Click Here To Purchase A Copy Of Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness: The Truth About the Vatican and the Birth of Islam

Today, Norm Goldman, Publisher & Editor of  Bookpleasures.com is pleased to have as our guest, Gary Dale Cearley author of Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness: The Truth About the Vatican and the Birth of Islam.

Gary Dale is an American who has been living in Vietnam for over ten years and he refers to himself an avid libertarian.

Good day Gary Dale and thanks for participating in our interview.

Norm:

What made you want to live in Vietnam and how easy or difficult was it for you to adjust to a much different culture than the USA? As a follow up, how and what kind of employment did you find in Vietnam?

Gary Dale: 

Well, I studied Vietnamese in Monterey, California, at the Defense Language Institute back in my days in the United States Navy.  I had to take a special test for this called the Defense Language Aptitude Battery,

or D-LAB as the military called it.  I did exceptionally well and so I was offered a chance to study at Monterey.  I was really into the idea of studying at one of the most famous language schools in the world.  Years later, after the Navy and a stint in Korea, I was offered an opportunity to go to Vietnam. 

There weren’t many Americans, or any westerners for that matter, who had Vietnamese language skills.  Of course, I jumped on it!  Vietnam was a place for pioneers back then.  Daily blackouts.  Internal visas required from the police if you wanted to go anywhere over night or outside of town. 

Local people weren’t allowed in your house after 10 pm.  A Vietnamese manager in a large company in those days made about eighty United States dollars per month.  And there were still lots of Russians there.  Man, all that is gone forever.  Vietnam is one of the fastest growing places in the world right now in almost every way.

But after nearly fifteen years I am “morphing” over to Thailand.  It isn’t so much that I don’t like Vietnam anymore.  Au contraire!  I came here on a project, another business venture.  It is working out that most of my time is spent in Bangkok these days.  In many ways this is a positive as well.  I find more intellectual stimulation here. 

In Vietnam I was drinking lots more and staying out late all of the time.  In Thailand I am getting a good bit more balance.  And I really, really need that!  I love and miss many of my friends in Vietnam though.  But it is only just over an hour flight from Bangkok so we do still see one another.

Norm:

What motivated you to write Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness: The Truth About the Vatican and the Birth of Islam and can you briefly tell us about the book?

Gary Dale:

Well, that is an interesting question.  Where to start?  First off, around thirty years ago a religious fraudster named Alberto Rivera was busy making his way through life by coming up with different histories, stories, religious alliances and hoaxes in order to scrape his way through life. 

He went through a number of denominations, congregations…  You name it.  Rivera, in typical fraudster style, had to make his stories more and more outrageous in order to attract more and more gullible people.  His name spread wide enough that at some point Rivera and Jack Chick, a publisher of some very controversial religious tracts, came together like magnets. 

Jack Chick is a world reknowned evangelical tract maker, one of the ‘Hell fire and brimstone’ kinds.  No, actually, it would be fair to say that many of the tracts that Chick has printed are extremely biased and bigoted. 

He spreads hatred for Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Muslims…  The list goes on.  You see, in the evangelical world Chick is very famous, well known to every man and his dog.  Outside of the evangelical world the number of those who know of Jack Chick and his dastard works diminishes greatly. 

They form a second circle, an outer circle, so to speak.  Most of these people come forward from the groups who Jack Chick has attacked viciously.  These folks know of him well, but they are very few.  Once you get outside this second circle, not many people know of Chick and his tracts.  At least so I thought.

Jack Chick was so enthralled and possessed by the lies of this Alberto Rivera guy that he made several graphic novels, comics, about Rivera’s stories.  These graphic novels were meant to appeal to the less literate folks out there.  The artwork was good.  And the Rivera books were all in the order of religious conspiracies.  These tend to keep people’s attention. 

Why just look at the Da Vinci code!  The text of one of these so called testimonies of Alberto Rivera in the form of a graphic novel called “The Prophet”, which was published in 1988, began to make rounds outside of the evangelical circles.  “The Prophet” was based on Rivera’s testimony that he had once been a Jesuit priest who had risen fast enough and high enough in his organization that he was taken into top secret holds within the Vatican and shown proof that the Catholic Church had actually “arranged” for Islam to be born and that the sinister reason behind this was because the Vatican’s true aim was to use Islam to wipe out the “true Christian churches” who followed the true Christianity. 

