EDITOR’S NOTE: I am excited to be able to use this space on the Internet as a place in which we can join together to ignite a worldwide exploration of some of the most revolutionary theological ideas to come along in a long time.

The ideas I intend to use this space for in the immediate future are the ideas found in GOD’S MESSAGE TO THE WORLD: You’ve Got Me All Wrong.  I believe this new book (published last October by Rainbow Ridge Books) places before our species some of the most important “What if” questions that could be contemplated by contemporary society.

The questions are important because they invite us to ponder some of the most self-damaging ideas about God ever embraced by our species.  For example, the statement that,,,
God is vengeful and God’s love can turn to wrath

This is an extension of an earlier belief. Much of the world believes in a God who is a male super-being, who demands obedience, who says we are imperfect because we have not been obedient, and who tells us that in order for us to be in God’s good graces (and thus, eligible for admission into heaven), we must meet certain very specific requirements— and whose love turns to wrath if those requirements are not met.

A search of many of the holy books of the human species produces countless references to “the wrath of God” in many of the world’s religious traditions.

In the Jewish tradition we are told at Nahum 1:2 that “Adonai is a jealous and vengeful God. Adonai avenges; he knows how to be angry. Adonai takes vengeance on his foes and stores up wrath for his enemies.”

In the Christian tradition we are told in John 3:35-36 that, “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.”

In the Islamic traditions we are told at Verse 005:060 about: “. . . those whom Allah has cursed, those upon whom fell the wrath of Allah, those whom Allah turned into monkeys and pigs, and the devotees of the arrogant and the evil. Their plight is the worst; they are the farthest away from the straight path.”

In the Mormon tradition we are told in Mosiah 3:36 of those who “have drunk out of the cup of the wrath of God, which justice could no more deny unto them than it could deny that Adam should fall because of his partaking of the forbidden fruit; therefore, mercy could have claim on them no more forever.”

Things are considered pretty serious when scriptures that we call holy tell us of a Deity that we call merciless. Small wonder that people throughout history have been nervous about offending God. Even Moses was known to have said in a prayer to God: “. . . we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled.” (Psalm 90:7)

Indeed, we are. This idea of God’s merciless anger permeates human considerations of The Divine, and has done so for centuries.

Now comes The Great What If . . .

What if God has never displayed, and never will express or experience, wrath?

Would it make a difference? Does it matter? In the overall scheme of things, would it have any significant impact in our planetary experience?

Yes. Of course it would. It would allow us to believe in a God whose love is unconditional and is never withdrawn for any reason at all—and certainly not for our beliefs.

This, in turn, would give human beings, at last, an accurate model of the true nature of love, and a wonderful example of how to love one other. Right now many humans use their understanding of how God loves us as their model of how they should love one another.

Accepting the notion that God’s love is unconditional would mean that a display of human wrath for any reason could no longer rely for its justification on the teaching that God has brought His wrath to bear on humanity time and time again. (You will recall that the Bible indicates that over two million people were killed at the hand or the command of God.)

At the level of individual life partnerships and romantic relationships, a new way of loving each other would have a demonstrable basis if humans were not told over and over again about God’s wrath. That new basis would be God’s unconditional love. What a model we would finally have! Someone who loves us no matter what.

Fear, too, would leave the human heart forever if we thought that the experience of love—whether the love of another human being or the love of God—was forever.

If we thought that God had no wrath, little children could go to bed no longer having to worry about what will happen if they don’t live until morning. The prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray to God my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray to God my soul to take . . .” could be changed to: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I know that God my soul will keep. And if I die before I wake, I know that God my soul will take.”

If we thought that God expresses no wrath, billions of adults could go to bed no longer feeling the urge to beg Mary, the mother of Jesus, to “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

Thus, Supplication Theology would be replaced by Application Theology.

Supplication Theology is a theology in which we are placed in the position of a supplicant, continually asking God, begging God, entreating with God for one thing or another.

