God Eternal Life and the World according to Bruce

By Bruce Wayne

"God Eternal Life and the World according to Bruce" is a philosophical journey in the quest to find the real meaning of God. This book takes a sincere look at religion and the belief in God and eternal life and tries to understand, or explain how God might, or should be perceived, and how today's perception of God and eternal life might be flawed, or just plain incorrect. This book does not discount the reality of God, but questions how God should be viewed. This book is written in and with a firm belief that God is indeed real, and that life is indeed eternal, but man's perception's of God and eternal life are ambiguous, contradictory, and illogical. This book tries to point out where current spiritual philosophy might be flawed and tries to point out what might be a more logical, or correct way to view such things.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bruce Wayne
• Release date: Mar 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986010007

Bruce Wayne

Born in upstate New York in 1951 to a loving couple from the Greatest generation. I was at the front end of the baby boom and watched much of today's technology come into existence. I started out in a local public elementary school, where I had lots of friends that lived in my town. We all knew each other and were growing up together in a quaint setting which was very “Mayberry-ish”. I ended up being moved to a Catholic School in another town nine miles from my home school and friends where I got an education in resourcefulness and endurance at the hands of some very violent women who beat children and talked about God. In high school, I pretty much kept to myself, but I did try my hand at football, which I wasn’t very good at, and I joined the Ski Team, which I loved and excelled at.  That was my one real success at that point in my life. Upon graduation from high school in 1971, I joined the US Air Force, where I learned aircraft maintenance and worked on large jet aircraft.  I love aviation so I felt like I was finally in my element. I bought a guitar and started to learn music and songwriting, with fantasies of being a popular singer-songwriter, but not all things are meant to be, though I did manage to write some songs and some poetry. One of the dominant topics of thought I kept in my head was about God and eternal life. I also loved to think about the universe and study astronomy. I wanted to know more than anyone could know and understand everything about God and Eternal life.  After many not-so-great jobs and a marriage that ended after 22 years, resulting in the birth of two of the most incredible people I’ve ever known, I decided to go to college at the age of 49, where I got an education in electronics. I was fortunate enough to land a job as a technician building Neutron Detectors for the Spallation Neutron Source, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge TN. Still pondering God and Eternal Life I decided to write a book about my views on man and spirituality. So “Here I Am” in 2022 fulfilling the first step on the path that God is directing me to take.

Book preview

God Eternal Life

and the

World

according to

Bruce

Forward

Iwant to thank you for taking interest in the writings of this project. This is my first book which I intend to follow up with more writings as my thought process expands and grows toward more clarity in what I believe is likely to be a plausible view of God, eternal life and a new world view, or multiversal view, based on those very things. As we start this journey together, I want to make one point very clear. By no means do I believe or think that Christianity is a bad thing. I was raised Christian and most of the people that I know, love and have the greatest respect for are Christians. Christians are very good people as a rule, and Christianity has been a very positive influence on the world and supports the dignity of humanity and morality. Those are very good and necessary things. I love Christians and I believe that they are a positive moral influence around the world. What I am taking issue with, in this writing and in future writings, are what I perceive to be, some of the inaccuracies and incorrect technical views and explanations they teach concerning God, Heaven, Hell and the story Jesus. I will also point out some of the hypocrisies of the Papacy and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian churches that seem to be more interested in what their congregations have in their pockets rather than their hearts and souls. I am sharing my views of God and Eternal Life and how those things might work, with those who are interested, and I am pointing out some of the teachings of various religions that I believe are incorrect, I also understand that for the masses there is a need to simplify these things even to the point of forming a view that is very likely to be incorrect. The depth of the philosophy I will get into going forward is not for the masses. It is for those who meditate, believe that life is eternal, and think very deeply about what God might be and mean to life in general. I love Christians and I am very glad that they are among us here on planet earth. The influence of Christianity here on Earth has a net positive effect. I respect that and encourage everyone to do the same. If we are true to ourselves, then we should come away from this reading with an understanding that we should be able to love and respect all life, human or otherwise. Though I do criticize various ideas, my overall focus is one of Love in God, which equates to Love in Life, and that includes all. Please enjoy the journey.

Introduction

In the Beginning

Ihave long wanted to write a book about life, God, eternity, and all there is throughout space and time. I have a lot of thoughts and I know what I truly believe, but somehow when I try to put such things into written words, I simply don’t know where to start; therefore, I have decided that the best thing to do is just dig in and see what comes out and where it leads. Perhaps I should just turn the task over to God and allow God to write through me. That would be a lot easier.

