God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher

These Have Been My Most Faithful Servants

August 29, 2024

It [a new divine message] will be most hard for two groups—the atheists, secularists, who have set their hearts against Me, against hearing, and (followers of) the old religions, who are set in their ways, very attached to specific forms and formulas. The latter pains Me because, in many ways, these have been My most faithful servants. Like a servant whose master has died and faithfully carries out his last wish—but misheard the wish. The old religions are mostly based on insights, revelations I gave them. But they became rigidified. Partial insights were mistaken for the whole.

He Got Most of it Right

August 22, 2024

The brash display at the front of the bookstore announced Conversations with God—the first of three volumes in which God tells all … to somebody else! I thought I was the one anointed to carry God’s message. What’s going on here?

Before my own experience, I would not have thought for a minute that the author, Neale Donald Walsch, actually heard from God. But, if God spoke to me, He could surely speak to someone else. In fact, He had told me that He communicates with people all the time. Walsch also reports God as saying, “I talk to everyone. All the time. The question is not to whom do I talk, but who listens.” Just what I had been told.

Has God appointed two messengers? With different messages? Or is this guy not on the up and up? I have to admit I was skeptical. My own prayers were herky-jerky and the voice I heard spoke in my own casual vernacular. Walsch’s conversations are reported in polished prose. That looked rigged.

Nor was I impressed with what Walsch reports having been told. It sounded like pop Buddhism—feel-good stuff that sells books but is unlikely to be God’s authentic word. Wasn’t Walsch just a charlatan?

When I asked, I didn’t like the answer.

The book of prayers [Conversations with God] is nice enough, but it will be dismissed by most as an oddity, not a revelation—even though he got most of it right—but I couldn’t write the blurb!

“Believing in Me is the most natural thing in the world.”

August 15, 2024

Judaism, Christianity, Jews, Jesus—all this upset me, so, for a time, I concentrated on day to day matters. One morning I started to ask some trivial question and was interrupted.

Did I tell you to ask a question? Just listen. You stopped asking about Me because some of the answers disturbed you. They shook your faith.

That was true. When answers upset me, I would start thinking that, surely, this was not the voice of God. “Lord, why is faith like that? Why is Your interaction with us so tenuous and subject to doubt?”

First, it is not. During most times, people have not had trouble believing. Believing in Me or in some gods was—is—the most natural thing in the world.

Second, my “invisibility” has to do with the kind of Being I am. It’s like asking why we can’t see neutrinos. Nobody can see your “mind.” You believe in “other minds” with no greater “evidence.”

God was alluding to the topic of my doctoral dissertation. One of the great philosophical puzzles concerns skepticism with regard to knowledge of other minds. The problem arises from the fact that we do not have direct access to other people’s thoughts and feelings. We only observe their outer behavior. In fact, we do not have any proof that others really have inner thoughts and feelings at all. Yet it is reasonable to believe they do. Is God any more elusive than minds? Well, He certainly seems so.

Although the voice was always palpably real and authoritative, I continued to experience resistance. My agnostic worldview really did not have room for these encounters. I was always walking a tightrope with unbelief just one misstep away. I had decided to follow the voice, but this decision would be tested.

________

Listen to this on God: An Autobiography, The Podcast– the dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin.

He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him.

Suffering is the Test of Humanity

August 8, 2024

“All that’s rather abstract, Lord. What exactly does disease do for us?” I thought of Job’s boils.

Suffering is the test of your humanity. There is no greater test than pain—how one copes with it. It is easy to be nice, faithful, and such, when things are great, but very hard under adversity.

“But, Lord, that just seems perverse—or cruel.”

No, that’s not so. Think about your own times of physical suffering—in the hospital, for example—the shots, the clumsy aide, the itch, the nurse about urinating, those were full of growth.

Those examples brought back memories. When I was still single, I had suffered a mild heart attack. I was put in the intensive care unit. They took blood tests, day and night. There are a limited number of places from which blood can be drawn, and the same spot cannot be used again right away. The wrists are ideal, but mine are sensitive and a needle there smarts. One does not have much power as a patient, but safeguarding my wrists became my prime imperative for the next two weeks. One after another blood drawer would come, and I would plead, argue, wheedle, and insist that they find some other place to puncture me. Each resisted at first, then managed to find a spot.

“Yes, that is certainly Me.”

August 1, 2024

“Lord, do any of the gods of the world’s religions fit You correctly?”

Some—many—come pretty close.

“Lord, is the God of the Old Testament one of the accurate depictions?”

Yes, that is certainly Me. And that is what I was like at that time. I led you to the Miles book because that is something he got right. Much else he got wrong—such as his reading of Job.

