Guest Post: Bob Mayer

A quick note of thanks to Bob Mayer for gracing this little blog with his presence. If you haven’t discovered Bob’s work yet, here’s a chance to get started. And if you find you like his stuff, well there’s tons of it to enjoy. Bob’s been a published writer for many, many years, so he’s got a long list of title to choose from. And now, I’ll let Bob take it from here –

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What Influenced me to write I, Judas: The Fifth Gospel?

Sometimes we can work backward to figure things out.  The first review on this book posted on Nook [image error]was:

Anonymous    Posted June 12, 2012

Zero stars

I am catholic and this book is horrible. Judas was a traitor not a prophet get your facts straight you filthy sadist

So.  What to make of that?

My wife and I watch MSNBC and Fox News.  We watch The Daily Show and Colbert.  We read numerous books, newspapers and magazines.  We’re always open to seeing differing points of views on various subjects.  There have been several intriguing books published about the Bible and God.  And some movies made.  One was The Rapture starring Mimi Rogers, and it was a very brutal movie because it played out the event occurring just as Revelations says it will.

What I wanted to do was pit the Brotherhood of fundamentalists and the Triumvirate of the Illuminati.  Faith versus science.  I wanted to show how the two are not mutually exclusive.

One of the tenets of almost all my books, which my business partner Jen Talty has labeled Factual Fiction, is to take facts and then explain them differently.  My Area 51 series is 95% fact.  I just add in a fictional element explaining the cause of the facts differently.  My novel, Duty, Honor, Country: A Novel of West Point & The Civil War is historically accurate, yet the log line for it is:  Sometimes the people who aren’t recorded by history are the ones who make history.

For example, in Judas, I have him explaining to the people sent to kill him the history of the Bible.  So many people use the Bible as the foundation of their faith but they have never studied how it was written and evolved.  Revelations, upon which the Rapture is based, most likely is not written about the Second Coming, but about an event that happened:  the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.  Yet it’s interpreted completely differently.

Also, I’ve always had a hard time reconciling the hatred in the comment above from the first review and people who profess to have faith.  The two don’t jive.

I once asked:  Why do churches lock their doors at night while we have so many homeless?  I got many vicious responses and I certainly understand the problems that would ensue, but if one really digs down to the core message of most religions, it would seem that faith has its limits.  There are Ten Commandments, yet somehow, through convoluted reasoning, churches have come up with ways to be able to violate many of them.

In Judas, one interesting scene is two very rich men, one from each side of the Brotherhood and Illuminati discussing the camel and the eye of the needle and entering heaven.  They finally begin to understand what it really means.

I went to Catholic School from grade one through high school.  I also served as an altar boy.  One of the most striking things I experienced was when we had a visiting priest, an African missionary.  When we were in the sacristy after he said mass one day, we were talking.  And he said that if those people in the pews really believed the words they were mouthing, they would act much differently than they do.  The simple way he said it, even at that age, I could feel his sincerity.  I felt it when he said mass.

I think there’s a lot of good to come out of both faith and science.  But it all has to be tempered with one key thing:  no one has all the answers.  To blindly believe a dogma or ideology is a very dangerous thing.