Application Theology is a theology in which we apply in our lives what we know to be true about our relationship to God: that God lives in us, through us, as us, and that the qualities of divinity are ours to apply in our daily lives, including wisdom, clarity, knowledge, creativity, power, abundance, compassion, patience, understanding, needlessness, peace, and love.

Now here is God’s message to the world:

God has been telling us from the very beginning, and it is becoming more clear to us every day, that humanity’s Ancient Cultural Story about God’s wrath is plainly and simply inaccurate.

It is okay now to remove this ancient teaching from our current story, and stop telling this to ourselves and to our children. The fact is that God has no reason to experience or express wrath. When you are everything, have everything, created everything, experience everything, and can express everything that you wish to express, what can there be to be filled with rage about?
 When you want nothing, need nothing, require nothing, demand nothing, and command nothing, what can there be for you to feel betrayed about?

Finally, when there is nothing else in existence except You, who is there for you to be rageful with? Whom shall you punish? Shall the right hand slap the left?

The idea of a wrathful God rests on a notion that God cares what you do or don’t do as one of billions of creatures in one of billions of moments on one of billions of planets in one of billions of sectors of a cosmos that is one billion trillion times the size of your home star. And not only that God cares, but that God cares so much as to be deeply wounded and grievously offended if your behavior does not live up to what is expected—nay, commanded—of you.

That would be akin to saying that you are concerned with one grain of sand out of all the grains of sand on all the beaches in all the world. You may love the sand and all its grains because they are part of the wonder and beauty of all the world’s beaches, but you certainly wouldn’t be filled with wrath if one of those grains was not reflecting the sunlight the way it was designed to. And you certainly wouldn’t be furious if you knew that this was but a temporary condition in any event, lasting no more than a nanosecond in the eternal span of that grain of sand’s existence.

The idea of a wrathful God not only depends upon our acceptance of the thought that God has a preference in the matter of our behaviors, but also on the notion that all of our behaviors and all of their consequences have not already taken place.

A wrathful deity can only be considered within totally artificial constructs of space and time. Yet in the universal Here/Now, God cannot become wrathful based on something that has just happened, but would have to always be wrathful based on all the things with which God is said to disagree, since everything that has ever happened, is happening now, and ever will happen is occurring simultaneously in the eternal and singular moment of Evernow.

It is true that God is always being something in Evernow, but “wrath” is not it. God is Love, eternal and unchanging.

Not wrath. Love.
Love unconditional.
The Essential Essence. The Prime Force. The Pure Energy. The Singular Element. The Only Thing There Is.


To gravitate toward this new and revolutionary holding of the Divine Reality and the Deity experience, one would have to release oneself from the notion that God is a creature of moods, whose temperament depends on what is happening at a particular time on a particular day in a particular life in a particular place on a particular planet in a particular solar system of a particular galaxy within a particular quadrant of a particular universe.
To help you move to this new and revolutionary holding, remember this always:

God is Love, eternal and unchanging. Not wrath. Love. Love unconditional.

There is a third notion we must deal with. It is the stubborn belief that there is something called “divine justice,” which can be violated, or that divine perfection can somehow be irrevocably marred, by a single event in the single life of . . . here we go again . . . a single being on a single planet in a single solar system of a single galaxy within a single quadrant of a single universe.

We are told by some religions that it is this violation or marring that God finds intolerable and unacceptable, and which must therefore be rectified and reconciled. Yet God tells us (as opposed to what religions tell us) that perfection can’t be marred, because perfection is the natural state of things and the everlasting condition and reality.

In truth, no one thing is better than another, but all things are simply what they are: reflections of a perfectly functioning universe in a perfectly demonstrating manifestation of a perfectly existing reality, one thing leading inexorably to another in a never-ending process called evolution.

How can any and every reality be perfect? Simple. If no one and nothing requires anything or something other than What Is. And this is the natural state of things.

In Ultimate Reality that which is divine requires and desires nothing other than What Is, for the very good reason that What Is is the sum total of all possibilities, all events, all circumstances, all conditions, all experiences, and all expressions of life in any and all forms, all at once.

