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 just four months ago 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…one teaching about The Divine—perhaps the one most often reflected in the doctrine of many religions—describes God as a superhuman male being, with human characteristics and proclivities (anger, love, being judgmental, etc.), but with wisdom, power, and abilities far beyond human capacity, or even human understanding.

In some ancient spiritual traditions pre-dating organized religions, The Divine was portrayed as a feminine goddess. And while this portrayal has been brought forward and is held as true even today in certain spiritual movements, the rendition of a male Deity outlined in the paragraph above has been by far the most prevalent.

Now comes The Great What If . . .

What if God is neither male nor female—and not even a human-like Super Being 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. First, it would pull the underpinning from a story prevalent across the globe—which is the story of male supremacy.

It is no coincidence that most major religions are still run by men. It is no coincidence that the world’s largest religion and one of the world’s fasted growing religions, still did not allow women in their priesthood as of 2014. It is no coincidence that—minor deviations in this regard notwithstanding—men still pretty much rule the corporate and financial world. It is no coincidence that to this day men continue to dominate the global political scene.

It is no coincidence that even in medicine, science, and academia men continue to vastly outnumber women in places of highest influence, impact, and authority. And it is no coincidence that even where women rise to the level of men in some of society’s institutions, they are even now paid less than their male counterparts far too often, although doing the same work.

If we thought that God was not a male, our whole idea of power, might, and glory would be more widely considered to be feminine, as well as masculine, traits. Our depictions of God would not be exclusively of a man with flowing white hair and a flowing white beard in a flowing white robe. Imagine an illustrated Bible with a picture of a female Goddess in it. What would that tell our children?

And what if we thought that God was not even a person? What if we relinquished the idea of God as a male or a female? What if we accepted as truth the idea that God is not a larger version of human beings at all; not a “person” in any sense of the word? Would that change things in our global expression of spirituality, in our day-to-day experience of religion?

It surely would. It would alter the Father/Child interactions of most of the human beings who believe in God. It would profoundly affect our understanding of our true relationship with divinity.

It would shift our whole notion of how to get what we want from God (if, indeed, we would then think that such a thing was even possible), and it would alter our whole idea of what, if anything, God wants or needs, demands or commands, requires or requests. And that would change, in one fell swoop, so much human behavior that our species might have a difficult time recognizing itself.

We would become, in short, a different species in terms of not only our deportment, but our objectives and goals, our measures of “success,” our ways of “praying” and interacting with God, and our ideas about where and how we fit into the overall scheme of things.

The search would then begin all over again among the largest number of people (as opposed to the tiny minority who have already begun this process) to redefine God and overhaul our entire approach to interactions with divinity.

Perhaps it is because this kind of massive overhaul of such a critical part of our human experience feels so overwhelming that most of us avoid this new search altogether and remain “stuck” in the same old place forever regarding our understanding of Deity.

Whatever the reason, it is questionable if we are doing ourselves any good hanging out with ideas about God that are thousands of years old.

Now comes 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 being a superhuman male 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 is obviously (or perhaps not so obviously, to some) not a Big Guy in the Sky who sits on a throne and oversees humanity’s countless daily doings, approving some and disapproving others; who hears countless prayers, granting some and denying others; who judges countless souls at their death, rewarding some and punishing others.

God is neither a male nor a female with the appearance, the qualities and the proclivities of humans, yet with supernatural characteristics, powers and abilities. Such an idea of God is simplistic in the extreme.

What, then, is God? Some say this is impossible to know. That is not true. God can be known, and God can be experienced. God communicates directly with us, as the founders of our religions have shown, and we can communicate directly with God—as every religion that believes in the power of prayer declares.

God can be known, and God can be experienced.

Here, then, is what God has communicated, and continues to communicate, to humanity about divinity: God is an Essential Essence that permeates everything, the Prime Source of unlimited intelligence and the Prime Force of unlimited creation.

God is at once both The Creator and The Created, a Pure Energy that impacts upon Itself. It is First Cause. It is Every Effect. It is the seat of all wisdom, the wellspring of all desire, the fountainhead of all power, and the origin of all reality.

