Our purpose, our mission on the Earth right now is very clear. Our opportunity, our invitation, our challenge is to change the world’s mind about God.
To do this, we must first ask ourselves, and then ask the world, a profound question: Is it true that God threw us out of the Kingdom of Heaven, that we are born in sin, and that God will now not let us back into heaven unless we follow certain rules, the obedience to which is the only path allowing us to return?
Is it true, furthermore, that if we do not follow these rules we will not only be denied re-entry into heaven, but will be condemned to unimaginable and everlasting torture in hell?
Is this the God of our understanding? Does it matter?
Yes, it does. Because humanity’s belief in a violent, angry, and vindictive God justifies humanity’s embracing of — and approval of — violent, angry, and vindictive behaviors with each other. So long as we believe that judgment, violence, condemnation and killing are the Ways of God (the Bible tells us that over a million people were killed at the hand or the command of God), we will believe and behave as if judgment, violence, condemnation and killing are appropriate Ways of Humans.
We have based our behaviors on what we understand to be God’s behaviors. That is why God’s Message to the World is so very important at this moment in the evolution of our species.
“Okay, you claim to have talked directly with God, so tell us . . .what is God’s message to the world?”
The speaker was the world-famous host of one of America’s most popular national television morning shows, and he was asking me to answer the biggest question of all time.
“Can you bring it down to a sentence or two?” he added. “We have about thirty seconds.”
My mind raced. How could I say something in thirty seconds that would capture the essence of what Deity wants the world to know? Then, in one quick flash, I heard God’s answer in my head.
I blinked and made an announcement that surprised even me. “Actually, I can bring it down to five words.”
The host raised his eyebrows, showing a nanosecond of disbelief, then deadpanned to the camera: “All right then. Ladies and gentlemen, from a man who says he communes with The Divine, here is God’s message to the world . . . in five words.”
I knew that millions were watching in households around the globe. This was my chance to bring God’s most important communication to more people than I ever imagined I would, or could, in my lifetime. Looking straight into the lens I repeated the words I had just been given to say.
“You’ve got me all wrong.”
If that is true, it re-opens for all of humanity every question, every discussion, we have ever had about the Divine. It my answer is inaccurate, there is nothing further to discuss. The discussion is closed.
This is how most of the religious world would have it. The discussion is closed. God has spoken to us, we are told by virtually every one of the world’s major religions. And God has since stopped talking to us. There have been no further, no new, revelations.
This leaves us lingering for centuries — nay, millennia — with what God is reported to have said to us, which can now never, ever be explored or explained, and certainly never expanded. No one has the right to expand on What God Said. Anyone who does so will be condemned as a blasphemer, an apostate, a heretic.
Yet on page 3 of the 3,000-page dialogue known as Conversations with God this statement appears: “I talk to everyone. All the Time. The question is not to whom do I talk, but who listens?”
Our opportunity now on this Earth is decide whether there could be a shred of truth in that statement. As I said, our invitation is to Change the World’s Mind About God. I believe this is the mission on which God has invited all of us to embark. It is work that will require great courage and deep conviction, for it contradicts every word of every religion in every culture and tradition on the Earth.
We are not children of a lesser God, who would judge us, punish us, and condemn us to everlasting damnation if we do not come to God through the right doorway, on the one and only pathway, by means of a singular means of salvation. Indeed, “salvation” itself is not even necessary, for God did not throw us out of the Kingdom of Heaven, then setting rules for our return.
The Good News is that we were not “born in original sin,” and we do not have to somehow earn our way back into God’s good graces so that we can go home. We are home right now, everlastingly in the arms of our loving creator, eternally embraced by Divinity, and imbued with It both now and even forevermore.
We are, indeed, “about God’s work.”
We have a chance, in this golden age of instant global communication, to launch a Civil Rights Movement for the Soul, freeing humanity at last from the oppression of its belief in a violent, angry, and vindictive God, and ending forever our telling and re-telling of the ancient and wholly inaccurate story of Separation.
We have been telling each other a story — and passing it on from generation to generation — that God is “up there” and we are “down here”, and never the ‘twain shall meet until Judgment Day, when we will be tried, judged, and convicted or acquitted…and if convicted, condemned and sent to everlasting torture as our punishment, that has produced our Separation Theology.
This in itself might be harmless enough, but the problem is that our Separation Theology produces a Separation Cosmology. That is, a way of looking at all of life that says that everything is separate from everything else.
And a Separation Cosmology produces a Separation Psychology. That is, a psychological viewpoint that says that I am over here and you are over there. And a Separation Psychology produces a Separation Sociology. That is, a way of socializing with each other that encourages the entire human society to act as separate entities serving their own separate interests.
And a Separation Sociology produces a Separation Pathology. That is, pathological behaviors of self-destruction, engaged in individually and collectively, and producing suffering, conflict, violence, and death by our own hands—as evidenced everywhere on our planet throughout human history.
Have we had enough now? Are we ready now to admit and to acknowledge that there may be something we do not fully understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which could change everything?
Are we ready now to, each of us, become messengers of a New Spirituality? Do we have the courage? Do we have the commitment? Do we even have an interest in doing so?
If so, how might we accomplish this? How can we change the world’s mind about God?
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