Chapter Five of WHAT GOD SAID
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NOTE: If you have not read previous installments, it will make sense to scroll down to the lower entries and read them from the “bottom up.” In this way, you will be encountering the material as it appears in the book.  — NDW
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What is needed now on Earth is a Civil Rights Movement for the Soul, freeing humanity at last from the oppression of its belief in a violent, angry, and vindictive God, and releasing our species from a spiritual doctrine that has created nothing but separation, fear, and dysfunction around the world.

We need to replace this dogma, finally, with an ethos of unity and cooperation, understanding and compassion, generosity and love.

The first step in this movement is to initiate a global conversation that begins with a rarely asked blunt question: “Honestly, and without bias, would you say that our world’s belief systems, including its religions, have produced the outcomes for which humanity has yearned?”

If the answer to this question is no, the next question must be: “Why do you think our belief systems have failed to do this?” And finally, any beneficial discussion would lead to this inquiry: “What beliefs or understandings do you feel would produce the outcomes humanity says it desires?”

These questions could form the basis of what I call the Conversation of the Century—and this is something in which all of us can take part. You could engage in the Conversation of the Century right now in the worldwide virtual community that gathers daily at http://www.TheGlobalConversation.com. This is an Internet newspaper I created that relates the expanded spiritual concepts of the New Spirituality to the news of the day, making spirituality itself vital again, meaningful again in our daily lives.

You could also launch a Global Conversation Group in your community right now, meeting in your home once or twice a month.

Talking about important topics generates energy around them. Every major change that has ever occurred in our social, political, economic, and spiritual systems began when one person talked to another person about it. This may seem almost absurdly obvious, yet I observe many people who want to see changes in their world and in their lives nevertheless saying: “What can I do? What impact can I possibly make?”

So make no mistake, people talking together about the same thing at the same moment become very powerful. So powerful that, as Victor Hugo said, “All the armies of the world cannot stop an idea whose time has come.”

Rewriting humanity’s cultural story to include expanded beliefs and deeper understandings about God and Life, enlarging upon the primitive and simplistic beliefs of our past, is just such an idea.

It takes time, but large clusters of people—whole societies—can have a change of mind about things. Martin Luther King Jr. helped create a change of mind about blacks. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem helped create a change of mind about women. Harvey Milk helped create a change of mind about gays. We can all now help create a change of mind about God.

A New Gospel

To “change the world’s mind about God!” Ah! What a goal!

And that is the goal of the New Spirituality. That is the goal of Conversations with God. That is the goal of every soul who knows and loves God, and who can no longer sit by idly and watch people grapple with teachings of a fearful, vengeful, violent God, and ignore all the damaging outcomes that such beliefs have inflicted upon the human race.

Those of us in that group know that the first thing we must help people change their mind about is God’s relationship to us. Then, our relationship to God. And finally, the relationship of all people to each other, and to Life itself.

These three topics form the through line of the most important messages of Conversations with God, summarized in chapter 2. I believe with all my heart that these messages provide a pathway to the kind of life experience for which Earth’s people have yearned, both individually and collectively, for thousands of years.

Please note that I said “a” pathway, not “the” pathway. My choice of words was specific and deliberate. Conversations with God offered humanity a New Gospel in the book Friendship with God. That New Gospel concludes the summary in chapter 2.

So let’s start there. Let’s begin our exploration of this thousand-word summary where it ends. Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up.

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— from the book What God Said by Neale Donald Walsch. (Berkley Books-Oct 2013- orders may be placed at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com and other online bookstores. The book is also being placed here, in previews, chapter by chapter.)