I will start by saying that I am Roman Catholic, born and raised. I attended eight years of Catholic elementary school at Saint James the Apostle School in Carmel New York. I started there in the second grade in 1958. Sister Laurentine was my teacher, and it didn’t take me long to learn that woman had a serious mean streak and a brutal personality. She enjoyed beating and screaming at small children and I sometimes felt that I was one of her favorite kids to abuse. As it turned out she was not anything unusual at that school, for I spent the next eight years being beaten and abused at the hands of some seriously angry women that spent their weekdays putting the fear of God into a bunch of kids and beating the hell out of them. I grew up fearing Nun’s way more than I feared God, but I took the message about God and eternal life, and eternal damnation very seriously and I spent a lot of time thinking about the lessons I was taught concerning those very topics.   

I think I was about nine years old and in the fourth grade with good ole’ Sister Hanora when I came to learn and understand that God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and that every individual human being, is personally responsible to keep the commandments and avoid sin; and that every individual human being would stand before God in judgment immediately after he or she dies. That is when I started thinking that I needed to get a good understanding of God and His will. It was made clear to me that I am responsible for my soul and my destiny, and I am personally answerable to God when I finally come face to face with Him. 

I will not have a priest, or a pope, or a lawyer to represent me. I will stand before God and answer for my life, deeds, actions, inactions, and misdeeds. 

Some say that Jesus will be there to represent me, but then I was taught that Jesus is God, so in the end, it’s all the same. I was also taught that God was all-loving, all-knowing, and all just, but then, if you stepped too far out of line, he would or could send you to burn in hell for all eternity, with no recourse. Quite a conundrum indeed. I took all these things very seriously and found it a bit scary, confusing and concerning as a child. 

I wasn’t sure exactly what to think about the Lord God. There was a part of me that thought that God must have a personality disorder, because He was presented to me as someone who was bipolar. The idea that he could love me more than my biological father, but then send me to hell for eternity, without notice, without recourse, and without blinking, made me want to know more about Him. I came to believe that there were too many holes in the stories that the nuns were feeding me for them to be true, yet I was obligated to believe them even when they didn’t make any sense at all, which I did. After all, who am I to question God, the nuns, the priests, the pope, and/or the whole Roman Catholic Church? I felt that I couldn’t risk not believing everything that I was taught. The cost of not believing was too high, and these were the very things that my parents believed; therefore, I believed, but I still thought deeply, pondered, prayed deeply and meditated on God, Eternal life, and God’s will. I found it all very contradictory and confusing.

Now, for me to create the illusion that I was a holy and exceptionally good kid would be a lie. I could be sneaky when the situation called for such skills, and I could never get my mind off girls. Impure thoughts dominated my mind on a very regular basis, followed by a bit of guilt, or perhaps fear that I didn’t have quite enough guilt, because I loved looking at and thinking about girls in ways that I was told I shouldn’t. 

I was always respectful and even a bit fearful of girls, and I always kept my thoughts and hands to myself and never acted out on those thoughts, or desires in a harmful or disrespectful way, but still, God knew what I was thinking and according to the gospel and the nuns, my thoughts themselves were sinful even if I didn’t act on them. I had so many conflicting thoughts in my head about God, who He is, and what He expects. Somehow, I always felt that there were many conflicts and contradictions in what I was being taught. 

But when something made no sense at all I was taught to simply have faith.

Today I am past sixty-nine years of age and I have been pondering, meditating, and praying deeply, to and about God, heaven, hell, eternal life, sin, grace, creation, and the Roman Catholic Church for a little more than 60 years. The conclusions that I have come to, which are still developing as I write this story, are much different from what I was taught by the church and all my religious (Catholic) education.   

I suppose that I could spend several pages and a lot of words writing about the different thoughts that I’ve had over the past several decades and layout the pathway that I took to arrive at my current beliefs, or I could just cut to the chase and start talking about how I view these things today. In taking that approach I can still inject history if I deem it pertinent to the topic or the point I am trying to make. Other than that, I will spare you a lot of dry and impertinent details of the journey that brought me to what I believe today.   

