Answer
The book that started it all, Conversations with God, Book 1: An Uncommon Dialogue, spent over two and a half years on the New York Times Best Sellers List, and in 2006 a movie based on the book was released. Conversations with God, or CwG, is the brainchild of Neale Donald Walsch. In 1995, Walsch released the first book in the series, followed by eight more books, all written as dialogues between Walsch and “God.” The basic premise of the series is that God is “speaking” to everyone all the time and that Walsch began listening. He wrote Book 1 while struggling with thoughts of suicide and questions over the meaning of life.
Walsch claims divine inspiration for Conversations with God, saying that God literally spoke to him (“over my right shoulder”), and he wrote down what he heard as if taking dictation. However, in an April 7, 2000, interview on CNN’s Larry King Live, Walsch admitted that he couldn’t be sure that it was God speaking and that the books could have been the product of his own subconscious.
In Conversations with God, Walsch says a voice told him that God is everything and everything is God. Therefore, we humans are “God.” Everyone around you is simply “you” in a different form, and we are all “God.” Here, Walsch is repeating one of Satan’s original lies, “You will be as God” (Genesis 3:5).
Walsch also claims in the Conversations with God series that all life is eternal. Death is “the great illusion.” There is no judgment, no punishment, and no hell, for there is no reason for any of that—there is no sin. After death, a person goes to a different level of existence in order to “continue the evolution of the human soul.” This teaching in Conversations with God is in direct conflict with Hebrews 9:27 and many other passages of Scripture that teach the reality of judgment after death.
Walsch’s defense of Hitler’s actions are in line with his teaching of relativism: Hitler might be called “evil” but only “within the context of our human experience.” And Hitler was commissioned by God “to show humanity to itself for the purpose of lifting humanity above what it had become and what it had sunk to” (Larry King interview, op. cit.). Therefore, in Walsch’s world, Hitler was just another thread of the tapestry and was necessary to help us move forward.
According to the author of Conversations with God, there is no right way to live or one way to come to God. There are many ways, and all of them are equally valid. All the gods of various religions are really the same “God.” Of course, the One True God disagrees with Walsch: “Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel, And his Redeemer, the LORD of hosts: ‘I am the First and I am the Last; Besides Me there is no God’” (Isaiah 44:6).
Walsch insists in Book 1 of Conversations with God that words cannot communicate truth. Instead, truth comes as each individual consults his or her own feelings. Everyone is right, and no one is wrong; contradictory “truths” are not a problem in Walsch’s faulty logic. It’s interesting for a man who has given the world nearly 3,000 pages of words to state that words cannot communicate truth. What, then, is he communicating?
