I was baptized Catholic...twice.
First, when I was a baby. A Church requirement, that: a little moisture to ensure my place in heaven.
Second, when I was twelve. A 'rededication' to the Faith, done with a twelve-year-old's full knowledge and consent--which is to say, it carried the weight of a political campaign promise.
I've always questioned the standard beliefs about God. Like many, I've wondered how a loving God could judge and condemn us to eternal damnation. I wondered why God was supposedly so needy, so jealous, so insecure. These always struck me as human, not divine, traits.
So I went through a period in high school where I rejected God, trying on atheism to see how it fit. For a time, I spouted the atheistic creed as mindlessly as I had once been taught to wheedle Hail Marys and Our Fathers.
But that didn't feel right, either. God as a crutch for weak people was all well and good, except I felt weak myself.
It was through my voracious reading that I first began to hear God speaking to me...through what seemed to be the most unlikely author: Stephen King. First in THE STAND (a book given to me by my atheist best friend, ironically enough); shortly thereafter in DESPERATION, a novel concerning itself very much with the power of prayer. I started to think a little more about the possibility of deity, and started halfheartedly paging through spiritual books, like THE CELESTINE PROPHECY.
Then came the books that changed my mind: the CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD series, by Neale Donald Walsch.
It wasn't, strictly speaking, an epiphany. Rather, it was the curious (and very agreeable) sensation of seeing my mind laid bare in print. It wasn't learning; it was realizing what I already knew. Very empowering and inspirational stuff, this.
Not that everyone's willing to listen to it, oh, God, no. I've read a bunch of reviews from devout Christians that stop just short of calling Neale Donald Walsch the living antichrist.
What's so controversial about his books? Plenty, if you believe in the God I was taught about in catechism class. According to these dialogues, God is everywhere, in everyone, all the time. He/She/It never judges nor condemns; there is no Hell apart from our tortured imaginings; all paths lead to God; all paths ARE God.
On evil, the text is quite provocative. It states repeatedly that there is no such thing as absolute evil, that nobody ever sets out to harm another without what they think of as a very good reason.
Take Hitler. Pretty much the entire world over personifies Hitler is evil incarnate. Yet in 1930s Germany, Hitler thought he was doing good for his country, and the true horror was that millions agreed with him. It took fifteen years for enough of the world to decide it was time to put a stop to his activities. Hopefully, we're a little quicker on the uptake now.
Book 1 is kind of like a big hug from God; book 2 is a stern, yet equally loving, lecture on where we are as a species and how to get where we say we want to go; book 3 is an examination of universal cosmology, including the lives of 'highly evolved beings' elsewhere.
The strongest reason I have to recommend this series to anyone and everyone is that it is by no means authoritative. It doesn't claim to replace anybody's holy text. Rather, it invites you to read its words, and respond how you will.
It worked for me.
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