I had read and liked Jack Miles’ award-winning book, God: A Biography. Though a trained theologian, Miles reads the Bible as a work of literature in which God is the main character. That may sound as if it would fail to do justice to scripture, but in fact it enables him to avoid the worries that theologians and historians usually bring to it. He just lets the text—and the character of God—speak for itself.

My Revelations Evolve

July 26, 2024

My revelations evolve. I reveal different things now than millions of years ago.

“Millions of years ago?”

Yes, I revealed things to prehistoric people, though they had a limited ability to understand. My revelations to Abraham and Moses were unusual, because they marked the first of the clear messages that got through and were really understood.

You Are Both Other and Same as Me.

July 18, 2024

The living reality of God was already more than I was comfortable with. As I got into the frame of mind to pray, I would feel as if His Spirit was coming into me, like the infusion of a spiritual presence—as if we were, if not one, at least overlapping. That made me uneasy.

“Lord, what is the purpose of those experiences in which You seem to fill my soul and body with Your Spirit?”

Those moments are infusions of energy, focused versions of the energy you draw on all the time.

“Am I merging with You at those moments?”

Yes, that is a good (acceptable) way to put it. When you open yourself sufficiently, I can enter.

“Do You get something out of it as well?”

Yes, I benefit from the in-dwelling of the Spirit in a body. My nature is essentially spiritual—it both benefits and suffers from not being embodied. Your spirit is embodied. By entering your spirit or soul, I enter your body as well.

God is limited by not being embodied? That seemed strange to me. “Why do You need that?”

Spirit is diffuse—it is valuable to energize it. Spirit has no sensory apparatus. I am enriched by participating in yours.

You are both other and same (as Me). I need you to be other so that I may encounter another self. I am a Person and, like other persons, define Myself by responding to other persons, and being responded to (by them).

But I also need union, not distance—just as other persons do. You and Abigail are both other and same. You need to be different people—love is a bridge between differences. You also merge spirits at certain moments, though not totally. That is also a kind of completion or fulfillment. Life, including My life, is the dialectic, as you might call it, of same and other, confrontation and union.

I am the Innermost Being of Man and of Matter

July 11, 2024

Later I learned that there are some interpretations of quantum mechanics that use the notion of a universal consciousness to explain how an electron in one part of the universe can be in perfect synch with an electron in another part of the universe without any physical interaction between them. I was not aware of that at the time, but I had just read about dark matter and dark energy, “dark” because they cannot be seen but only inferred from gravitational and other effects. The mass of these previously unsuspected components are now thought to far exceed the total visible mass in the universe.

Yes, you should look into those. Think of it—most of what is in the universe is unnoticed. It is inferred from gross phenomena, but it is inferred as force. Think of the human body. It is moved by the mind. How? Where is the mind? The mind is throughout the body. Its actions are registered, but it is not noticed. I am not noticed. But in fact I am seen everywhere, and I am in the innermost being of man and in the innermost being of matter. Do not have contempt for matter. It is not the inert stuff of certain old theories. It is vital and alive and a part of Me. The interaction of mind and matter is part of Me, and I am the vehicle through which it takes place.

“Death and the Hope of Immortality . . .”

July 4, 2024

“The next phase is what I wonder about. It looks to me as if You communicate some sense of moral order and hierarchy, reverence for life and death, a sense of the meaning of life … I am feeling that this is Your voice, not mine, Lord.”

Yes, it is. They were understanding Me well enough to understand that life has meaning—a beginning and an end and the sense of a meaningful movement from one to the other, summarized (judged, reckoned) at the end. Death and the hope of immortality, which isn’t merely the fear of death but the understanding that there is a vertical dimension to life and (that) its meaning does not stop with death, that there is a larger story the individual is part of, and his (and her) spiritual development is not limited to just one life.

“I Am Enacting the Plan.”

June 27, 2024

“Lord, do I understand this correctly: You are emerging, self-creating perhaps, out of Nothing?”

This is correct. It is not quite right to say that I “always” existed. I did come into being, and before Me, there was only Nothing, and there is a sense in which I was present in the Nothing. There was no time, in the usual sense, then. There was no matter, no energy, no events.

As I emerged, I had to figure out Who I Was, and What Was to Happen. You (human beings) talk about God’s plan, but I am enacting the Plan, a Plan binding on Me and not just made up by Me. The Plan is the scheme, as I have figured it out, of how things should be. My role is less (that) of (an) organizer than of (the) goal or telos.

Telos is the Greek word for aim, purpose, or function, as in “teleological.”

I draw things in the right direction, like flowers to the sun.