GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
238. What’s Your Spiritual Story: Ray Silverman on Swedenborg, Modern Revelation, and Eternal Love
In this episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, Dr. Jerry L. Martin talks with Dr. Ray Silverman, a Swedenborgian minister who grew up in a passionately atheist home but always felt a hidden connection to God.
From secretly praying under the covers as a child to later discovering Emanuel Swedenborg’s writings on eternal marriage and universal salvation, Ray shares how his journey led him beyond traditional religion into a deeply personal spiritual life.
Together, Jerry and Ray explore what it means to be spiritual but not religious, how modern revelation continues today, and why spiritual transformation often begins with questioning inherited beliefs. Ray recounts the pain of being disowned by his father when he became a minister, and the joy of finding a faith that embraces love as eternal.
They discuss how Swedenborg’s teachings align with insights in God: An Autobiography, affirming that God speaks to each person in a way they can understand.
Dr. Silverman, author of Rise Above It: Spiritual Development for College Students, also shares how he applies the Ten Commandments in modern life without dogma, helps others overcome “idols” like procrastination, and guides people to attune to divine purpose through everyday moments.
Whether you’re curious about Swedenborgian theology, interested in modern revelation, or seeking your own spiritual story, this episode offers profound reflections on faith, love, and the ongoing presence of God.
Other Series:
The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:
The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue.
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Scott Langdon 00:17: This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, a dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography as Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L Martin. He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions and God had a lot to tell him. Episode 238.
Scott Langdon 01:01: Hello and welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I’m Scott Langdon, your host. And on today’s episode, Jerry has a conversation with our good friend, Ray Silverman in the second installment of our new series: What's Your Spiritual Story? Though raised in a devoutly atheist household, Ray never lost a connection with God and his deep belief in love would eventually lead, as it did in a similar way for Jerry, to a newfound depth in his desire to know God and God’s ways more clearly. Next week Jerry and I return with an all new edition of What's On Our Mind. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:02: Well, I'd like to welcome Ray Silverman, who is one reader of the God Book I have the pleasure of having met and learned his fascinating life story. Ray, it's good for you to be here and, as I remember you can correct me if I'm misremembering, but your youth you described in a kind of Zorba the Greek way. You know we all start out somewhere. Where we start isn't where we journey to later, but you might just share your story, your spiritual journey, wherever you want to start.
Dr. Ray Silverman 02:44: Yeah well, I don't know exactly where to begin. I think it began when I was a young boy growing up in Providence, Rhode Island. My father was a zealous, very zealous atheist. He hated religion with a passion. And if he knew that I was praying to God uh, under the covers he’d get really, really mad upset yeah so I kept that a secret from him. But I always believed in God and I don't know why. I just believed that there was a God and I would pray every night.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 03:24: It felt natural to you.
Dr. Ray Silverman 03:26: It became natural, and I have never doubted it's just that there's a God. Even though I grew up in a staunchly atheistic family. When I met my wife, I felt that God had brought us together and that he would keep us together forever.
Dr. Ray Silverman 03:49: But you know, this was something that I had read in poetry. I was an English major in college and got my graduate work in English. And there's Elizabeth Barrett Browning. You know “I will love thee… I love thee to the length and depth and breadth my soul shall reach. And if God so choose, I will love thee better after death.” There it was. There's the singers, like Johnny Mathis, “I'll love you till the twelfth of never.” And you know it's right out, right out there.
Dr. Ray Silverman 04:24: You know love will never end, endless love. In theology, especially in Christian theology, it seemed like Jesus said in the resurrection they are neither married nor given in marriage, but shall be as the angels. So, when I met my wife, I did believe God brought us together and He'd keep us together forever. And I thought, well, if it's not in the Bible, I'm going to have to write a book about this. So my wife and I started our research and I found a book in the library by Emanuel Swedenborg, a Christian theologian, and within the first couple of chapters he's talking about eternal marriages and he's interviewing these angels in heaven a man and a woman who are called one angel, who have been married for thousands and thousands of years. He said to my wife we have found it. This is it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 05:25: So this spoke to both of you.