Now, depending on how you’ve been brought up and what you’ve been taught, and how strongly you believe all that, I may or may not sound lost or crazy to you. But please stay with me to learn what is the basis of my belief system. Without going through my entire 69 years of history I’ve tried to give you enough information about how seriously I take all of this for you to believe that I’m not just some nut case who has been drinking some crazy kind of Kool-Ade. I want to iterate that everything I think and believe today has come from deep prayer, meditation, and communication with and in God and is inspired by God and revealed to me by God. Everything that I will present to you is based on reason and logic and a firm belief in God. I believe that these things have come to me directly from God. So, let’s start with God.

Chapter 1

Who is God? or What is God? What is the correct question?

The first step in trying to answer any question is to frame the question correctly. If the question is framed incorrectly, then one will be trying to answer the wrong question. It’s very difficult to come up with the correct answer when trying to answer the wrong question. So, let’s start there and ponder the first very pertinent question for thinking about The one and only God. Is the correct question, Who is God? Or, is the correct question, What is God? Many, or maybe most Catholics and other Christian’s view God as an individual Supreme Being. He sits on a great throne, as presented in Revelation, with Jesus sitting at his right hand. God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all just, and all-loving. These are the teachings of Christianity. I used to have that view of God; however, my view today is much different. Though I still believe that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all just, and all-loving, I don’t believe that God is an individual being; therefore, I do not refer to God as He, or Him, or She for that matter. So, if God is not a Who?, then What is God? God has neither an individual personality, nor gender, nor does God have a need, or desire, to pass judgment on us as eternal beings. Instead, God is life. God is all of life everywhere, God is the source of all there is, and God is eternal. 

We come from God, and we return to God. God is life and life is eternal. No beginning and no end. We are in God and God is in us. We are of God, and we are eternal beings, with no beginning, and no end. Despite that, many believe that we only came into being at our conception or birth, then acquire Eternal Life from thereon. I cannot agree with that philosophy. In the first place the word Eternal, or Infinite means always was and always will be; therefore, we are eternal beings in God. As such we always were and always will be. We, along with God, have no beginning and no end. If we are to accept things that are in the Bible, then God said, I knew you before you were in the womb. I have a good and devout Catholic acquaintance who explained to me that passage means that because all time is simultaneous with God, that God knew you would be before you were. But that is not what the Biblical text says. God did not say I knew you would be before you were, it says I knew you- before you were in the womb. I take this to mean that God knew my spirit, or soul, prior to my acquisition of my physical, earthly, human form. 

I believe that I have eternal life and that I have always had eternal life. And the only way that I can have Eternal Life, meaning no beginning and no end, is that I have always had it. So, what are the implications of our lives being eternal in the purest sense, with no beginning and no end? One implication is that our life did not start at conception, because we already were even before conception. Conception only allows our lives to perpetuate in a physical form here on planet Earth. And if that is true, and I believe it is, then that brings us to another topic arising out of the question, What have we been doing for the past several billions or even trillions of years?. When one thinks logically about our time here on Earth one must seriously weigh the likelihood and the logic of hanging around for billions of millennia waiting to be born here and now and living out a life that lasts less than one hundred years for most of us, then when our bodies die, we go to spend eternity in Heaven, or under some bad circumstances, Hell.   

Now, let’s take a moment to think about One Hundred years. 

That’s a long time for us here and now, and most of us will not last that long. But then, if one compares that century to eternity it doesn’t measure up to the blink of an eye. So, after having our eternal life since before the beginning of time, we are given less than a cosmic second to come here and determine our eternal life from here to all future eternity? I can’t help but think that there is a very serious flaw in that line of thinking. First, why would an all-knowing and just God do that to anyone? That doesn’t make any sense to me. Then one must also wonder, what was one doing before coming here to be born and experience this physical life here on planet Earth? When one starts thinking along these lines, it becomes reasonable to consider the likelihood of experiencing life in a physical realm, or perhaps several lives before this one. So, am I now introducing a belief in Reincarnation? Well, yes, in the sense that there is a likelihood that we experience multiple, physical life cycles. But Reincarnation in the traditional sense, based on the belief systems of Eastern Religions? No!   

Let’s consider another form of reincarnation. I’d like to start this topic by making a point that I probably should have opened with, and that is, that there are many religious philosophies in the world. The major ones include Judaism, Christianity, (Roman Catholicism), Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. Of course, I’ve left many others out; however, my point is not to name all the different belief systems but to point out that they all have some amount of validity in their philosophies. At the same time, I believe that none of them have gotten it right. Perhaps one reason is that