In your opinion, have our earthly theologies provided humanity with effective guidance on how to live together in peace and harmony?
Here’s my opinion: No. In fact, far too often they have produced just the opposite result.
Today 400 children die of starvation every hour. Every hour. Yet it would be possible to feed all the starving children on the planet, to protect them from dying of preventable diseases, and to make basic education accessible to all, with no more than five per cent of the overall annual sales of arms in the world.
Five per cent.
Can this be possible?
Yes. It’s possible and it’s true.
How is this evidence of a failure of religions and theologies? Neglect of its own offspring to the point of starvation could only occur in a society whose people see themselves as separate from God and separate from each other, having little to do with each other, and this is what is taught by our religions. Only such a cultural story could justify a world in which the income of the richest 225 people is equal to the income of three billion poor people.
You may have missed the real impact of that, so let me say it again. We have created a world in which the income of the richest 225 people is equal to the income of three billion poor people.
Three billion.
That’s half the world’s population.
What’s so wrenchingly sad about all of this is not only that the situation exists, but that so many people think it’s okay that it exists. You tell them that the income of the richest 225 people is equal to the income of three billion poor people and they say, “Uh-huh. Okay. So what’s the problem?”
Want to know why there’s so much unrest and violence in the world today? Open your eyes.
Perhaps you already have. Perhaps you already know. Perhaps you understand. Yet it will take more of us understanding, and then deciding to do something about what we understand, for anything to change. If only more of us could open our eyes to the world around us! If only more of us could see our world as an expression of our oneness.
If only our theologies could help more of us do more of this more of the time. But in fact it is our theologies that keep us from experiencing the reality of our oneness, and teach us of separation. And it is our ideas of separation that allow such conditions to continue to exist.
If theology was a physical science–biology, say, or physics–I believe that its data would long ago have been judged unreliable in producing consistent results, even after thousands of years. At the very least, that data would now be questioned.
Does humanity have the courage to question its own data about life and about God? Are humans brave enough to ponder the unaskable What if?
What if something very important that humans think they know about God is simply inaccurate? Would that change anything?
How much more will people allow themselves to endure before they begin looking for the underlying reason that the world is the way it is? And, of those people who say that a belief in God is powerful enough to be the cure for the world’s ills, how many are able to see that an inaccurate belief could be powerful enough to be the cause?
How about you? Where are you with all of this? Given the state of the world today, do you think this may be a good moment to consider some new thoughts about God, about life, and about each other?
How is your own life going? Are things just fine? Or are you meeting more challenges than, frankly, you’d like to be encountering in your relationships, in your career, in your day-to-day movement through life?
As you look at your life and as you look at the world around you, do you think you are seeing a reflection of What God Wants? If not, what do you think that God does want?
Next Saturday we will take a look at that. Next Saturday, I will give you my answer to that question.
(Excerpted and adapted from What God Wants by Neale Donald Walsch, Atria Books.)