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.
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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?]
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