The Global Conversation

Tag: punishment

  • Crimes and Godliness

    This idea has been swimming in my head for a very long time. At one point in time, I was corresponding with more than 30 inmates in various correctional institutions around the country. The charges ranged from simple burglary to murder. One was even on death row.

    I got to know them as men and women, not as criminals. They wrote about their families and about their dreams and their hopes for the future. They were poets, songwriters and artists. Several times a week, my mailbox would be graced with an envelope that was beautifully decorated by an inmate. I used to have a collage of many of these works of art, but sadly, I lost it in a house fire.

    I was inspired by these men and women to rethink my ideas about those who commit crimes. To see them not as someone who got what they deserved, as “low life” who don’t deserve any of the “good things” in life, but as a human being who had made some ineffective choices.

    I am aware that most people see the justice system as a means of making sure the criminal “gets what s/he deserves”, but I have long seen the justice system as a means of “rehabilitating” those incarcerated within its prison walls. It long ago ceased to make any sense to me to throw these people into cages, treat them like animals, deny them access to any means of bettering themselves and then, when we release them, to be surprised that they return to a life of crime!

    A recent insight that came to me is that most crime is about trying to feel in control in a world that feels out of control on so many levels. Those who work in rape crisis centers have long been aware that rape is not a sex crime: it is a crime about power and control. Those who work in women’s shelters have long been aware that domestic violence is not about uncontrollable anger but about power and control over another. (The other crimes are where people just don’t think—they have a momentarily lapse of judgment and make a “stupid” decision. Like someone who shoplifts a cigarette lighter when they have the money in their pocket to pay for it.)

    In the CwG material, God tells us that no one does anything inappropriate given his/her view of the world. And then recently, in What God Said, I read:

    • [T]he Conversations with God theology suggests that the only motivation that makes sense to our Soul is the goal of experiencing, expressing, and demonstrating Divinity. So we will, as enlightened beings, seek to do “what works” to produce that experience from moment to moment.

    It was a sort of “Aha!” moment for me. How “enlightened” we are will determine “what works” for us to produce that experience of Divinity. And what, at its base, is the experience of Divinity? That of creating the life that we choose. And for those who are “less enlightened”, this is experienced as being the one who calls the shots. Being “in control.”

    This logically leads to one conclusion: a criminal is seeking to express and demonstrate their view and understanding of Divinity! The creative energy that is part of that divinity manifests as taking control of others to create the world they want when they want it! It is “what works” for them to fulfill that drive to experience Divinity. Until they get caught.

    It’s already evident that “getting tough on crime” doesn’t work. Rather than seeking harsher penalties and more jail time for those who have violated the social mores of their culture, perhaps it would be more effective to help them find further enlightenment so the next time they choose to express their Divinity, no one else is adversely affected.

  • Who and what is God?

    Conversations with God was given to humanity to bring us answers to Life’s Great Questions. And the greatest of all our Great Questions has been, and continues to be: “Who and what is God?”

    Most of us clearly understand that God is not a very large and handsome man in the sky, with a long white beard and a flowing robe, sitting on a golden throne in a bejeweled room, surrounded by wing flapping angels.

    Yet while we are pretty clear about what God is not, we are not nearly as clear about what God is.

    So let’s see what God has to say on the subject.

    In Conversations with God, God made it clear that God is without form, gender, or substance in the way that we know it.  God is, rather, that of which all things are made.  The Essential Essence of which everything in existence is comprised.  That essence contains Supreme Intelligence.  And Total Awareness.  And Absolute Power.

    It is omnipresent and omniscient.  It is everywhere because it is everything that exists in any place at all.  It knows everything because without that which it knows, nothing that exists could come into being.  It is the Source and the Substance at once; it is the Creator and Created.

    It always was, is now, and always will be.  It knows no beginning and no end.  There is nothing that exists outside of it and there is nothing that exists inside of it without it.  That is, simply put, there is nothing that is not God.

    This Essential Essence uses Itself to recreate Itself, and calls upon Itself to empower Itself, to be Itself, all by Itself.

    It needs nothing, requires nothing, demands nothing, punishes nothing.  For what could It possibly need?  What could It in any case require?  Why would It demand anything?  And who—pray tell, who in the world—would it command or punish?

    That which has everything and is everything and wants and needs nothing holds only one desire: to express and to know Itself through the glorious experiencing of Itself…and to create this possibility.

    That is the reason that life as we know it was created.

    Every human being who has stepped into the living of this possibility has achieved all the things we as a sentient species say we want to achieve.  And they have done so without hurting, without damaging, without killing.  We say they have lived the lives of “saints.”  Yet they have merely lived life as it was intended to be lived ‑‑ a way in which most human beings have adamantly refused to live, for the most ironic reason of all:  We think it is too good to be true.