Dr. Ray Silverman 05:26: Yes. And one of Swedenborg's central premises, even though he's a Christian theologian and believes that God manifested in the world as Jesus Christ. Swedenborg in the 18th century was teaching that you can be saved in any religion. You can go to heaven in any religion. It just requires a belief in something higher than yourself, God, life according to the commandments. I love that. I love that. You know. It spoke to everything that I ever believed.
Dr. Ray Silverman 05:59: I tried to bring this message to my father, who would not accept it, well, I accepted it so much that I became a Swedenborgian minister, and when I did that, that was like the nail in the coffin for my father. He disowned me. He didn't talk to me for the rest of his life.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin: Well, that's painful.
Dr. Ray Silverman: I know that we'll meet in heaven and we'll have much to talk about.That's a very condensed version of my story.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:32: Yeah, well, that's amazing. And it's interesting how, at the search for love, you skip to falling in love with your wife. For me, I have a story similar. As you know, the God book starts off with a love story. It starts off with falling in love with my wife. And my not having even believing in love. I believed in compatibility or something like that. You put your two profiles side by side and see if you're compatible, common interest and whatever. But there were many years before that, and so it was a long journey to find the right person. What was that journey like for you, was it a wasteland? The journey toward finding your wife.
Dr. Ray Silverman 07:25: Oh well, you know, my parents, for example, didn't talk to each other at all.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin: So you didn’t have a model.
Dr. Ray Silverman: Yeah, and it was like Raymond tell your mother and Raymond tell your father. So I was like the middle person. I was the youngest child, I was the last one in the family. They were still not talking. I had this terrible sense of a marriage that didn't work, and part of my prayer was dear God, help mommy and daddy become friends. Eventually they did become friends.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin: That's very hard on the child.
Dr. Ray Silverman: Yeah and then I had relationships before I met my wife that you know were so painful.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:09: Really.
Dr. Ray Silverman 08:10: I never wanted to repeat those again.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:12: Yes.
Dr. Ray Silverman 08:13: Met my wife. We were both determined to make this marriage work.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:17: Yes.
Dr. Ray Silverman 08:18: Not repeat any of our prior relationships, and we knew somehow that the only way it would work is to put our lives in the hands of God, who would keep us growing together.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:29: So at the time you came across God: An Autobiography, you were a Swedenborgian minister, and I always tell friends that I discovered that, like the Vatican of the Swedenborgians is right here in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, this is really, really one of the great centers worldwide.
Dr. Ray Silverman 08:49: Except Swedenborg's, not our pope.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:53: Well, it's not a pope you don't exactly have a pope but he was, in addition to a great Christian style thinker, and a thinker even larger than that, he had visions, right, he had visions?
Dr. Ray Silverman 09:06: He's another revelator, and that's why it was no problem for me to see you as part of that long line of revelators. You know, God is never without a spokesperson, and who it'll be we never know.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 09:21: Right, it's an interesting question because a lot of people think you know, as soon as God, you might say, finished writing the New Testament, he retired and moved to Florida. You know, God just went silent at that point, except for, well, everybody knows if they have a life of prayer or moments where a sort of miracle seemed to come into your life or some special help. Well, God seems to be kind of active still. But as far as revelation, they always think just revelation stopped and one understands why religion wants to close it off at some point.
Dr. Ray Silverman: Yeah. Isn't that interesting?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin: An institutional interest in that and I assume Swedenborg had challenges as he comes along saying, well, I've got further word from the divine and we now have to put this further word into some kind of large picture.
Dr. Ray Silverman 10:22: Exactly right. In fact, this is one of the things that impressed me about the God book that you're saying in the God book, or God is saying to you, what Swedenborg is reporting in case after case after case. Also, I love this idea that you just don't take it at face value. You know maybe what was given to the ancients, this was written in the old testament or even the new testament, and everything has a much deeper meaning. And if you can get to the center and to the core, we come into much more of a oneness with one another, and so God is always trying to bring us more and more people into that core.
