Conversations with God, part 14

Morality, part 4


On the one hand, God tells us, "The first thing to understand about the universe is that no condition is 'good' or 'bad.' It just is. So stop making value judgments" (p.79). Okay, I suppose that God is not commanding us to stop making value judgments. Maybe she's just making a recommendation, saying that it's rationally incorrect to make value judgments, since nothing is good or bad. But then later, she changes her mind. She says, "In truth, there is nothing evil, only objective phenomena and experience." Okay, so far, so good. She goes on: "Yet your very purpose in life requires you to select from the growing collection of endless phenomena a scattered few which you call evil—for unless you do, you cannot call yourself, nor anything else, good—and thus cannot know, or create, your Self." So now she's saying that we have to make value judgments even though she told us before not to do it. But it gets worse. She goes on to say, "By that which you call evil do you define yourself—and by that which you call good." And then she says, "The biggest evil would therefore be to declare nothing evil at all" (p.133). That is a glaring contradiction. First, God has already declared that there is "nothing evil at all," in previous statements, which means that she herself is committing what she considers to be "the biggest evil." If it's true that there is nothing evil at all, then it can't be "the biggest evil" to declare nothing evil at all. And if it were evil, and if we should declare some things evil, then God has contradicted what she said before about there being no should or shouldn't, and about not making value judgments.

Even after completing his conversation with God, Walsch still did not seem to understand that there is no right or wrong. In the introduction, he wrote that his own life "has been marked by continued mistakes and misdeeds, some very shameful behaviors." If there is no right or wrong, then there is no room for praise or blame. Consequently, there can be no such thing as shameful behavior.

More examples could be cited. Perhaps my point would've been made with even fewer examples, but I wanted to show how frequently God makes moral assertions in this book to demonstrate how deeply engrained morality is. Even among those who are the most vocal in their rejection of morality, they cannot help themselves. We all believe so deeply in morality that we can't stop make moral claims even while denying that they refer to anything real. Many of us are trying desperately to pretend that we don't know right from wrong, because we care so much about our personal autonomy, but we are failing miserably in our efforts to delude ourselves. The reason we're failing so miserably is because morality is just as real and obvious as the external world. In the author's own words, "That's the problem with truth. The truth is relentless. It won't leave you alone. It keeps creeping up on you from every side, showing you what's really so. That can be annoying" (p.140).

to be continued...

Part 15