It is, in a single word, Love.

Its wisdom is activated, Its desire is fulfilled, Its power is evinced, and Its reality is fully, grandly, and gloriously made manifest through the experience and the expression of Love.

Does this Essential Essence we call “God” have a personality?

Yes.

God’s greatness and God’s magnificence is God’s formlessness. This does not mean, however, that God is not a “personality” to whom we may pray and with whom we may interact. It means, in fact, exactly the opposite.

It is God’s essential formlessness that allows God to assume any shape and any form in any moment that it serves the ends of Love for God to assume.

Thus, God can take on the energy of a father’s figure, a mother’s comfort, a friend’s loyalty, a confessor’s compassion, a peacemaker’s courage, a survivor’s strength, a teacher’s patience, a compatriot’s camaraderie, a lover’s intimacy, and a beloved’s constancy.

So we see that the fact that God is not, at Its basis, a bigger-than-life human being does not mean that we no longer have anyone to pray to, or to intercede with, or to form a personal relationship with. Quite to the contrary. God can be all things to all people, and if we want a personal God we can pray to, a parent-like God we can ask advice of, or a powerful God we can intercede with, God can and will fill all of those roles for us.

God is all things to all people because God is all things in all people.

I believe God is life itself.

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 just four months ago 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—as well as some of the most helpful and uplifting ideas we can conjure in response to those damaging ones.

For example, what if what Mewabe posted here recently (“The problem is not so much whether or not one believes in a creator God, but whether a person LOVES, APPRECIATES, RESPECTS and HONORS life.”) is the key to it all?

I was especially intrigued by the entry that followed Mewabe’s post, from Hempwise. I think this person captured our circumstance in the world today perfectly.

In case you missed it in the previous discussion here, Hempwise said:

“Yes, seeing life as Prime importance, value and being responsible for it all is the obvious solution.

“Just this morning I was listening to the radio (and) a Syrian lady spoke about her three sons. Her youngest was 13 and (she described) why she had to send him to fight for Isis. She said she had no choice in the matter. It was all about Honor.

“So entrenched in her cultural story she was (that) her own thoughts were…of her religion and their beliefs. Even sending her children to war to join their cousins and (meet) probable death was of higher importance than honoring life and sustaining that. This is so very sad.

“The Middle East is on a collision with self-annihilation if the young are continually oppressed by their religious schools, and indoctrinated by the interpretation of old books.

“Religion and governments have to move aside when it comes education. (They are filled with) control freaks seeking to limit wisdom and critical thinking in favor of righteousness and robot mentality.

“The task is mammoth: to change cultural understandings that never get challenged.

“The culture from which we emerge is causing the demise of the culture.”

I agree with virtually every word that Hempwise wrote there. I have been saying for years, after being told in very direct terms in the Conversations with God dialogue, that what humanity would benefit the most from right now is the writing of a New Cultural Story. Our species would be enormously helped by writing, and them telling ourselves and our children, a new story about God, about Life, about Who We Are and Why We Are Here, about our true relationship to each other, about the purpose of Life Itself, about how life functions, about the fact that beliefs create behaviors, and about how life is experienced by the Highly Evolved Beings of the Universe.

The challenge is that we cannot, as a species, come to an agreement on what that New Story is. So we keep telling our Old Story over and over and over again — even though it is the Old Story that is killing us.

The question is: Where do we begin as we seek to craft our New Story? I think one place to start might be to at least give credence to the claim that our Old Story is simply not accurate. That is the point, that is the thrust, of GOD’S MESSAGE TO THE WORLD: You’ve God Me All Wrong.

I do hope you will all read it, not because I wish you to convert you to my idea, but because I wish to propose it as a starting point for a vital new discussion about all of Humanity’s Cultural Story, and where we might all begin in co-authoring a new version of it.

We have to start somewhere. And so here, in the weeks ahead, I will continue to present for review and discussion the points made in this most recent text based on the messages in Conversations with God.

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 just four months ago 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, after the idea that God is to be feared, I believe that the second most damaging notion that some humans hold about God is the thought that God might not even exist.

