Conversations with God

Boortz talked about this yesterday and today. I really liked it. Both times.

Sunday afternoon I picked up Conversations with God, Book II and started reading. I happened upon a particular passage that fairly summed up my own feelings, and I thought I would share it with you here. The passage opens with Neale Donald Walsh talking to God:

Do we need to return to religion? Is that the missing link?

Return to spirituality. Forget about religion.

That statement is going to anger a lot of people.

People will react to this entire book with anger . . unless they do not.

Why do You say, forget religion?

Because it is not good for you. Understand that in order for organized religion to succeed, it has to make people believe they need it. In order for people to put faith in something else, they must first lose faith in themselves. So the first task or organized religion is to make you lose faith in yourself. The second task is to make you see that it has the answers you do not. And the third and most important task is to make you accept its answers without question.

If you question, you start to think! If you think, you start to go back to that Source Within. Religion can't have you do that, because you're liable to come up with an answer different from what it has contrived. So religion must make you doubt your Self; must make you doubt your own ability to think straight.

The problem for religion is that every so often this backfires -- for if you cannot accept without doubt your own thoughts, how can you not doubt the new ideas about God which religion has given you?

Pretty soon you even doubt My existence -- which, ironically, you never doubted before. When you were living by your intuitive knowing, you may not have had Me all figured out, but you definitely knew I was there!

It is religion which has created agnostics.

Any clear thinker who looks at what religion has done must assume that religion has no God! For it is religion which has filled the hearts of men with fear of God, where once man loved That Which is in all its splendor.

It is religion which has ordered men to bow down before God, where once man rose up in joyful outreach.

It is religion which has burdened man with worries about God's wrath, where once man sought God to lighten his burden.

It is religion which told man to be ashamed of his body and its most natural functions, where once man celebrated those functions as the greatest gift of life!

It is religion which taught you that you must have an intermediary in order to reach God, where once you thought yourself t be reaching God by the simple living of your life in goodness and in truth.

And it is religion which commanded humans to adore God, where once humans adored God because it was impossible not to.

Everywhere religion has gone it has created disunity -- which is the opposite of God.

There is so much more, but I'm not going to copy Walsh's entire book here. Read this particular dialogue for yourself. You'll find it starting on page 247. Those of you who are deeply troubled, even outraged by what Walsh has written .... these books could do you some good.