A rainy day is no less perfect than a sunny day, for it is the rainy day that makes the glory of the sunny day joyful, and the heat of the sunny day that makes the cooling of the rainy day welcome.

It is the mistake on her multiplication tables at age nine that produces the mathematical genius teaching advanced calculus at MIT at age thirty-four.

And yes, it is even the horror of the worst of human experiences that has given birth to the best of our species’ expressions as we evolve across the decades, centuries, and millennia.

Across the span of all existence, one circumstance or event produces, eventually, an awareness that authors another circumstance or event, and the master lives life without judgment or condemnation of that process, nor of any person or occurrence that is part of it, but rather, sees the grander mosaic.

“Justice” and “perfection” are human constructions created within the context of relative values. The idea of divine justice depends upon a preceding idea that some things are “right” and some things are “wrong” in the mind of God. Yet such an idea does not exist in the realm of the spiritual, which is also a realm of the Absolute, where everything is experi- enced Here/Now, and the only energy is Absolute Love.

Every spiritual master knows this, which is why all spiritual masters have said, each in their own way: Judge not, and neither condemn. You have already heard this message before here—and you will hear it again before these proceedings are concluded—for it rests at the heart of everything the human race is invited to embrace in its new understanding of God.

The question is, does “judge not, and neither condemn” apply as well to God?

The answer that most religionists have given us is, no. Humans are not to judge, but God is expected to judge.

Yet is this how everything is really supposed to work? And if so, why? How did it get to be this way?

EDITOR’S NOTE: I am excited to be able to use this space on the Internet as a place in which we can join together to ignite a worldwide exploration of some of the most revolutionary theological ideas to come along in a long time.

The ideas I intend to use this space for in the immediate future are the ideas found in GOD’S MESSAGE TO THE WORLD: You’ve Got Me All Wrong.  I believe this new book (published last October by Rainbow Ridge Books) places before our species some of the most important “What if” questions that could be contemplated by contemporary society.

The questions are important because they invite us to ponder some of the most self-damaging ideas about God ever embraced by our species.  For example…

. . . the belief that God who is a male super-being who demands obedience, who says we are imperfect because we have not been obedient, and who tells us that in order for us to be in God’s good graces (and thus, eligible for admission into heaven), we must meet certain requirements.

Among those requirements are that we believe in God in a certain way, and worship God in a particular fashion.

What this comes down to is that we must belong to a specific religion—or at least, hold true to its tenets.

The thought that we even need to be in a good place with God arises out of the idea we explored above: that only absolute purity and total perfection is allowable or present in heaven, and that this probably does not describe us—so we’d better do something about it.

This thought, in turn, emerges from the other thought explored earlier: that we entered this world in a state of impurity, branded at birth with Original Sin, Inherited Imperfection, or Ancestral Guilt, and that we all have in any event offended God with our own sins during our own lives.

And this thought surfaces from a deeply-held belief that we can sin, and that God can be offended.

From these congealed notions is born a deep concern in the hearts of many people that we are not in God’s good graces now. And so we look, individually and as a collective, for ways in which we can get into God’s good graces—before it is too late.

The popularity of religions is based on this yearning, and on their promises that they can produce this result.

Religions, we are told, are our passports into heaven. All we have to do is follow their mandates, live according to their guidelines, obey their rules, and respond affirmatively to their injunctions.

Dramatically increasing the stakes in all this is the statement of some denominations that their religion offers the only way to achieve what is called “salvation.”

We are told that if we do not believe what they teach, if we do not embrace their doctrine, if we do not accept their canon, creed, and credo as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, we are condemned by God to everlasting damnation.

There is no question about this among the faithful within those denominations: We must believe in God and worship God in a certain and particular way or our eternal soul is eternally doomed.

*         *        *

Now comes The Great What If . . .What if God does not need to be worshipped, and does not need to have humans believe in God in any certain way? What if God does not need human beings to believe in God at all?