Dr. Ray Silverman 11:04: The scripture that comes to mind is Jesus saying I have many things to reveal to you, but you cannot bear those things now. And in the God book, God is telling you Jerry, there's a lot of information that people were just not ready to receive. They received it only in the way that they could, but it'll be opened and clarified further in further generations of time, according to their readiness. And that is totally what I believe, totally what Swedenborg teaches and what totally makes sense.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:39: Well, it makes sense. So of course I had this experience. I don't know, you know, I was unlike you. I'd never believed in God, didn't feel and didn't even have a lively God question. It was not of interest to me. I had a worldview worked out and it had its own nobility, you might say, and so I was doing fine until God spoke to me. And then I thought oh, my philosophy was wrong.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 12:06: It's like new data here comes in, there's a God who can actually not just preside over the universe as some abstract being, but actually talk to people and show an interest in their lives. That was the kind of God who spoke to me, who's very interested in Jerry's life and Ray's life and the life of each and every person. And you know it's a very different vision, but it did mean that I had a lot of questions and the kind of skepticism. So I'm always sort of pushing with question, question and sometimes I'm told, Ray, just the way you just formulated it, I would ask a question and I was told, Jerry, you're not ready yet. You would not understand it if I told you. In fact, you're not ready yet to hear about that. Has the God book affected you in any way since reading it?
Dr. Ray Silverman 12:58: I think so. I think that's a good question. Well, let me back up a little. One of the things in the God book that I really love is why God picked you. And He said I picked you because you're an ordinary nice guy. You're not a crank. You're a distinguished professor of philosophy. You're a director of the National Endowment for the Humanities. You would not be considered. You know, one of those people who's hearing voices. I hadn't read that yet, but when I met you at the American Academy of Religion and you were doing Theology Without Walls and you began to speak, I thought here's a real nice person. Here's a person who has not been affected by what I'll call academic snobbery.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 13:58: Oh, right, right, it's valuable for me that after my years of full-time academic work, I spent some time, you know, I was running a higher ed organization when I met my wife, and I did some things in Washington I was a congressional fellow and so it was very helpful to get out of that academic cocoon. Everyone's sitting around thinking we're the smartest people in the world. And you meet other people in other walks of life and you discover, well, they may not be sort of theoretically smart in the sense that they can talk about Aristotle and Plato and this and nuclear physics, but they have lots of smarts and, even more important, you know, in their area of life. And, even more important, they often have a lot of life wisdom which a lot of professors are deficient in.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 14:48: I would meet people who were, I just thought these people have really thought about life and what they're doing and have come up with sound answers. And isn't that sort of what it's about? Is that search for sound answers to life's questions, but I did wonder why me? Because I thought wouldn't you want, well, someone who was a believer, for openers?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 15:22: But maybe in our age it was useful. If God's going to talk to somebody, better talk to an agnostic who has questions. Because this is where most people are in that boat. Even if they're sort of believers, they're in the middle of a culture that's a culture of unbelief, the public culture.
Dr. Ray Silverman 15:41: This fall, I've been invited to speak at the Parliament of World Religions, and I'm on a panel that's called Spiritual but Not Religious.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 15:54: Okay, yes.
Dr. Ray Silverman 15:56: And so what I am planning to say at some point, I'd like to introduce it in a way that's not confrontative or not in any way disparages anybody's sense of spirituality.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:10: Right.
Dr. Ray Silverman 16:10: Quote Swedenborg, who says spiritual life is acquired solely by a life according to the commandments in God's word.
Dr. Ray Silverman 16:21: And that is not what people usually have in mind when they say I'm spiritual.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:28: No, no, it is usually a oozy woozy kind.
Dr. Ray Silverman 16:29: In fact, when someone says, well, I'm trying to live my life according to God's commandments, that sounds religious, that sounds like what they rejected. And Swedenborg saying, no, no, that's what's spiritual. It's upside down for so many people. But my discovery has been, as you say in the God book, that God gave us the commandments, the ethical and moral laws of life, for a reason. He also gave us Hinduism and discovering of the Atman and the inner life, for a reason.
Dr. Ray Silverman 17:08: These do not compete with each other. They're all various ways of looking at the truth. So the God book supports, sustains and clarifies that in a beautiful way, in a beautiful way. So what I'd like to say to you and maybe if this gets broadcast to others is when I discovered Swedenborg's explanation of how the Lord really intends for two people to stay together forever, and then he explains it in depth.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 17:39: Yes.
Dr. Ray Silverman 17:40: It confirms something that I believe in my heart of hearts and in the God book when you write about how there's God giving a certain revelation to the people of Eastern religions.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 17:54: Yes.
