Some quotations from one of my books

Several years ago, I wrote a novel called, THE SECOND APPEARANCE. I began writing the book during a Christmas morning and finished it the following Easter morning. The book deals with the issue of reincarnation and whether or not we all have souls that go into newborns after we are deceased. The story is about a nine-year-old boy whom many believed was Jesus Christ who had returned to Earth back in 1945. Despite the fact that he didn't think he was Jesus, and further more, didn't even want to be Jesus, many still believed he was Jesus and for this reason, they made demands upon him which had a terrible effect on his life. I have excerpted quotes from the book that you might find interesting, if not challenging.

I believe that there are people on Earth who are alive that are surely in Hell so why can’t we be in Heaven on Earth while we are alive?

I believe that Heaven is a place of perfection for those who embody the will and the spirit of God. If we are within God’s graces, surely we are in Heaven

I believe that some day, which may well be beyond our lifetimes and the lifetimes of those who are our immediate descendants, there will be a day when those in God’s presence will suffer no pain and little sadness and that our life on Earth will be extended until humans live well beyond a hundred years of age, when there will be enough food for everyone and no one will be in need and there will be peace on Earth. When that time comes on Earth, then our descendants will truly be in Heaven. That concept certainly beats the one that suggests that those in Heaven will be floating on the clouds playing harps and at the same time, being bored beyond measure.

Friendship grows slowly like a beautiful flower. And once it blooms, it is
something to behold. But when that bond between friends is separated because of death, like the beautiful flower that exists no more, it is a time to regret but never to forget.

Humans want to know that their needs are going to be met and that there is at least one person in their lives who is able and willing to help them meet those needs. Love is a deep and tender feeling of affection for or attachment or devotion to a person or persons. It is also a feeling of brotherhood and good will toward other people.

When one truly participates in a sexual act with another human being, the act is one that should include love and devotion to the person who shares the sexual act with another and with those two emotional feelings added to the physical act, then and only then is anyone truly intimate with that other person.

Love is an emotion or a feeling and that there is no one definition of love because the word ‘love’ meant many different things to many different people. Sex, on the other hand, is a biological event and even though there are different forms of sex, most sexual acts have certain things in common and may or may not include penetration. When two people are sexually intimate and in love at the same time, their intimacy both at love and in sex are intensified.

It is commonly said that pride is not a virtue and where it goes, shame is sure to follow. But if you have done a good deed for someone else or accomplished a difficult task given to you, then you should be able to rightly enjoy consuming the tonic of wholesome pride in yourself.

There is no pain that is greater to bear than accepting the responsibility of bringing about a friend’s death through indifference to the friend’s plea for help.

The solidarity of friends, based solely on their personal and voluntary commitment to each other, is unfettered by any selfish concerns. Each gives what the other needs, without thought to cost or reward, simply because of the fact of their friendship.

Past disasters have often been treated by those who experienced them as a series of world judgments but I believe that these past judgments have been culminating into one final judgment which I strongly suspect is far into the future of humankind. That means to me that there will only be one day of judgment and that day is sometime in the future and not now.

Gossip and rumors differ in that the former is a form of hurtful talk between friends, neighbors and even strangers about another person which is usually done behind the victim’s back. Often it is slanderous and done with indifference with respect to destroying someone’s reputation. The latter is simply a repeating of a piece of information that hasn’t really been verified because the person telling it doesn’t know if it is true. It can be as innocuous as repeating a story about someone moving out of town or as harmful as spreading a rumor that someone is a child molester. Gossip that is passed around town is like the collection plate being passed to you in your church. There is no way of avoiding it.

Schools should not refuse to teach the evolutionary theory simply to avoid giving some offense to religion nor should they circumvent my decision by teaching religious faith as science. Put another way, our schools shouldn’t teach as scientific fact or theory any religious doctrine, including ‘creationism’. Of course, any genuinely scientific evidence for or against any explanation of life should be taught. Just as teachers should neither advance nor inhibit any religious doctrine, they should not also ridicule, for example, a student's religious explanation for life on Earth.

Students should have the right to speak to others and attempt to persuade their peers about religious topics just as they do with regard to political topics. But school officials should intercede to stop student religious speech if it turns into religious harassment aimed at a student or a small group of students.

As I personally see it, not everything in the Bible is to be taken at face value. For example, Moses passed a law that anyone that worked on the Sabbath was to be stoned to death. That punishment for that reason hasn’t been applied in a very long time. Times change and so must our beliefs. I don’t accept all of the words of the Bible literally. I do however take many of the passages of the Bible as being most appropriate as a guide to living a proper life.

