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A review by tackman_babcock
Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1 by Neale Donald Walsch
1.0
It turns out God sounds a lot like a blithering idiot from Oregon exploiting a background in marketing to make a fair bit of money by basically telling well-meaning but mentally lethargic people what they want to hear.
The sections on 'how do we know this is actually god talking?' are particularly demented, basically: a thinly-veiled and smug 'why should you care?' response, and then moving on swiftly to avoid the fairly obvious objection 'because you are asking me to pay you money to tell me what god says, and it kinda matters as to whether your work is a total fraud and you're bilking people out of their money and, you know, lying to them'.
The rest of the book veers between well-meaning pap, complete nonsensical word-salad, and attempted retreads of gnostic / newage-y bollocks from the 70s about how desiring things or fearing things or where you put your attention changes the universe itself, without the slightest attempt to provide any good reasons to think that any of that is true. I guess this might seem impressive to anyone who has never encountered these kinds of pollyanna outlooks on life before and imagines that because some gomer has published them in paperback the thoughts contained must be 'new' or exciting or somehow remotely viable.
What none of these authors ever deal with is the actual real-life damage their ideas do, like teaching people that when bad things happen that those people attracted it (even in part) and are therefore somehow in some part at fault; or how teaching people that the universe will unfold a certain way according to where we place our desires or attentions anaesthetises us from grappling with the real-world actual things we could be doing for the people in our lives that are suffering or in need.
Overall it's very much like becoming deranged, imagine an opium trip without the fun, or perhaps the dim fog of a traumatic head injury - just an cloying invitation to retreat from the labor of trying to figure out the world or affect it in any way, an abandonment of the irritating task of figuring out which parts of the world are good or bad or perhaps (mon dieu!) in need of some changes. And like devoting your life to pursuing alcoholism, the few benefits are ephemeral as you discover they were only ever in your own mind, and you simply notice less how your irresponsile choices make life worse for everyone else around you.
That isn't to say there is no value at all in the new religious movements. For example, I'd agree instantly that there's some real, honest-to-god (heh) benefits to be had with cracking apart the western mindset and contemplating the ways that our neurotic internal monologues obscure our sense of identity, and there is clear good to be found in pursuing ways (like meditation) to be more present moment-to-moment. But this book, Conversations with God isn't that. It's doing a great deal more harm than good, it isn't remotely interested in whether it's true or not, and it wants to sell you feel-good pap, even if that means you never again to stop to ask whether certain parts of life are doing 'more harm than good'.
The sections on 'how do we know this is actually god talking?' are particularly demented, basically: a thinly-veiled and smug 'why should you care?' response, and then moving on swiftly to avoid the fairly obvious objection 'because you are asking me to pay you money to tell me what god says, and it kinda matters as to whether your work is a total fraud and you're bilking people out of their money and, you know, lying to them'.
The rest of the book veers between well-meaning pap, complete nonsensical word-salad, and attempted retreads of gnostic / newage-y bollocks from the 70s about how desiring things or fearing things or where you put your attention changes the universe itself, without the slightest attempt to provide any good reasons to think that any of that is true. I guess this might seem impressive to anyone who has never encountered these kinds of pollyanna outlooks on life before and imagines that because some gomer has published them in paperback the thoughts contained must be 'new' or exciting or somehow remotely viable.
What none of these authors ever deal with is the actual real-life damage their ideas do, like teaching people that when bad things happen that those people attracted it (even in part) and are therefore somehow in some part at fault; or how teaching people that the universe will unfold a certain way according to where we place our desires or attentions anaesthetises us from grappling with the real-world actual things we could be doing for the people in our lives that are suffering or in need.
Overall it's very much like becoming deranged, imagine an opium trip without the fun, or perhaps the dim fog of a traumatic head injury - just an cloying invitation to retreat from the labor of trying to figure out the world or affect it in any way, an abandonment of the irritating task of figuring out which parts of the world are good or bad or perhaps (mon dieu!) in need of some changes. And like devoting your life to pursuing alcoholism, the few benefits are ephemeral as you discover they were only ever in your own mind, and you simply notice less how your irresponsile choices make life worse for everyone else around you.
That isn't to say there is no value at all in the new religious movements. For example, I'd agree instantly that there's some real, honest-to-god (heh) benefits to be had with cracking apart the western mindset and contemplating the ways that our neurotic internal monologues obscure our sense of identity, and there is clear good to be found in pursuing ways (like meditation) to be more present moment-to-moment. But this book, Conversations with God isn't that. It's doing a great deal more harm than good, it isn't remotely interested in whether it's true or not, and it wants to sell you feel-good pap, even if that means you never again to stop to ask whether certain parts of life are doing 'more harm than good'.