Would it make a difference? Does it matter? In the overall scheme of things, would it have any significant impact in our planetary experience?

Yes, of course it would. If we let go of the thought that one way is the only way to worship God and get to heaven, the spiritual self-righteousness that appears deeply embedded in humanity’s experience of God would virtually disappear. And absent that self-righteousness, all of the religious wars and inter-denominational struggles, the ruthless and senseless killing that has soiled the pages of human history for millennia, would likewise ultimately disappear.

If we felt that we didn’t even need to believe in God for God to welcome us back Home, we could then enter into whatever belief in God we might develop—if, indeed, we chose to embrace such a belief at all—and do so as an expression of pure joy and absolute wonderment, rather than an outgrowth of angst or a product of trepidation. A loss of fear about what will happen if we do not profess a belief in God would spell the end of all fear-based religions.

Indeed, as the love-me-or-else threat was taken out of our experience of God, our entire relationship with The Divine would shift dramatically, putting us into a genuine friendship with God in which our worried trembling would be replaced by our empowerment.

*         *         *

On another level, if we held the thought that God has no need for our worship, our species would stop seeing the whole notion of “worship” as a good thing, but would view it, accurately, as the kind of subjugating human activity that denies our own divinely bestowed magnificence—to say nothing of our own presence in that which we say we adore.

This elevating of the human self to its rightful place of awesome inclusion in the expression that is God would reshape humanity’s basic identity, altering our species’ understanding and expression of itself. And it would do this so completely as to remove and eliminate selfish, hurtful, malicious, or malevolent behavior from the human experience forever. We would suddenly know who we really are, and who everyone else is, and we would treat ourselves and everyone else much differently.

This is, in fact, what has occurred within the civilizations of all highly evolved beings in the universe. The effect that such a shift in beliefs would have on the planet would be to, at last, civilize civilization.

Now, here is GOD’S MESSAGE TO OUR WORLD…

God has been telling us from the very beginning, and it is becoming more clear to us every day, that humanity’s Ancient Cultural Story about God demanding that we worship, believe in, and approach God in a certain and particular way is plainly and simply inaccurate.

It is okay now to remove this ancient teaching from our current story, and to stop telling this to ourselves and to our children.

God does not care what religion we belong to (or whether we belong to any religion at all). Religions are the inventions and conventions of humanity.

God doesn’t care what we believe about God (or whether we believe in God at all). Beliefs are the inventions and conventions of humanity.

God doesn’t look to us to provide God with something that God needs (because God needs nothing at all). Needs are the inventions and conventions of humanity.

The need to be worshipped (to say nothing of the command to be loved) could only be the characteristic of an insecure, unfulfilled, imperious, tyrannical ruler—which cannot possibly describe the God of this universe.

The need to be approached in a single and specific way, making every other approach (no matter how sincere the motive, no matter how pure the intent, no matter how arduous the effort) not only insufficient, but a cause for judgment, condemnation , and damnation, could only be the characteristic of a totally unreasonable, utterly intolerant, preposterously hypersensitive, unbelievably small-minded, and insanely draconian despot—which cannot possibly describe the God of this universe.

*         *         *

The idea that God demands to be loved defies all reason and logic. Yet it is held by many, for it is written, in what has been labeled as The Greatest Commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”

So let it be said clearly and without equivocation: The God of this universe—by virtue of being God—needs or requires the adulation of no one. As well, the God of this universe—by virtue of being God—has nothing to lose by welcoming any soul who arrives at divinity by any path, and is nothing but overjoyed when any soul has found its way back Home by realizing, accepting, and assuming its true identity.

The idea that God rejects everyone except those who come to God by one singular and particular path is simply mistaken. It defies all rational thought and directly contradicts the definition of Love.

The idea that God rejects everyone except those who come to God by one singular and particular path is simply mistaken.

The good news is that our Deity is not the God of the brand name.

God’s love, God’s acceptance, and God’s joy in us is not dependent upon what words we say in prayer, what name we invoke in supplication, or what faith we embrace in hopefulness.