Why this is damaging is that it stops all atheists and many agnostics from using God’s power, even as the whole of humanity seeks to work collaboratively to create the life we all say we want for everyone on this planet.

If you see a sign on your front door from the city that the electricity is off in your house, you will not bother turning on a lamp, having concluded that there’s no point in doing so. You will then be in the dark. The power that’s flowing will be useless to you because you do not believe that it is flowing. You will not even test it, because you’ve been told by someone in authority that the power is out.

It is estimated that right now over 10 percent of the world population thinks that the power is out. That’s roughly the number of people who categorize themselves as non-religious, with 2 percent actually declaring atheism. And of the vast majority who say that they do believe in God, an enormous number nevertheless have occasional—and sometimes lifelong—doubts about whether the God in whom they believe actually exists.

Now comes The Great What If . . .

What if it is true, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God exists?

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. If the entire world believed without question that a Higher Power exists, out of which life on the earth emerged, it would create a universally accepted context, a sacred or theological basis, for humanity’s collective formulation of fundamental values.

Right now the values guiding the behavior of our species are not collective or uniform. They are scattered all over the place.

One person may believe that abandoning one’s religion should be punishable by death, while another person may believe that the person who put another person to death for abandoning a religion should be put to death—to use a glaring example brought up by the news account in Chapter 2.

One person may believe that the purpose of life is to live in such a way as to please God and get to heaven, while another person may believe that the purpose of life has nothing to do with pleasing God, even as a third person may believe that there is not even a God to please.

One person may believe that all souls who do not believe in the One True Religion are going to hell, while another person may believe that all souls who seek God with a desire pure and true will avoid going to hell, even as a third person may believe that there is not even a hell to go to, much less a God to send people there.

One person may believe good and evil are defined by God, while another person may believe that God does not view the actions, choices, and decisions of human beings in these terms, even as a third person may believe that there is no Deity at all to apply such labels to human behaviors.

One person may believe that killing people as a punishment for certain crimes, or even as a means of “defending the faith,” is in accordance with God’s Law, while another person may believe that killing people for any reason is not in any way in harmony with God’s Law, even as a third person may believe that there is no such thing as God’s Law, much less a God to announce it.

Without a common belief in the existence of a Deity and a shared understanding of what is true about and for that Deity, we can’t even agree on a reason for living, the purpose of our existence, the experience—if any—that follows death, and the basis for life’s largest decisions (both as an individual and as a society).

I believe that God has been telling us from the very beginning, and I observe that it is becoming more clear to us every day, that the portions of humanity’s Ancient Cultural Story which instill doubt about whether or not there even is a Higher Power in the universe 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 exists.

Make no mistake about it.

God exists.

While there are those who feel that science and spirituality are the antithesis of each other, the greatest scientific mind of our time, Albert Einstein, said: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”

It has been said that when he was asked by David Ben-Gurion (the primary founder and the first prime minister of Israel) whether he believed in God, Einstein—who, of course, uncovered and proposed a world-changing formula about energy and mass—agreed that there must be something behind the energy.

It might be worth, then, highlighting this: Make no mistake about it. God exists.

Albert Einstein also said, “I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own—a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.”

Is this something upon which we can agree? God was not made in the image and likeness of Man.

Who or what, then, is God?

Here is an analogy that may help us answer this ancient question.

As humanity has moved more deeply into the twenty-first century, medical science has learned more and more about what it has called “stem cells.” These are described as undifferentiated biological cells that can differentiate into specialized cells, and can divide to produce more cells of a specialized kind.

If harvested from a human body before they differentiate, they can be “coaxed” in a laboratory into adopting the specialized identity of any cell in the human body. This means that they can regenerate any portion of virtually any organ of the body—from brain cells to lung tissue to heart muscle to the follicles of hair on your head. This has led to a whole new branch of medicine emerging under the loose heading of nanobiotechnology.

The point of bringing all this up here?

If “nature” can do all of this within the vastly limited framework of a single human body, what could one drop of the Primal Force or the Essential Essence do within the unlimited framework of the cosmos?

Are human stem cells showing us something on the micro level that tells us something about life on a macro scale? Could God be, in a sense, the stem cell of the universe, able to differentiate in any one of countless ways?

