Comments On Conversations With God
I’ve just read a book called “Conversations with God: an uncommon dialogue. Book 1.” written by Neale Donald Walsch. I had to stop when the author concluded there was no God because I got too upset. Some of what the author said rang true for me but much of it seemed so wrong I could not understand how anyone who genuinely wanted to hear God could possibly believe He was saying it all.
I decided to have my own conversation with God to see what He would have to say to me about this book.
God was reluctant to comment and all I could seem to get was a statement about Himself.
“I am God. I do not gossip about my children or criticise them to others.”
I got the feeling this man genuinely wanted to communicate with God and he really was hearing what God had to say at first but not everything he wrote down actually did come from God. I got the impression that, whilst God was unwilling to speak against the writer, He did want to deny saying much of what the writer claims He said.
Instead of answering my questions God asked me some of his own.
“Do you think it is possible there is no right or wrong? Do you believe there is no such thing as evil or the devil? Is it your experience that the opposite of love is fear and that I really don’t care what you do? Do you think it is possible I would be willing to spend eternity in the company of souls such as Hitler or that I am nothing more than an observer whose sole aim is to experience myself through your experiences? Do you believe I recycle souls? Do you find it plausible that something greater than Me exists?”
The author claims God said all those things were true but, before I could get my mind around those questions let alone try to answer them, God said one more thing.
“It is hard for those who have not looked evil in the eye to grasp the truth about it.”
So let me invite Neale Donald Walsch to have a conversation with ME! Let me introduce him to MY experiences of this world and my understanding of these things and of God.
Let me start by introducing him to a man I met when I was working in a prison. A man who tore a hole in the bowel of a toddler and killed her in his quest for an orgasm. A man who looked me in the eye and insisted he was not to blame for his behaviour and whose sole focus was on his rights, his needs, and his wants.
Let me ask Mr Walsch if he honestly believes God would want to experience Himself through either of those people. As a helpless child suffering in ways we could never begin to understand or as a soul capable of reaching orgasm in the act of tearing apart the body of a child. Could he honestly believe God was watching while this unspeakable act of cruelty was committed and He did not care, did not have an opinion about this behaviour, was not angered by it?
I don’t claim to have all the answers nor can I make God give them to me. He tends to prefer asking me questions that provoke answers I would not have thought of otherwise but some things I don’t really need God to tell me.
Is it possible there is no right or wrong? Not in my experience! Some things really are wrong. You can rationalize those things and recreate them in your own mind to make them seem any way you want but, if those things were actually done to you, there would be no question in your mind that they were wrong.
Do I believe there is no such thing as evil or the devil? Absolutely not! Trading the life of a child for an orgasm is evil. Putting your desire for a fleeting moment of pleasure ahead of another persons desire to grow up and become all they have the capacity to be is so wrong it has to be evil.
As for the devil, he is real, I have had many encounters with him. Every time I open my mind to hear Gods voice there is another voice standing ready to hijack the conversation. Many times I have begun by having a conversation with God and ended up in a conversation with someone who was telling me what I wanted to hear. Someone slimy and sly who tends to insert himself gently into a conversation and hijack it with flattery and temptation.
I can’t count the number of times I have been told how special I am, how “chosen by God”, how obligated I am to share with the world the wisdom God wishes to impart to me, how much God wants to make me rich and famous or use me as His new age prophet.
The difference between me and Neale Donald Walsch, however, is I don’t want to be special or chosen or rich or famous or a prophet. I want to be the person God created me to be. No more than that and no less and I don’t have any idea who God created me to be so I leave the details up to Him. If I should find myself becoming rich or famous or a new age prophet I would know those things were part of God’s plan for me but I don’t want them enough to be willing to go out of my way to make them happen.
Over the years there have been many times when the slimy, slick, persuasive voice of Satan has sought to convince me he does not actually exist or he does not have the power to insert himself into my conversations with God but his voice is just different enough from God’s for my instincts to run up a red flag warning me to be cautious about believing what I am hearing when he speaks.
From the sound of it Neale Donald Walsch had no experience of talking with God before he wrote the book so I can only suppose he never learned to tell the difference between the voice of Satan, the voice of God, and his own ego but the book clearly contains all three voices.
Call me naive if you like but there is another reason I am convinced Satan exists. I just cannot make myself believe human nature is really as evil as it might seem if you look at all the things mankind has done. I believe humanity is capable of evil but I think some of the evil things that have been done were at a level far beyond anything the human imagination could ever conceive. I am certain such things were thought up by a supernatural force of evil and planted in the minds and hearts of the people who acted them out. Human beings, in my experience, tend to think on a personal level. It takes a demon to want the wholesale destruction of nations, races, and civilizations. I think Hitler wanted to destroy SOME Jews but Satan whispered in his ear “Why settle for killing just a few? Why not kill them all?”