In the eyes of God a Jew is as good as a Christian, a Christian is as good as a Muslim, a Muslim is as good as a Buddhist, a Buddhist is as good as a Mormon, a Mormon is as good as a Bahá’í, and an atheist is as good as all of the above.

That Which Is is That Which Is, and neither its Isness, nor its joy and bliss in being the Isness, is dependent upon any particular expression in any particular way of any particular part of the Isness.

*         *         *

Let us go even further. It is not even necessary for human beings to have any belief that there is a God in order for God’s blessings to flow. The flowing of God’s blessings is God’s greatest joy, and it is a process that is uninterrupted and eternal. It has nothing whatsoever to do with our love for God, and everything to do with God’s love for us.

Again, this may be the toughest concept for human beings to accept. The largest number of us just can’t seem to embrace the notion that divine love flows freely to all, without exception, requirement, or condition of any kind.

Or, in a remarkable inversion, many declare that God’s love does flow freely to all, and that God’s condemnation and punishment of His subjects for not believing in God, or for any wrongdoing, is a demonstration of His love.

It is only through such convoluted theological architecture that the idea of a God kind and good can be constructed and preserved—although it is questionable if such preservation has been achieved at the level that those who have constructed this theology might have wished. It seems far more evidentiary that the idea of a God kind and good has been simply forfeited by religion, and that this is the chief reason for the rejection, by millions, of the idea of any sort of God at all.

This is one of the greatest sorrows to have befallen the human race, for it has robbed so many members of the species of their greatest resource, therefore crippling the species itself immeasurably.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I am excited to be able to use this space on the Internet as a place in which we can join together to ignite a worldwide exploration of some of the most revolutionary theological ideas to come along in a long time.

The ideas I intend to use this space to explore in the immediate future are the ideas found in GOD’S MESSAGE TO THE WORLD: You’ve Got Me All Wrong.  I believe this book places before our species some of the most important “What if” questions that could be contemplated by contemporary society.

My most recent entry in this column produced an interesting post in the Comment Section below, which in turn prompted an exchange between that poster, Patrick Gannon, and myself, which I would like to highlight here by re-publishing it, inviting each of you to offer your response to its central question:

IF A ONE BELIEF SYSTEM REPLACES ANOTHER, AND THE NEW BELIEFS ARE DEMONSTRABLY MORE BENEFICIAL THAN THE OLD, SHOULD THE NEW BELIEFS NEVERTHELESS BE REJECTED OUT OF HAND BECAUSE THEY ARE ‘BELIEFS’?

I invite you to read the exchange below and offer your observations in the Comment Section.
============================================

PATRICK GANNON WRITES: Neale, can you explain these lines: “Who God Is,” “What God Wants from Us,” and “You’ve Got Me All Wrong”?

[CERTAINLY. I WILL RESPOND TO YOU RIGHT HERE!]

At times (but infrequently) you describe God as an energy, a force, a conscious intelligence, etc. [Patrick, the whole of the Conversations with God series of books offers you the description of God that you seek. Have you read those books?] …but most of the time you describe God as a person, a being, a superhuman with a number of human characteristics. [it is clear to me that you are not reading my material very closely. GOD’S MESSAGE TO THE WORLD: You’ve Got Me All Wrong makes just the opposite assertion, Patrick. It says, clearly and without any room for doubt, that God is NOT a ‘superhuman being’. The CWG cosmology also makes it clear that the Essential Essence which we call “God” can and does take any form which will help any of Its creations know and experience Divinity. In other words, God can appear, and be experienced in our lives, as a protective and loving Father or Mother, as a dear friend or brother or sister on the journey, as a wise counselor and guide…indeed, in any form that we wish, including the form of pure energy, placed at our disposal to be used to produce consistent and predictable results. God is all of this, and more. There is nothing that God is not, or cannot be. The very effort to define God brings the limitations of our human Mind to the process of experiencing God’s unlimited Self.]

