What God Wants: A Compelling Answer to Humanity’s Biggest Question
About This Book
What God Wants: A Compelling Answer to Humanity's Biggest Question takes as its premise the most fundamental challenge in theology: if God exists and God wants things, then knowing what God wants is the most important possible knowledge — because every act of worship, every moral code, and every understanding of the meaning of life is derived from the answer to this question. Walsch's argument — developed through the characteristic dialogue format and with characteristic directness — is that the devastating answer, confirmed by millennia of religious history, is this: God wants nothing.
This is not a nihilistic claim but a radical and liberating one: Walsch argues that the entire framework of religious obligation, divine requirement, and conditional divine favour rests on the assumption that God is a being with needs and preferences that human beings can satisfy or frustrate — and that this assumption is not only theologically incoherent (how could an infinite being need anything from finite beings?) but is the specific assumption that has enabled every form of religiously motivated violence and oppression. If God wants nothing, then no group can claim divine endorsement for its specific practices, and no group can be in a position of failing to give God what God requires. The implications for how human beings relate to each other across religious difference — and for how they relate to themselves — are examined in careful, compassionate detail.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the 'God wants nothing' argument: the specific theological reasoning through which Walsch arrives at the conclusion that an infinite God cannot have wants or needs in the sense that human religious tradition has generally assumed — and what follows from this conclusion for the understanding of the purpose of prayer, worship, moral behaviour, and religious life in general
• Grasp the violence connection: how What God Wants traces the specific connection between the assumption that God has preferences among human beings (in favour of specific groups, practices, or beliefs) and the history of religiously motivated violence — the specific mechanism through which 'God wants X' becomes the justification for forcing or compelling X, and for harming those who refuse
• Recognise the positive vision: how the 'God wants nothing' teaching points toward a positive understanding rather than merely a negative critique — a God whose relationship with every being is one of unconditional love and unconditional regard, with no transactions, no requirements, and no conditions — and what living from within this understanding of the divine actually feels like
• Learn the reinterpretation of religious practice: how What God Wants invites a completely transformed understanding of the purpose of religious practice — not as the satisfaction of divine requirements but as the expression of the human being's own love and gratitude, and as the development of the qualities (compassion, wisdom, love, service) that constitute the human being's fullest expression of its divine nature
• Appreciate the personal liberation dimension: how the teaching of this book functions not only as a global theological argument but as a personal liberation — the specific forms of religious guilt, compulsion, and fear that dissolve when one genuinely internalises the understanding that God wants nothing from one, and the quality of inner freedom that becomes available when one's relationship with the divine is completely freed from the transactional framework
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