Author Garrett Glass to be Featured on Close Up Radio

MORRIS, ILLINOIS, UNITED STATES, December 11, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ -- “Religious people are NOT delusional, while atheists are NOT amoral monsters,” asserts our guest. This is the story of Garrett Glass.

Garrett Glass is the author of several historical fiction books which provide hypothetical, non-canonical accounts surrounding the growth of Christianity as described in The Bible. His first book in the series starts on the day of Christ’s crucifixion, and from there his books contrast two storylines: the path the earliest followers of Jesus took in response to his death; and the response of the Roman empire to this growing threat to imperial rule.

“The focus of these books is to contrast what was going on at the highest levels of the Roman Empire, against the activities and struggles of the small Christian communities that were popping up in all major cities of the Empire,” summarizes Garrett. “My approach is not to make this Biblical, though I am using individuals cited in The Bible. In writing Jehoshua: Signs and Wonders, and Jehoshua: Conflagration, I tried to explain why people at the time would construe certain events as miracles. Fundamentally, my novels follow major events as described in The Bible, or in the historical record.”

Garrett’s upbringing was decidedly religious. As a youth he was an altar boy. In his twenties, however, he became interested in the Jesus Movement of the 1970’s. This was a period when many books were being published that offered historically based, realistic, and non-supernatural explanations for Jesus’ miracles and his supposed resurrection. As a result of this revolutionary thinking regarding Jesus’ life and mission, Garrett became disenfranchised with the Catholic Church and religion.

What followed was a twenty-five-year career in banking, during which he did not practice religion. Writing historical fiction when he retired was at first an experiment for him. “I was thinking of a gift for my wife on our 30th anniversary – something I couldn’t get at a store,” said Garrett. “I set about secretly writing the Jehoshua novels, and discovered how much I enjoyed the freedom of writing fiction, especially in comparison to a career writing corporate memos. I’ve been writing fiction and non-fiction ever since.”

By authoring such books, Garrett’s readers have often assumed Garrett is an agnostic or an atheist. To explain his own religious beliefs, Garrett authored Who Cuts God’s Hair. “I describe myself as an atheist, but with a big difference,” says Garrett. “I believe God exists, but I also know where he lives. In Who Cuts God’s Hair, I establish both where he resides, and why belief in God is the default position of mankind. It’s not delusional to believe in God.”

Who Cut God’s Hair is divided into three parts. “The first part, and what I most would like to emphasize, is a model that I created,” explains Garrett. “The model describes the process that anyone goes through from infancy to adulthood in developing a belief in God. We live in a remarkable age when advances in neuroscience are discovering astounding facts about the brain. I’ve used this research, along with work by prominent mental health experts and sociologists, to develop the model. To the extent I’ve contributed something unique to our understanding of God-belief, it is to discover how this belief develops as a newborn progresses from birth through childhood.”

“For example,” continues Garrett, “we’re taught to believe that someone who lives a moral and worthy life will be rewarded with life after death, in heaven. In fact, life begins in heaven. A newborn enters this world naked, helpless, and utterly dependent on adult caregivers for its survival. To the newborn, its caregivers appear to be all-powerful creators, all-knowing, and all loving, because they provide aid and comfort when summoned. These experiences create a neural imprint for what I call Template God.”

“By age one the infant has three-dimensional sight, and can recognize caregivers as external to them, ‘out there,’ with human characteristics. The gods are now positioned as humans, in space. At age two, when the infant moves into childhood, language develops. Not only can the child communicate with the gods, but the child discovers that the gods can be angry, sometimes punishing the child. To cope with this discovery, children often take on themselves blame for any punishments they receive. This is when guilt develops, which is such a fundamental component of religious belief – guilt in one’s unworthiness in the presence of God.”

“Somewhere from age four to eight a terrible trauma occurs. The child learns that the gods have clay feet – they are not immortal, they are not perfect, they are not all powerful, because they will die someday, as will the child. This discovery is equivalent to the child taking a bite from the apple in the Garden of Eden. The discovery of death results in the expulsion from heaven. At this stage, which I call Unmasked God, children learn a fundamental skill essential to human survival – psychological repression of thoughts of death. One other beneficial thing occurs in the brain at this time, known as infantile amnesia, in which the synapses that connect neurons are pruned. As a result, all of our infant and childhood memories remain stored in our brain, and influence our behavior unconsciously, but we cannot summon these memories consciously.”

Garrett describes the result of this trauma as the creation of a life-long yearning for a return to heaven – a “God-shaped hole in our heart,” as Evangelical Christians describe it. Since God was once real in our lives, we create an illusion of God, living “out there” in the cosmos, who will grant us eternal life in heaven. The majority of people today believe in God and live their lives in religious faith, and according to Garrett there is nothing delusional about this. These people are responding to the promptings of their unconscious mind. About a third of adults question or grow out of the illusion, but it is wrong to think these individuals are evil because they are godless.

Concludes Garrett: “I find agnostics and atheists are just as moral as religious people even though they have no god. And why is that? Because the hundreds of thousands of experiences receiving love, sustenance and knowledge from infancy through childhood motivates all of us as adults to extend these same gifts to others.”

Close Up Radio will feature Garrett Glass in an interview with Jim Masters on Wednesday December 13th at 1pm Eastern

Listen to the show on BlogTalkRadio

If you have any questions for our guest, please call (347) 996-3389

For more information, please visit https://whocutgodshair.com/

Lou Ceparano
Close Up Television & Radio
+1 631-850-3314
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