The Vatican also planned to use Islam to recapture the Holy Land for Rome.  There is much more to the story, going into the life of Mohammed, his wife Khadijah, Saint Augustine, Pope Pius II and many, many other historical figures throughout the ages.  As a piece of fiction, the Rivera story was exceptionally well crafted.  As work of non-fiction?  An utter disaster.

I was originally sent this text by a religious friend of mine who believed it.  I read it but could see that there are holes all through it.  I went home and marked through the text and made notes where it was wrong, mistaken or just out and out lies.  Then later I received it from a friend in New Zealand, Stu Dunne, who I didn’t know to be a religious extremist.  Here was a guy I thought was alright. 

Well, as it turned out, he was passing along something he’d been mailed by David Icke, the former BBC sportscaster, Green Party representative, and now big time conspiracy theorist.  So I took a further look on the web and was shocked by how many times this text from “The Prophet” turned up!  It was making its way on neo-Nazi websites, doomsday websites, conspiracy theory websites…  It was getting beyond itself.  So then I dug out my old notes and went to work on the inevitable refutation of this mockery.

Norm: 

What kind of research did you do to write this book?

Gary Dale: 

To be quite honest, this was not easy working from Vietnam.  I had to borrow books.  I had to buy loads of books.  Sometimes when I would take overseas trips I would spend off times at libraries.  I also interviewed several religious experts and historians for the book.  I also got several articles from online archives.  Some of these archives were university archives.  The truth was easy to find.  It was the referencing that gave me fits!  But I got it done.

Norm:

What other books have you written?

Gary Dale: 

Well, the latest to go to print is Gary Dale Gets Offensive:  Lurid Scenes from Bawdville.  This should be available online and at selected bookstores within this month.  This particular book was written a few years back but only now am I getting to publish it. 

Currently I am working on a few other books.  Two are close to being published.  The first one is a biography of Lysander Spooner, a nineteen century abolitionist, classical anarchist and libertarian thinker.  The other book that I should finish within this year is related to rational thinking in our personal lives and in our governments.  Neither of these books are titled yet.

Norm:

What do you want your work to do? Amuse people? Provoke thinking?

Gary Dale:

 I definitely want to provoke thinking.  I want people to share my sense of history and critical thought.  And yes, when appropriate I would like them to be laughing.  Gary Dale Gets Offensive should certainly do the trick with the laughing part!  Then again, the stories and jokes in this book are very saucy, an acquired taste, so to speak.

Norm:

What do you think over the years has driven you as a writer?

Gary Dale:

Mainly the stories that I wanted to read that haven’t been written.  The book on Lysander Spooner is an excellent example of this.  Sure, things have been written about the man, but he doesn’t have any bio that is more than a few chapters in a compilation of his works. 

People need to see the historical side of this man, not just the political arguments he put forth.  So this book will be born to a great interest to some.  And they are my audience because this book needed to be written and hasn’t been yet.  It is the same with Gary Dale Gets Offensive.  Southerners are losing our story telling heritage.  Nobody’s talking about it.  Jeff Foxworthy is making lots of money, but he is in many ways cheapening our culture.  Nobody is saying this.  Now I am.  That is what drives me as a writer.

Norm:

What's the most difficult thing for you about being a writer?

Gary Dale: 

Two things.  One mental and one practical.  First the mental…  Sometimes I just don’t have the willpower to get the job finished.  I know I have to do such and such, but dammit, I get lazy.  I am working on this.  On the practical side, as an expatriate I don’t have the research resources that I would if I were back home.  Plain and simple.  I have to spend lots of money on books.  I depend on people to help me.  But this in and of itself has made me much more creative in how I go about my research.

Norm:

How do you come up with ideas for what you write?

Gary Dale: 

I mainly look at the things that I am interested in and find holes in it.  I find conflicts and look at those.  I doodle for ideas.  I mind map for ideas.  And sometimes people will give me good ideas in serendipitous ways.

Norm:

What does it mean to tell the truth? And what does it mean to tell stories in a work of non-fiction?

Gary Dale: 

Normally in the works that I have done, telling the truth has meant correcting lies.  I also like to think of it as providing verifiable information that was previously not known.  Again, my book Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness deals with this head on. 