Dr. Ray Silverman 17:56: Another religion, another kind of revelation to people of a more Western orientation don't compete with each other, these don't even contradict each other, but they augment and complement each other in the most beautiful way, and this is the time for that. So when you say that in the God book, it confirms something that I believe in my heart of hearts. So one of the functions of the God book is to let people know these little intuitions you've had are real.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 18:26: Yes, that's right and the journeys are real journeys, even though they're in different cultures, with different vocabularies, different rituals, even different philosophical you know, whole philosophical systems, they're valid roots to the divine. And of course, the striking thing in the God book is that the divine, the ultimate divine reality, is itself multifaceted and different cultures. You know, the Atman relates to the Brahman. Well, that's one aspect of divinity and that isn't achieved by some other relation. That's why the people of Israel forming a covenant and so forth, that's another relation to divinity and I guess I, extrapolating from that, I came to appreciate, well, down to the individual, you know, there's probably a destiny for Ray and for Ray's wife, and so, you know, for each person, and it might be to join this or that religion, since all the good ones, they're not all necessarily good. There's no blanket endorsement in the God book, but the ones you usually think of as major religions do have in them elements that are, you know, might say, give you direct access to what's ultimate in reality.
Dr. Ray Silverman 19:50: Right.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 19:52: And that's a wonderful vision. Jesus plays a huge role, as you know, because I also had an encounter with Jesus, and it is revisited at the end. But that never negates or nullifies the other religions and the kind of access they give you to the divine and the aspects of the divine that they help actualize. You know that help manifest in the world in which we live.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 20:00: But your notion of commandments sort of struck me. I know when we first met at a conference we sort of exchanged books of some kind and you gave me your book on Ten Commandments, which is a teaching tool as well as an interesting read. And I think you're quite right, Ray. Especially the younger generation do not like authoritarianism, they don't want to be told this is a set of rules. You come in this building, you sign up for a set of rules. We're going to boss you around, tell you how to live and mainly condemn you for living the wrong way. But it seems to me you teach right out of the Ten Commandments, right out of the text, and yet it seems that your view is an open and expansive way of using the Ten Commandments. Does that sound right to you as a characterization?
Dr. Ray Silverman 21:17:I love how you said that. I wish I could quote that and put that on the back of the book. Oh by the way, I've got the new cover.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:29: Rise Above It: Spiritual Development for College Students by Ray Silverman. And what's great about it, I think, is exactly what young people want. They don't want rules as if they were you know in the military code of justice or something you know how you've got to behave. They want something that… they want people to speak out of their experience.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:55: I tried the drug lifestyle and here's what it led to and in my experience, it wasn't a winner. You know, it did not bring me happiness. It brings me a temporary semblance of happiness, and then the opposite, and so on. You go through the different areas of life and you do that with the students by having them write journals or something. So they're thinking about the commandments which you interpret very expansively. So idol can be you know, I have no other Gods before me and you ask the students well, what other Gods are there in your life? What are the idols, in effect, that you're worshiping? And people start thinking about all kinds of things that are going on. It can be sex, it can be careerism, it can be popularity. I want to be popular, I want to one-up the other person. It can be all these. And you said, often it's procrastination, which is a surprising answer to me. Many of them procrastinate and that's a kind of idol for me. I'm sort of living for procrastination you know,
Dr. Ray Silverman 22:57: We do a brainstorming early in the course of you know, what things stand in the way of their being their best self yeah that's a nice way of getting to: You shall have no other gods before you. What? Who do you want to be? What kind of a person do you want to be? They'll all say I want to be patient, I want to be kind, I want to be generous. You know all those virtues. They already know that well, what stops you? What prevents it? Well, their anger, patience, lust, laziness. But the one that becomes number one for the past 18 years has been procrastination.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 23:39: Amazing, amazing.
Dr. Ray Silverman 23:41: Yeah, and then you know you can get within the procrastination to all the various branches and roots of that. To all the various branches and roots of that. Maybe fear of failure, maybe just a real kind of lazy selfishness, all kinds of things, but procrastination is the umbrella that they mostly choose.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 24:00: You've been teaching this course for many years and therefore the book that you showed us, Rise Above It, you know quotes from many of these student journals because you've had quite a collection and they're very real life and very moving and we've all been there in some respect or other at some point in our lives of the very things these young people are going through. But I know you're also looking for opportunities to sort of spread this and maybe train other people to do the same thing or to do it in different venues or something like that. What better than to start from the Ten Commandments than to do this in this very open and personal way.
