Reading Neale Donald Walsch’s Tomorrow’s God
I’m about 10 chapters into Neale Donald Walsch’s Tomorrow’s God: Our Greatest Spiritual Challenge. It’s written in the same format has his “Conversations With God” books, which I haven’t read. Walsch critiques what he calls “Yesterday’s God” - a God that humanity has created as a “Super Being” - a larger than life version of a human being. Yesterday’s God doesn’t lead us to the kinds of human behavior patterns that will make our world peaceful and sustainable for human life. This is the major flaw of organized religions - and Walsch especially critiques the three major Abrahamic ones. Walsch’s other problem with Yesterday’s God is that, he says, this God isn’t really the true God. Tomorrow’s God is Life itself, including not just what biologists would call living (versus inanimate) things, but all of existence, which is pulsing with movement and living energy, and varying levels of consciousness. We are a part of this God, and in Walsch’s pantheistic theology, there is nothing that is not a part of God. Tomorrow’s God openly invites us to substitute the word “Life” for the word “God” - one of the ideas in the book I find the most thought provoking and, for the moment, appealing.