Just as Jesus’ spirit can be within all of us, does it not follow that the spirit of a loved one who has also passed on would also be in all of those who loved that person? Some believe it’s a guardian angel. Others say it’s the brain’s way of coping under great duress. Whichever, the experiences are eerily similar: the sense of a presence that encourages; advises and even leads a person out of peril. It soothes us like drinking alcohol does to some. Just as we have a biochemical response to stress through adrenaline, there is a mental process that definitely helps us to calm down.

For those of us who do believe that Jesus is amongst us, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t have this belief, no proof is possible.

The definition of man is best described as an entity on our planet composed of body and soul and made in the image and likeness of God. Man then is composed of a material element, the body and a spiritual element, the soul and not as two independent elements that just by coincidence, happen to be joined together while the body grows but rather as two separate elements that by God’s will, are joined together from inception and as such, they need each other to form a complete whole, namely, a human being.

I believe that if Jesus returned to Earth, he appeared both in spirit and in body as a human being, such as he did when he first appeared on Earth almost two thousand years ago.

I don’t think God intends to let the world see Jesus as the world saw him two thousand years ago. I believe that the soul of Jesus will continuously inhabit the bodies of humans beings on Earth perhaps for centuries until God is satisfied that the time has come for Jesus to fulfill his role as Christ, the Son of God. When that time comes, the world will really know that Christ, the Son of God has arrived.

It is my belief that souls, like atoms are indestructible. When we die, our souls do not die but instead they take their places in the bodies of human beings. I believe that when Jesus Christ died and then resurrected and later ascended into Heaven, his soul remained with him because he was still alive in Heaven. I also believe that when God decided that his son should return to Earth, his soul then took its place in other human bodies and that the soul in those human bodies was still the soul of Jesus Christ who had returned to Earth, time after time.

Most religious people believe in life everlasting for the faithful, a continuation of the life force that reaches far beyond the limitations of our mortal flesh. In such belief systems, death is not an end but a transformation where we as human beings shed our corporeal selves at the moment of our demise and that our souls live on to rejoin our Creator. I believe as many do, that once our souls are free from our corporeal selves, our Creator causes them to enter other human beings again at the moment of their conception and live within those human beings until they too are deceased and their souls are transformed again to other human beings being born.

The difference between fact and belief is not unlike seeing the same object from two different directions. If the object is a round ball of the same colour throughout and two people are looking at it from two different directions, then what they see are the same. They would regard their observations of the ball as an undisputed fact of its existence. If however, after standing in different locations, the object they see is a house of different dimensions throughout, then what they each see is obviously different. They may not agree in their interpretation of the description of it but that doesn’t alter the fact that the house they see is still a house even though they differ in their interpretations as to what they saw, and for this reason, their observations of the house is nevertheless, an undisputed fact of its existence and not merely a belief of what they saw.

As much as we believe in the concept of the existence of souls, this life spark remains strictly an article of faith.

I don’t believe that when Jesus appears in front of us again, he will look at all
like he did almost two thousand years ago.

My quarrel with being told that I will be born again, though, at least in its current usage, is that it gives the mistaken impression that transformation is a one-time affair. It predisposes that once you are on Earth as a human being and die, your soul will either go to Heaven or Hell. End of story. I don't believe this is an accurate representation of the scriptures.

We can never be born enough. The soul---the curious soul, at least, the live soul---always longs to be made new. To be ever more whole. To be reborn. Not because we were born wrong the first time, but because God has created our souls to live forever in the bodies of human beings. And so my wish for all of us is that we be born again---and again---and again.

The people in the past, like many alive today, spoke of Heaven as being in the sky or beyond. Heaven, according to ancient Judaism and Christianity, was merely the sky. But then they also thought of Earth as being flat. To them, the term ‘the kingdom of Heaven’ was the same as ‘the kingdom of the sky.’ Modern thinking like the thinking of the past, considers Heaven as the abode of God and the location of the blessed afterlife but it has undergone a hasty retooling in light of modern knowledge, namely that there is no absolute up or down, that the sky and outer space are not up there but out there and Heaven can be out there and even here on Earth. In other words, it is everywhere.

Reincarnation could come about as the souls of deceased persons move from humans at their moment of death to others at the moment of being conceived.

If our spirits live forever and is within each of us in our lifetimes, is it not conceivable that we were here before and that after we are gone, we will be here again?