Dr. Ray Silverman 25:25: You see, this is so nice of you because I thought that this interview was going to be to help you promote the God book but you’re helping me promote my book, which is exactly what God wants.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 25:38: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I'm often told, of course I have to promote the God book. I feel a divine assignment to do that, and what better way to promote it than to bring on wonderful readers like you, that's true, but in the end, you know what's the God book about? It's about each of us living a life in as close a connection as we can to divine purposes.
Dr. Ray Silverman 26:07: You call it attunement, which is a very beautiful word.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin: Yes, yes, yes, and it's sometimes. It's funny because I'm not a very musical person, certainly have no talents myself, but musical images are often given me. In the book that the attunement is one point described. I think it might have been the context of Taoism or something like that, but I don't think it's necessarily limited to that, something like that, but I don't think it's necessarily limited to that. But, as you know, almost like one of the if you've ever seen, you know, improv musicians who kind of maybe it's jazz or maybe it's something else, but they're kind of playing around, picking up each other's themes, responding and chiming in, and so a lot of the sense is, well, you're kind of going with the flow, going with the harmony and the harmony with other people, the harmony with divine purposes, because you know the road in your life is always taking twists and turns. So the purpose, divine purpose for you five years ago may not be the divine purpose for you tomorrow, with a new set of challenges. So you kind of have to stay attuned, have to keep that connection and I don't know if harmony isn't the only key, but that's one of them. And usually if you're doing the right thing, I mean it may also sometimes have to fight. I'm told that you know you don't care about good and evil unless you fight for good and against evil, you know, in those situations where it confronts you, but for normal life you're looking for a high degree of harmony, being in sync with God and acting lovingly to other people. So in your system, you know, you look at your life. In one way the whole life was a life about love right. You need to find the right woman and, having found her, an awful lot flows out of that love.
Dr. Ray Silverman 28:08: Right, exactly like seven children and the kind of teaching. Some books came to mind while you were talking about jazz or improvisation. We tend to think of our life as a carefully plotted story, you know, with a beginning, a middle, a rising action, climax, denouement. Sometimes stages, yeah, but it's not like that. And so I took a course once where one of the textbooks was called The Jazz of Leadership, and it was really about just being sensitive to everyone's moment where they take the lead.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 28:52: Yes, yes.
Dr. Ray Silverman 28:53: And another book I read a long time ago. You probably remember it was The Celestine Prophecy.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 28:58: Yeah, I never read it, but it was, all over the place, a huge bestseller.
Dr. Ray Silverman 29:03: And one of the things that stuck out to me in the book was he talked about dialogue or conversation in a group, and he says, at any given moment, someone is supposed to speak. Yes, this is sort of like Quakerism, isn't it? You know the idea of being moved by the divine, but I use it in my classrooms as a teacher. I say, if you feel called to speak, I want you to speak, but notice, you might be called to just be quiet and listen. Any given moment, the person who's speaking is the person who should be speaking, and let's see if we can honor that, and it's been marvelous. But that's sort of like the jazz of leadership in the classroom. It's the way God orchestrates our life. I don't know why I bumped into that person today and why this happened. You know that kind of ongoing synchronicity is really trust in the ongoing presence of God as our co-partner.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:06: Yes, that's the way my life has changed. At first someone asked has this changed your life? And I actually first said no, I'm kind of the same guy I was before. I started thinking in more minute ways. You might say that I'm nicer in traffic than I was before. But another way is I do look for the divine signal so that what I would have dismissed as a coincidence I now pause over, I don't rush to connect them just because, oh, everything's got to connect to everything, but I pause and think is God sending me a signal. Putting this in my path? Is this somebody I'm meant to stop and help, for example? Or just other kinds of things like if I suddenly have a thought or an urge, I wonder has this been sent to me, this idea?