When I met the man I mentioned earlier the hair on the back of my neck stood up and I instinctively felt, as I looked into his eyes, that I was in the presence of something cold, inhuman, and extremely evil. I worked with many prisoners and, between them, they had committed many crimes including other murders and rapes but I only ever had that reaction to this one man. I defy anyone to have an experience like that and still refuse to believe in Satan or the existence of evil!
Is fear the opposite of love as Neale Donald Walsch claims God told him?
Absolutely not!
Fear is the opposite of faith. The opposite of love is hate.
Love builds and nurtures the target of its affection. It seeks to do right by the loved one and takes great delight in seeing them happy. Love wants to give. God is love and He wants to give to us.
Hate tears down and drains the target of its attentions. It seeks to wrong them and takes great delight in seeing them suffer. Hate wants to destroy. Satan is hate and he wants to destroy us.
Do I believe God really doesn’t care what I do?
I know he cares!
Many years ago I wasted a lot of time applying for jobs that were not really available. A lot of jobs in Australia are contractual. Every year the contract ends and the job is re-advertised but the person who already has the job is the person who always gets it again. At that time in my life I was very sensitive to rejection and every time I got one of those cold, impersonal, rejection letters I went into melt-down mode. This was before I had cast the demon of suicide out of me so these melt-downs were extremely self-destructive and suicidal.
One day I was on my way out the door of my home when God told me to wait as there was a phone call about to come in. I went back inside and waited and the phone rang a minute later. It was someone giving me the news I had failed to get another job. They let me down gently and advised me I had come close to getting it. After I hung up I complained to God. I asked Him why He made me wait for the call when it was only bad news. He reminded me of how upset I was when I got the last rejection letter and pointed out how much easier I was taking this rejection. When I eventually got the rejection letter there was no melt-down.
If God cares enough about me to try and spare me the distress of an impersonal, unexplained, rejection letter I have no doubt at all that He cares about everything else to do with me including what I do!
Do I think it is possible God would be willing to spend eternity in the company of souls such as Hitler?
It is not my place to judge the soul of another person but I can tell you this much. I would not be willing to spend eternity in the company of unrepentant souls because they would bring the same evil, the same ugliness, the same bad things into heaven that they are inflicting on the world today. What is the point of having a heaven if it is going to be indistinguishable from what we already have?
Neale Donald Walsch claims God has told him there is no heaven, no judgement time, no point at which justice will be done so nobody has to worry about being accountable for what they do.
In the Book of Genesis God says to Cain, after he has killed his brother, “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”
The stories I heard when working in the prison would continue to haunt me now, more than ten years later, if I was not absolutely certain justice will eventually be done. There is a lot of blood calling to God for justice just as Abel’s blood was calling back then. A truly loving God must, by definition, be a just God and justice demands the guilty must pay a penalty for what they have done.
God has done everything He can to help us escape punishment by sending Jesus to pay the penalty in our place but we are still responsible for our own choices. Come judgement day we will all have to answer to God for the choices we have made. Justice demands we do. Some of us will be able to turn to Jesus and ask Him to answer God on our behalf and, for those people, Jesus will turn to God and say “Father, this person admits responsibility for what they did but I claim this soul as being one of those for whom I died. I ask you to accept my blood as payment in full for the wrongs this person has done.”
God finally broke His silence as I was writing this and here is what I believe He said.
“Perfect love cannot coexist with hate for hate will never stop trying to destroy everything and everyone it comes into contact with. I cannot share heaven with souls who cling to hate and they would not want to share heaven with me. It was not me who turned against Satan. It was Satan who turned against me and the energy field of his hate was repelled by the energy field of my love, like two magnets pushing each other away, and it was this that cast him out of heaven.
Pride is another force that seeks to repel me. Pride interprets my love as paternalistic, demeaning, belittling and it seeks to push it away but I am immovable. When you try to push me away all that happens is you push yourself away from me. The wonder is not that Satan was cast out of heaven, the wonder is that I was able to hold him there as long as I did, his hate and pride grew too strong in the end and that was what cast him out.”
While I had God’s attention I tackled Him about forcing me to respond to the claims in Neale Donald Walsch’s book by myself.
Why can’t you respond to all the things he says you said? I nagged.
“He claims I said a lot of things. It would take another book to respond to it all.”
Would that be so bad, I asked, why shouldn’t the world have another book containing real conversations with you?
“Why do you think I chose to use many to write the bible instead of just one? One open mind taking dictation from me, like Neale Donald Walsch tried to do, is too vulnerable to the efforts of Satan to spread his own gospel.”
So, I said triumphantly, you are saying the book Neale wrote is the gospel according to Satan?
“No. The book Neale wrote has three authors. Me, Satan, and Neale Donald Walsch.”
I was feeling a bit annoyed by now.