Consider this: Cosmologists are now telling us that our universe may be—and probably is—just one of an infinite number of such manifestations. In other words, as unfathomably large as we have assumed our universe to be, it may be merely a spec in a universe of universes.

Or, to put it another way, we may live not in a universe, but in a multiverse.

This would make our earth an infinitesimal dot in a solar system that is an infinitesimal dot in a galaxy that is an infinitesimal dot in a quadrant of the cosmos that is an infinitesimal dot in a universe that is an infinitesimal dot in a multiverse that is infinite.

Can we continue to doubt that there is “something” behind, or undergirding, or having given birth to, this magnificent multiverse? Would it not be more logical to assume and conclude that some cause exists behind the effects of the physical realm? And would it be so totally senseless to call this First Cause: “God”?

It is interesting to note that science reports evidence of an extraordinary intelligence present in all of life at the cellular, and even the sub-molecular, level. Life seems to know what it’s doing, and to be doing it deliberately, methodically, consistently, and predictably. Even inconsistency can be predicted! (see Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.)

And then there is the relatively recent understanding of what is known in quantum physics as the observer effect. This states that “nothing that is observed is unaffected by the observer.”

What this adds up to is that there are three elements in the “system” that we call “life”: intelligence, design, and power. It is difficult to look closely at any aspect of life as we observe it—either at the micro level of the sub-molecular world or the macro level of the cosmos—without conceding that the manifestations of physicality are simply too sophisticatedly complex, too tightly interlocked, intermixed, and interwoven, too marvelously and massively intricate and interactive, to have been the result of random chance.

It seems clear that the presence of life’s patterns is neither “accidental” nor “incidental” in the process of life itself, but that the intelligence and power evidenced in the patterns is the force behind that process. Indeed, the Source and the Creator of it.

There has been ignited on this website a small but interesting conversation about the Conversations with God messages and about me, personally, vis-à-vis those messages. In short: Am I treating them as ‘gospel,’ and do I, at some level, wish them to be considered a new religion?

Comments like (and I am paraphrasing here), “Neale quotes CWG as if he were quoting scripture”…..and…..”The last thing we need is a new religion”….and….“Neale speaks of the ‘CWG cosmology,’ and that can be a dangerous trend”…..etc….lead me to believe that perhaps it would be a good time for me to enter this conversation personally.

Let me begin by announcing that I feel very safe in saying that anyone who knows me personally is very clear that I do not consider CWG a new religion, nor would I want it treated as such. Indeed, just the opposite is true. I am hoping that Conversations with God will lead every person back to their own highest indwelling truth.

That does not mean that I do not think CWG has any theological value. Quite to the contrary, I think it may be among the most value contributions to the study of God that has come along in a very, very long time. And I think that what CWG invites us to consider about God could change the world for the better if it opened individuals to aspects of themselves wherein which was found resonance with its messages.

To unravel that rather clunky sentence, I am saying that I believe if the world lived according to, and functionally embraced the messages of, Conversations with God, our planet would be a better place. But to be fair, that is not saying much. Almost anything would be better than the way we are living now.

Nothing on this planet is working. Read that n-o-t-h-i-n-g.

None of the systems we have put into place to create a better life for us all on this planet have produced the outcome for which they were designed.

It’s worse than that. They’ve actually produced exactly the opposite.

Our political systems — created to produce safety and security for the world’s people – have produced nothing but disagreement and disarray.

Our economic systems — created to produce opportunity and sufficiency for all — have produced increasing poverty and massive economic inequality, with 85 of the world’s richest people holding more wealth than 3.5 billion…that’s half the planet’s population…combined.

Our ecological systems — created to help us produce a sustainable lifestyle — have been abused so much that they are now generating environmental disasters right and left.

Our educational systems — created to lift higher and higher the knowledge base of the planet’s population — have produced a drop in global awareness and sensitivity that each year sinks our intellectual common denominator lower and lower. We can’t even remember our own telephone numbers anymore.

Our health care systems — created in hopes of producing a good and long life for an increasingly higher percentage of people — are doing little to eliminate inequality of access to modern medicines and health care services, thus actually providing top level medical services each year to a lower and lower percentage.