Dr. Ray Silverman 31:00: Yeah, that's a new way of thinking In Christianity that would be called being born again. You're not the old Jerry Martin, you're a new Jerry Martin. Everything is now filtered through the lens of is this what God would like me to do? God would like me to say, and maybe the old Jerry Martin was a nice person who said is this something kind to say? It's just different, it's different. And then the whole thing about being born again, in Eastern thought you could call that reincarnation. Now you have another chance to start over, right, and I love that. Like sometimes my wife will remind me of something I did many, many years ago and I can say well, I'm not that way, that's not me. She’ll say no, Ray, that's not you, you're not that person anymore, and I love that.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 31:58: Yes.
Dr. Ray Silverman 31:59: It's a chance to be a brand new person in this lifetime.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 32:02: Yes, yes.
Dr. Ray Silverman 32:03: Yes, that's called blowing out the flame of ego. Yes, that's nirvana. Yeah, nair, to blow vana out, to extinguish the flame of self-will. And what flows, flows in his place is being led by God, and that's an amazing transformation. So there it is. That's the Eastern language to describe Christian born again. But it's all one thing.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 32:37: The Christian language is you go through a kind of death right to be born again the, the death of the old or Adam.
Dr. Ray Silverman 32:54: The old man and he's always been there. Whether you were in your old man or not, but now the pipeline is cleared out. God's flowing and doing the work through you and it feels like you..
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 33:09: Oh yeah, it's not that it's more you than before, because there was a lot of clutter that really wasn't you. It was acquired from your surroundings or propped up as a kind of Potemkin village self-image or something like that.
Dr. Ray Silverman 33:26: And it's all there in the God book and it's only like about 350 pages.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 33:32: It's all there.30 volumes. Well, the original edition, the first draft, was twice that length. But I saw a lot of it were minor prayers and daily stuff and even repetitive, because I often would be retracing ground and got it down to whatever it is 350.
Dr. Ray Silverman 34:08: And even that, you know we're living in a bite-sized world with everything is little short messages on Snapchat or text, and for people to sit down and open a book and spend some time in contemplation, that's radical.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 34:23: Yes, and I always feel I don't know how you feel, Ray that God: An Autobiography is a book to be read slowly, you know, not to just sit down over the weekend. Some people I know have read it that way and felt they got a lot out of it, but it seems to me it's the kind of book where you read a chapter and then mull it over.
Dr. Ray Silverman 34:42: A lot to think about. Not just to think about, a lot to put into your life.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 34:54: Yeah and that the challenge that in fact, I'm trying to think through more carefully how to make the God book more accessible in terms of life lessons. They're there, but they're sort of implicit, the way they tend to be implicit in most of scriptures, of most of the You need to have what are the key quotes, for example, that would help guide life? And they're there and they guided my life and are just learning how to pray. I talked to one person he's jewish and a learned man, classicist, knows ancient languages, and how has this affected you? And he said well, I pray differently. Yeah, because before there was. You know, these kind of ritualistic set prayers and the style of course of the God book is dialogue and it's praying to a God who's listening. It's personal and listening to you. In particular, when Ray prays, God is listening to Ray. And Ray has something to say, and God will send signals back in light of that. So that's one message is to maybe reconceive how you're not relating to a religion, you're relating to God.
Dr. Ray Silverman 36:13: Oh yeah, that's right. That's very good, that's right, the whole idea that God is directly present for everyone, get to God through mediators is very powerful, very powerful.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 36:30: Yes, and that's life transforming.
Dr. Ray Silverman 36:33: Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 36:33: Yeah, that changes your life. Well, thank you, Ray. I think we're a little past our time, but it's time very well spent, yeah, and I really appreciate your giving this time to me. I just find you a fascinating person with a fascinating life and wonderful God-inspired projects, so thank you very much.
Dr. Ray Silverman 36:55: Well, thank you very much and blessings to you and blessings on the success and promulgation of the God Book.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 37:03: Okay, thank you.
Scott Langdon 37:32: Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with episode one of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God's perspective as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I'll see you next time.
Spiritual But Not Religious, Swedenborg, Modern Revelation, Eternal Marriage, Ten Commandments, Spiritual Growth, Overcoming Procrastination, Attunement, Reincarnation, Ray Silverman, Healing Family Patterns, Spiritual Transformation