walking the walk, not just talking the talk. We are Being the change we wish to see…or at least more and more are doing so…and more than we know are doing so.
I know it may seem as though nothing we do will make any difference in the total scheme of things…but that would be a wrong thought. Everything we do makes a difference. There is no separating one another from what we do. There is no one whose effort, no matter how seemingly small, is less than. For, just as the ocean is made up of billions of individual drops of water, so, too, is global change made up of billions of small changes. Our living the change is going to demonstrate, to all who see, our understanding of who we are, and our Oneness, and invite them to examine a different way. Let’s not be arrogant and fall into the trap of thinking our way is the only way, but be open to all ideas.
I am patting us all on the head for starting the dialog, because all great change begins with small conversations, as Neale has pointed out in his most eloquent way. I am giving us all the thumbs up for doing our small part…for creating our places in the Garden of the Gods.
Today I leave you with a little poem that I wrote:
T.
DROP
A pool of deep,black,
Water,
Light glowing upon the
Surface,
Illuminating the endless
Circles,
Created by the single
Drop.
Do you see it?
Asked
God.
I said,
Yes.
Then, said
God,
Be
The
Drop.
~Therese
(Therese Wilson is a published poet, and is the administrator of, and Spiritual Helper at, the global website at www.cwghelpingoutreach.com She may be contacted at: Therese@TheGlobalConversation.com.)