Our social systems — created to produce the joy of community and harmony among a divergent population — more and more generate and even encourage discordance, disparity, prejudice, and despair…to say nothing of rampant injustice.

And, most sadly dysfunctional of all, our spiritual systems — created to produce a greater closeness to God, and so, to each other — have produced bitter righteousness, shocking intolerance, widespread anger, deep-seated hatred, and self-justified violence.

What gives here? What’s going on with the human race that it cannot see itself even as it looks at itself? Where is humanity’s blind spot?

Might it be time to ask: “Could there be something we don’t fully understand here about God and about Life, the understanding of which would change everything?”

I lifted the above paragraphs straight out of God’s Message to the World: You’ve got me all wrong. I think they speak directly to the issue now facing humanity, and many of us in our individual lives.

But is Conversations with God “The Answer” (capital T, capital A)? No. Nor does it claim to be. In fact, just the opposite. The dialogue says over and over again that it is not The Answer, but rather, an invitation to ask The Question. And the Question is?

Well, I’ve just stated it above. Here it is again: “Is it possible that there is something we don’t fully understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which would change everything?”

The CWG goes on to offer some ideas about what we humans might not fully understand; some suggestions on some different ways that we might hold our experience of God and of each other and of life itself—its purpose, its function, its very reason for being, and our reason, as humans, for being.

Do I, as an individual, really believe these messages came to me directly from God? Yes. Without equivocation I believe and state that they did—and do (messages from the place of highest wisdom within us continue to come to me every day). Do I believe that I am the only one receiving such messages—or one of the very few? No. I believe that God is talking to all of us, all of the time. I believe the question is not, to whom does God talk? The question is, who listens?

Do I believe that because I experience the messages to have come directly from God that they must and should be treated like holy scripture? And that they must and should be heeded in every way? No. Indeed, the messages themselves (I observe again) say just the opposite, declaring: “Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.”

Am I prone to quoting Conversations with God all over the place, on every topic and subject? Do I say over and over again, in my writing and in my public speaking, things like: “As Conversations with God says….”, and “As CWG tells us…”, and “According to Conversations with God, “ etc., etc.?

Yes. I plead guilty.

Why do I do this if I don’t want its messages and words treated as “scripture,” and don’t hold them that way in my own mind? Because I want the ideas to be considered seriously, to be heard over and over again, to be treated not as “scripture,” but as a place from which to open meaningful discussion and deep exploration. Because I want people everywhere to know what these books are saying, so that people everywhere can decide and declare whether they agree with them, or parts of them, or whether they do not, and thus renew and ignite the living of their lives in a particular way—a way that reflects their own highest thoughts on all the topics that matter dearly to the human soul.

I am grateful to Morton, who has posted here, because he has responded to the CWG books exactly as I had hoped everyone would: with a sure and certain return to, a getting in touch with, their own highest truth, their own deepest conviction, their own absolute determination to live and breathe and have their being in their most loving beliefs about themselves and about the God of Love who is the source of this world. Thank you, Morton, for displaying the courage to speak your mind. So long as we can agree that we disagree peacefully, we have found a way of being which everyone’s understanding of God can accommodate.

It is okay with me if people become disturbed with or about what I have written if they experience it placing themselves in touch with their own highest convictions. Is returning us to ourselves not the true purpose of every form of art? And is not literature that explores the nature of God exactly this?

Is not literature that arouses our senses and engages our mind—even as and if we disagree with it—part of what a true renaissance is all about? I think it’s time for a spiritual renaissance on our planet. Indeed, I think that’s the only thing that will save it. And for me, personally, I know that is the only thing that will make my own life meaningful.

I seek and wish to connect with my own highest thoughts about Life, about God, about who we are, about our right and best relationship with each other, and about how we can live and love and laugh together as I believe we were meant to—and not spend our days and times simply and urgently trying to figure out how to survive…with some of us (far too many of us) actually killing each other in order to meet what we perceive to be our own needs, or as a means of expressing our own deepest truth.

There is so much more I have to say about all of this. Anyone care to engage?