Why do I get the impression you are defending him, I asked God, why are you not trying to distance yourself completely from what he wrote?
“Neale is my son. He opened his mind to me and I spoke to him just as I will speak to anyone who will listen to me. I did say some of what he wrote and, as I told you once before when you were concerned about preachers giving sermons you do not approve of, I will use my word no matter who repeats it or how it is presented.”
I let the subject drop and moved on to the next question.
Is it possible God is nothing more than an observer whose sole aim is to experience himself through my experiences?
The book is correct, in my opinion, in claiming we are all made from the very substance of God and He actually DOES experience everything we experience but I am certain it is wrong in claiming God has no opinions about the things he experiences through us.
He has opinions. He does not enjoy evil or wrongdoing. I have felt His anger and grief as I mentioned in my entry titled “Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen.”
An unrepentant soul is like gangrenous tissue in the body of God. It is dead and cannot be salvaged. If you do not cut it out it will infect connecting tissue and kill it too. God will not force living tissue to co-exist with putrid, rotting, dead tissue. He will amputate the spiritually dead parts of himself when the time comes.
Do I believe God recycles souls?
No. I have no proof but, if God really does just recycle existing souls, how come the population of the world keeps on growing? Where do all those new souls come from? You could argue they are coming from all the animals who have been made extinct but what could a soul possibly learn from being in the body of an animal? Did I begin as a cockroach and work my way up to being who I am now? I doubt it.
The book argues that there is a lot of evidence, credible evidence, proving reincarnation is a fact. The evidence is only credible if you do not believe in Satan or demons. The supernatural forces of evil know every detail of every life that has ever been lived. These forces can plant the details of someone else’s life into the mind of any person who is open to receiving that information. I suspect, if you collated all the available information, you would find the demons have been pretty slack and lazy and there will be more than one person who is the “reincarnation” of some desirable soul like Cleopatra or King Arthur. I’m betting there are many “past lives” that were never actually lived or that include details taken from the lives of people who are still living too.
I asked God to comment on this subject and He obliged. This is what I believe He said about reincarnation.
“Each and every one of you is a precious, priceless, irreplaceable work of art to me. There are no twins in my eyes. I see the differences even when two souls appear identical to everyone else.
I do not recycle works of art! Would you?
Would you scrape the paint off the Mona Lisa so you could recycle the canvas she was painted on? Would you tear down the pyramids of Egypt or the Taj Mahal so you could build something else with the stone? Would you melt down the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, or the English Crown jewels to make new things with the metal and gemstones? Even the things that can be called imperfections don’t make you less valuable to me. Would you tear down the Leaning Tower of Pisa just so you could rebuild it and make it stand straight?
Even souls like Hitler are priceless to me but they choose to destroy themselves. They splash the canvas of their soul with blood, they sell the blocks and gems they are made of for power, they trade their metal for adulation and even if I wanted to recycle them so they could try again I could not. There is never anything left of the original work of art to recycle by the time they are finished with it. They give it all to Satan and he destroys it.
This is why there must be repentance and an acceptance of Christ. When they give it all to Satan they lose ownership of it. When they repent and hand whatever is left over to Christ He becomes the legal owner and he has the ability to repossess, reclaim, and restore whatever Satan has taken, ruined, or destroyed.”
Do I find it plausible that something greater than God exists?
If something greater than God exists then that thing, by definition, is the real God. Any “God” who claims not to be the ultimate God must, also by definition, be a false God. The “God” Neale Donald Walsch had a conversation with told him there was something even greater than himself.
On page 197 of “Conversations with God” the “God” Neale Donald Walsch was talking to tells him;
“For even as you are the body of Me, I am the body of another.”
Instead of realising this must mean he is talking to a false God this leads Mr Walsch to conclude, on page 200, that;
“…if there is no end to bigness, then there is no biggest. That means, in the largest sense, there is no God!”
Once again I turned to God and asked Him to comment and this is what I believe He said.
“Big and little are descriptions of that which exists just as rose or daffodil, white or yellow, scented or unscented, and long or short stemmed are descriptions. A flower can be big or little, rose or daffodil, white or yellow, scented or unscented, and long or short stemmed but it must first exist before any of these things can be said of it.
There is nothing bigger than existence and nothing smaller than that which does not exist.
I am all of that which exists because all that exists is created from me. I am existence itself and there is nothing outside of me. Within me, big can continue into infinity as can small, but both must be within me or they simply do not exist and cannot, therefore, be any size at all.
None of my creations can escape me. Many, like stubborn children, will close their eyes and say that what they cannot see does not exist but I am always there waiting to clean the blood from their canvas, repossess the blocks and gems they have sold, recreate the metal they melted down, restore and reclaim the work of art they were created to be. All they have to do is realise they are destroying a masterpiece and ask me to help. I will always hate the things they do that damage the work of art but nothing can stop me from loving the work of art itself.”
