Introduction

My first book. Boy, there’s a pretentious title if ever there was one. What I was thinking of was what should I name the folder where this was going to reside so that if I took a long break, I would be able to find it. Or if I should drop dead, someone else would find it and be intrigued enough to take a look. Oh well, I had to call it something, so that is as good a title as any I suppose.

What I am trying to accomplish here is to put to paper some thoughts I have had over the years, so that I could share them with a few people to see what they thought of them. Now the usual way of doing this is to make a post on social media and wait for feedback. Well I sort of tried that with a few very basic parts of what’s here and nothing happened. No one was interested, no one commented. Since the mental exercises I went through and continue to go through are basically for my own edification, it didn’t bother me. However, occasionally I have tried to explain some of these concepts to people and have come to the conclusion that I have been doing a very bad job of it. The concepts I am trying to relate are a bit complex and it requires a special skill to convey them to someone accurately. A skill that I hope I can muster through writing.

So, what exactly am I trying to do? Well, this is a bit difficult as well. Let me just say that a few years ago one of my nephews told his mother that he doesn’t believe in God because humans have been as far up in the sky as they could go and have not found any evidence of God or Heaven. At the time I thought that was a logical statement, especially for a child. But that got me thinking, if someone says “There is no God”, that is essentially a statement of reality. In my mind, to believe in God is at least as logical as to not believe in God. Perhaps more so since religion has an intrinsic value completely separate from whether it is true or not. I mean religion certainly provided comfort to me and my wife as we coped with the deaths of three of our children. I would certainly like to think of my deceased children as Saints in Heaven rather than as rotting corpses in a crypt. But the real issue is that if someone was trying to impress a view of reality upon me that I did not share. My immediate reaction would be to simply reject it and state all the reasons why there IS a God that have been taught to me by my years of Religious Instruction. The only problem with that is, I don’t really have any. I am a Religious idiot. I went to Public School. I was raised a Catholic by two parents who really didn’t practice that religion. I went to “Release Time” every Wednesday for two hours to get prepared for the Sacraments I would receive. I remember the nuns telling me things like; “God knew you and all about you before you were even born.” God knows all that you have done.” “God can see everywhere and know everything.” Ideas that at the time I thought were patent nonsense. But after the Seventh Grade that was it. Nothing. So that defense wasn’t going to work. It then occurred to me that if someone was going to try to impose upon me a version of reality that did not include what I still believe in, then perhaps I should investigate by what authority they have that opinion. Meaning that if you’re going to talk to me about what is real, then do you yourself know what is actually real? Does anyone actually know what is real?