July 22, 2007

Conversations with God

Posted at 5:38 pm by Richard and tagged , , , , , . Popularity: 16% [?]

After discussing Misquoting Jesus recently, I thought it was about time I talked about another book that’s had a profound impact on my views - “Conversations with God”. A 3-part (now, with many more1 ) work in which the author, Neale Donald Walsch, claims to be having an actual written dialogue with God.

“I was unhappy … and my life was feeling like a failure on all levels … This time, rather than another letter to another person I imagined to be vicimizing me, I thought I’d go straight to the source; … I decided to write a letter to God.”2

… and, God replies. The book follows with a written dialogue between Walsch and God, talking about prayer, love, divine inspiration and the nature of the bible, and all sorts of potentially controversial topics.

Now, if you haven’t already read these books, you’re probably thinking exactly what I thought when a friend first told me about them - “what kind of nut-job publishes a book claiming he actually had a conversation with God? He’s either nuts, or full of c#@p”. A perfectly valid position to take, but as you read further, you start to understand that it doesn’t matter if Walsch is actually having a conversation with God, if he’s a con artist, or even if he’s nuts - what matters is the book contains some very valid insights.

If God truly did inspire the bible, then why those people? Many of them “never met or saw Jesus in their lives, they lived many years after Jesus left the Earth”3. Some might suggest that the bible as we know it cannot be the word of God unless each of these writers, scribes, translators, etc. were all divinely inspired, which further complicates the issue. Walsch (or, God) suggests the answer to this problem is that the bible is not the only divinely inspired text - “everything in life is holy”4, and God’s inspiration is available to anyone who “listens”:

“Listen to your feelings. Listen to your Highest Thoughts. Listen to your experience. Whenever any of these differ from what you’ve been told by your teachers, or read in your books, forget the words. Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth.”5

The God portrayed in “Conversations with God” is exactly the kind of higher power I could imagine being behind all the world’s religions. There’s no way any one religion has got it perfectly right, because each rely on the words that have been passed down through generations, which have been translated, changed and misinterpreted. Each “divinely inspired” text may have come from people who were more in touch with this “God”, and therefore came closer to God’s true message, but each writer had their own human flaws as well, and thus no text is perfect. In the later books, he hints at the idea that by being “in touch” with God, one is really in touch with oneself - God is not only “in” each of us, but we are (collectively) God.

The book certainly solves some of the issues with traditional religion, but possibly so much so that it’s incompatible with traditional religions (which is probably a good thing!). I mentioned in my previous post “Soft Atheist, Hard Agnostic”, that I am a “soft” agnostic when it comes to “spiritual” gods or other non-interfering higher powers. Despite the personal connection Walsch claims to have with this god, to me his ideas seem very close to these types of “gods”

The books are certainly a departure from the seemingly popular non-fiction books on religion and atheism today, but if you haven’t read anything like this before, it’s not a bad place to start.

  1. While I happily bought the first three books, and I honestly believe they were written with good intentions, I can’t help but feel the multitudes of subsequent books are just an attempt to “cash in” on a franchise, and hence, I haven’t bought or read any of them. [↩]
  2. Walsch, Neale Donald (1999), Conversations with God: an uncommon dialogue - Book 1, p.1 [↩]
  3. Walsch, Neale Donald (1999), p.67 [↩]
  4. Walsch, Neale Donald (1999), p.68 [↩]
  5. Walsch, Neale Donald (1999), p.8 [↩]

July 16, 2007

Misquoting Jesus

Posted at 8:05 pm by Richard and tagged , , , , , . Popularity: 21% [?]

I just came across a review of a book I’ve been reading off and on for the last month or so - Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why - on a couple of different sites. The review itself (at Powell’s Books) gives a nice summary of Bart Ehrman’s arguments regarding the impossible task of obtaining and understanding the “original texts” of the bible.

Many people have a vague notion that all the original biblical texts are preserved in vaults somewhere, and translators work from those original texts. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. The earliest surviving versions of the gospels are handwritten copies dating from centuries after the original texts were written. Also, we don’t just have a single version of each gospel; we have many versions, and even more fragments. The trouble is, none of the versions agree with each other.1

If you haven’t read the book, I’d highly recommend it. Dawkins even mentions it in his recent “God Delusion” (so, it’s gotta be good, right?). Ehrman details many specific examples of differences between versions of the biblical texts, and also examines how the specific books were chosen and compiled.

Also, if there’s any Christians reading this - please, tell me - how DO you reconcile the problems Ehrman mentions? Were all of the copies of the bible divinely inspired? Was there one particular version that was divinely inspired? Please… I’m dying to know!

  1. Brown, Doug (2007) Review of Misquoting Jesus, Powell’s Books [↩]

June 17, 2007

How Rudy Rucker Showed Me God

Posted at 11:07 pm by Richard and tagged , , , , , . Popularity: 11% [?]

Rudy Rucker: The 4th DimensionOne of the earliest books I can remember reading that had an influence on my spirituality was not a book on religion at all but a book by a science fiction writer, Rudy Rucker. “God” is usually talked about as a father figure, or some mystical being (who looks somewhat like us - old dude, white beard) in the sky - and while these stories might be just metaphors for the true nature of God, it created a barrier to the possibility of me ever accepting the existence of higher power. I remember that “The Fourth Dimension: And how to get there”1 inspired me to think about the possibility of this higher power in a new way. Rudy Rucker is best known as a science fiction writer, but the book “The Fourth Dimension” is a work of non-fiction. In it, Rucker draws on the works of Edwin A. Abbott who wrote “Flatland” in 1884.

Flatland - Buy now on Amazon In “Flatland” Abbott explores the fictional life of “A. Square”, who lives in a two dimensional world and is visited by “A. Cube” (a 3-dimensional creature). While it’s a rather simplistic example, it raises the possibility that we (3-dimensional creatures) may be surrounded by “beings of a higher dimension” who could interact with us in God-like ways. While I don’t necessarily believe that God is, in fact, a creature from a higher-dimensional universe, the book suggested the possibility that maybe God can physically exist, but still be “omnipotent”.


A. Cube visits A. Square2

Rudy Rucker gave me a way of thinking about the nature of a higher power that still allowed me to understand the world from a scientific viewpoint, and while I’m sure it wasn’t his intention - Rudy Rucker opened my mind to the possibility of “God”.

  1. Also known as “The 4th Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality“ [↩]
  2. Image taken from Rudy Rucker, “The Fourth Dimension: and how to get there“, p.41 [↩]

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