Picking up from the last entry, there were pages and pages of thoughts I loved in Conversations with God. Such as page 14:
Yet God, in a sense, does not even care about the outcome. Not the ultimate outcome. This is because the ultimate outcome is assured.
And this is the second great illusion of man: that the outcome of life is in doubt.
It is this doubt about ultimate outcome that has created your greatest enemy, which is fear. For if you doubt outcome, then you must doubt Creator—you must doubt God. And if you doubt God, you must live in fear and guilt all your life. If you doubt God’s intentions—and God’s ability to produce this ultimate result—then how can you ever relax? How can you ever truly find peace?
Yet God has full power to match intentions with results. You cannot and will not believe in this (even though you claim that God is all-powerful), and so you have to create in your imagination a power equal to God, in order that you may find a way for God’s will to be thwarted. And so you have created in your mythology the being you call “devil.” You have even imagined a God at war with this being (thinking that God solves problems the way you do). Finally, you have actually imagined that God could lose this war.
But then I got about half way through, and I began to really dislike almost everything I read. I wanted to keep reading with an open mind, at the very least to understand where Walsch was coming from, but in the forefront of my mind was the title. It became impossible to read objectively because this was, well, God speaking. And you can’t disagree with God, right? You must accept everything God says because God can’t be wrong.
During my attempt to read further while trying to be objective, CWG lost all credibility for me when he said, in chapter 11, “I’ve had a dozen New Age teachers…” Throughout the book (and the movie), one gets the impression from Walsch that the thoughts presented in the book are derived from a “fresh conversation with God,” from a man who had little previous understanding of or teaching about God beforehand. Therefore, his statement reveals that his conversations with “God” in the book were apparently influenced by previous New Age philosophy, not a fresh, objective encounter with God.
What it comes down to for me is that, either this isn’t actually God speaking to Walsch (rather a collection of well-worn New Age ideas—some beautiful and true, some objectionable and false), or I am just not ready for what God had to say.
If you want to see where I elaborated on a couple of the New Age ideas presented in the book that I have heard before and that I disagree with, visit my Facebook Note, “Two New Age Teachings I Reject (and a Couple I Love).” If you read the comments, a third that I added into the mix (of rejection) is the notion of reincarnation.
Guess I’ll have to find a new book to discuss. It’s still a good idea!