What I am basically saying in this book is that Alberto Rivera lied and Jack Chick promoted the lie.  I called a spade a spade wherever I saw one in their story but then I backed it up with verifiable, historical truths.  Now here’s the catch…  Most of my hate mail on this came from the fact that no matter what I would have written, how I would have said it, and what sources I used to discover, make and back up my assertions, there were people out there who didn’t care to listen, to read, to think for them selves.  So did all that research, verifying facts, etc., make my work true?  Not to these folks.  But I say it is and I stand by what I wrote.

For the second part of that question, well, you got me there.  I am still learning.  Part of the trouble I have been having with Lysander Spooner is exactly this.  For instance, a few years back when I decided to write this biography I laid out a piece of paper and did a mind map on Lysander.  I then took that mind map and made a time line of events in his life and sat down one weekend and almost put myself in a trance and typed out a short bio based on that mind map, but following the time line from beginning to end.  I made about sixty or seventy pages.  Or maybe even eighty to get started. 

Then I started looking for the holes to fill.  What did I not know?  How did I find out?  How could I verify?  But once I get all that I can put together a big string of facts about Lysander Spooner.  I can tell you who his grandfather was.  I can tell you how old he was when he became a lawyer or when he wrote No Treason.  I can tell you how old he was and where he was when he died.  But the facts of a life just isn’t a life.  It is all the little things in the middle that made up who he was. 

I can’t meet the man to ask him.  I can’t interview anyone who did know him.  I have to fill all of that in without making the man someone he wasn’t.  I can’t rely on stereotypes and generalizations that have been handed down.  One simply cannot draw the line from A to B and then paint the middle, but this in an odd way is exactly the task I face with this particular work.  I am having fits with this, but I trust I will survive it, the book will be born and the finished will remind the world just how much of an amazing man Lysander Spooner was.

Norm:

What has your experience been like with self publishing? Do you recommend it over traditional publishers?
 
Gary Dale:

So far, yes.  I have total control over the work.  My first book is a great example.  This book about the Vatican Islam Conspiracy would most likely never, ever have been taken up by a publisher who looks to make any money from the project.  I would still be looking for somebody to act as my book’s agent, that is if I didn’t self publish this book. 

And I dare say such a book would never have gotten off the ground unless I could have found a benefactor who doesn’t like Jack Chick.  Now I get e-mails from people all over the world who have read the book and give me their feedback on it. 

It is about 50/50 as to whether I am going to Heaven or Hell but the point is that instead of waiting for someone else to take this up, I did it myself and I now have a readership.  I may have found an interested party for Gary Dale Gets Offensive but again, how much control would I have been able to keep?  Not much.  And this book will be out this month and hopefully, no, surely my readership will expand with it as well.

Norm:

How have you used the Internet to boost your writing career?

Gary Dale: 

I have gone on several social networking sites like Ryze, Myspace, LinkedIn, Gather, etc.  These have gotten me some readers and lots of feedback.  Some of my press releases are on the web as well and this also gets me bigger visibility for when people Google me or one of my subjects.  This has definitely been a good experience for me.  I meet lots of people, readers, and even some become fans.

Norm:

Do you have some kind of writing community in Thailand where you can exchange ideas with other writers and authors?

Gary Dale: 

Actually, we certainly do.  It is led by our good friend C.Y. Gopinath, or Gopi as we call him.  Gopi is an author who hails from Bombay and he, like me, is living the expatriate life in Thailand.  A few of us writers meet once a month for coffee and conversation.  I am trying to really push this along because I am liking the people who I meet there greatly.  We all love the same thing and that always helps get the conversation going.  And we share our experiences, ideas and support for one another.  It’s great!  Right now there are only about five of us, but hopefully this will grow a bit.

Norm:

Is there anything else you wish to add and what is next for Gary Dale Cearley?

Gary Dale: 

I appreciate this interview greatly.  I guess next for me is a project involving the Arab world.  Namely centered on Egypt.  I spent some time there in May and June, mainly in Cairo and Alexandria, and I will be back there during November and early December for more research.

 I also plan to take in a few book fairs in New Orleans and Baton Rouge in the fairly near future if everything works out. 

 I’m keeping my fingers crossed.  Also I have been in discussions with a best selling author regarding co-writing a book with her.  This is not ghost writing, as I don’t want to take such a proposal at this point.  This could be good, but I am not sure that either of us are sold yet.  If it happens I think this could be big for both of us in very different ways.  And that keeps me considering the project.

Thanks once again and good luck with all of your future endeavors.

Click Here To Purchase A Copy Of Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness: The Truth About the Vatican and the Birth of Islam