You’ve got “me” all wrong: “me” is a term humans use to refer to themselves. Use of the word “who” implies a being, a person. What God “wants” implies that God has wants; and yet you say repeatedly that God has no needs or wants…. Hmm, maybe you say God has no needs, only wants, I don’t recall – but the question still arises – why would a God have wants?  [Now it is really clear to me that you have not absorbed the CWG messages. And that is perfectly okay. You are not ‘required’ to. But if you are going to question me about what I have written and said, you would benefit from knowing more thoroughly what that is. The book What God Wants explains in detail exactly what it is that God wants. Please read Chapter 13 carefully and fully.] As you have said yourself, a “want” is an expression of lack – of not having something. How can “God” lack anything? [Of course, God in Its aggregate “lacks” nothing — for the simple reason that God IS everything It could possible want or lack. All of this is fully explained in the CWG writings. Individuated aspects of Divinity, having forgotten who they really are, can imagine themselves to need, want, or lack something, but The Wholeness that is God cannot and does not. I am not sure what makes you think that It does.]

I understand that humans ‘animate’ God – this has been done with elements of nature, the sun, the stars the constellations, etc. for eons; but once you do this, it all becomes religious, and New Age God is just the basis for another religion as best I can tell, given that She is constantly referred to as a personal being. As such, the legacy religions are going to fiercely resist any New Age Religion. It’s only when the legacy religions are discredited as the Romans eventually discredited the Pagan Gods, before the new religion can fully replace the old…. and then the question remains, will we really be any better off?  [This is a fair and legitimate question. Let me answer it this way. First of all, no one who has read CWG could fail to miss its repeated — and I mean, endlessly repeated — statements that CWG is not a ‘religion.’ Its chief point is that the Authority of God rests within you. Its main message is: “We are All One. Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.” But if you are asking me a direct question — Do I think the world would be better off embracing some of the foundational notions of the explorations in CWG than it is today, my answer would be a flat ‘yes, without question.’] Was the condition of mankind improved when pagan gods were replaced by Christianity? It hardly seems so, and the ideals expressed by Jesus weren’t all that different from the ideals expressed by New Age God. [Well, Patrick, there are about 1.5 billion people who would disagree with you on that last statement. As least, the ideals that people SAY were expressed by Jesus are in many, many cases vastly different from the ideals expressed by Tomorrow’ God.]

Your new book appears to be largely about discrediting the old religions, so it’s hard not to view this as part of an ongoing process to establish a new religion to replace the old,  [It seems to me that it should not be ‘hard’ to avoid doing that at all. All you have to do is thoroughly read the CWG material, which makes it abundantly clear that establishing a NEW religion is the LAST thing that is being suggested, recommended, desired, or contemplated. Rather, what is being offered is an invitation to create a New Cultural Story — not the same thing as a ‘religion’ at all — providing humanity an opportunity to reconfigure its relationship with life, with the Earth, with what some people call ‘God,’ and with each other, such that a ‘religion’ is not even necessary.] ….and if the pattern holds true, in due course it will have its own orthodoxy, its own dogma, its own “correct” set of beliefs, and we’ll be right back where we started. Or so it seems to me. [Even if that were true…I mean, even if it rolled out that way and it DID produce, eventually, its own orthodoxy, its own dogma, its own “correct” set of beliefs, what makes you conclude that this would, ipso facto, put us right back where we started? I can’t imagine that the new beliefs — should they arise as an actual “orthodoxy” — would not be more beneficial than the old. We are talking here about a Civil Rights Movement for the Soul, freeing humanity at last from the oppression of its present and ancient beliefs in a violent, angry, and vindictive God. Even if CWG DOES turn into a ‘dogma’ or a ‘belief,’ how could not that be an improvement over our present beliefs? Or is it your assertion that “beliefs”, in and of themselves, are somehow evil, or “no good,” and that even if it is a “belief system” that dramatically improves behaviors, it should be automatically rejected simply because it IS a “belief system”? Is that your assertion?]