By Genevieve Pollock
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania, SEPT. 7, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Brian Gail’s new trilogy captures the action and drama of a very real 40-year war between good and evil, selfishness and true love, Popes and businesspeople, Divine mercy and sin.
His first book, “Fatherless,” recently hit the Catholic bestseller list. The second book of his trilogy, “Motherless,” is due to be released in late October (by Human Life International). The third book, “Childless,” is currently being written.
In his books, Gail incorporates his experience as a husband, father and grandfather, a former semi-pro athlete, and a retired CEO and entrepreneur. Currently, he writes, educates, and gives talks worldwide.
Gail explained to ZENIT about how this trilogy follows a 40-year strategy against the family, incorporating historical facts and real life stories to illustrate the key enemies, heroes and plots of our time.
Part 2 of this interview will be published Wednesday.
ZENIT: Could you give us a preview of what we can expect in this trilogy?
Gail: It is called “The American Tragedy in Trilogy.”
It is about the demonic attack on family, and how it brought down one of the greatest empires in human history, how Satan took dead aim on family, in our time, in one of the greatest of countries — and civilizations actually — in the same way he did in the garden, through the big lie.
By taking father out of the home, taking mother out of the home, by creating technology that is all pervasive in the home, he prepares the soil for the ultimate solution, which is the life sciences revolution.
This will be the nullification of Genesis; it will be man creating man in his image and likeness.
The trilogy explores that Biblically significant (in my opinion) 40-year period, between morning in America — the 1980s — and midnight in America — the 2020s.
The first book picked up on pornography, cable porn in the home — in the sanctuary — and the Pill in the cabinet, and the devastation that these wreaked in the family.
The next step on the slippery slope is life in the Petri dish, life in the laboratory, created without the mothers; thus the second book is called “Motherless.” It covers in vitro fertilization, under the microscope so to speak, along with embryonic stem cell testing.
We move ultimately to “Childless,” set in the 2020s, when nanotechnology, the transhuman society, nanobots and hybrids, ultimately give rise to the “human species 2.0.” We’re all 1.0, whereas 2.0 means — as Ray Kurzweil, its herald, its “John the Baptist,” proclaimed in his last book — the fusion of what he refers to as biological intelligence and artificial intelligence.
Man, therefore, now having a computer inside of him, being part computer, has the capacity of a mainframe to zip, sort and compute. And even then they will introduce the virtual experiences into that software, which becomes neural implants in the minds of 2.0 humans.
We’re just a primitive version, and they’re at work on a refinement. They are going to fix the problems. They are going to do it out of subatomic particles that they themselves created. The technology was imbedded, not by a god, but they discovered it and so therefore in their own minds, in their own bubble, they are creating out of nothing.
The trilogy is about morning to midnight, about father to child, about, as John Paul II said, the final confrontation between the Gospel and the anti-Gospel.
ZENIT: In many ways we’ve been able to see the negative effects of pornography and contraception in a multitude of broken marriages and families, but we have not yet seen the long-term consequences of the widespread use of in vitro fertilization. What do you think will be its effect on society and the family?
Gail: I think there will be both a short-term and a long-term consequence of our society’s embrace of in vitro fertilization.
There is the immediate consequence of significantly adding to the estimated 500,000 embryos cryogenically preserved in some 225 storage facilities scattered across the country. These are children who were created outside the marriage act — often by married couples — and who are now motherless.
This is a human disaster of the first order — not just for the children who will eventually be chopped up and used for commercial research purposes (tissue for embryonic stem cell research) or simply discarded as refuse — but for the institution of family and, therefore, America.
Longer term in vitro fertilization, like its twin sister embryonic stem cell research, is simply the next steep slide down the slippery slope into the dark abyss that is the culture of death.
It is an essential demonic coordinate in the race to nullify in hate what God created in love.
It will lead inexorably to what are already being called transhumans — the fusion of artificial and biological intelligence in a new species of man some nanotechnologists are already referring to as “Homo Evolutus.”
This is nothing less that man creating man in his own image and likeness — a nullification of Genesis I. This pure hubris could well summon fire to fall from the sky.
ZENIT: In your book, “Fatherless,” you focus on the everyday conflicts that men in particular experience in daily life. What would you say is the most important point for men to remember in understanding how to daily seek holiness?
Gail: It is to be a father in a fatherless world, now that the currency has been devalued in the past generation and a half.
The father has to do one thing: He has to model and teach his children how to say no to self.
We have not been able to bridge the gap between what our technology permits us to do and what our hearts tell us we want to do. And unless a father can teach his child how to say no to self, he fails in his primary accountability in his vocation.
The great problem of today, the great existential crisis is this identity crisis man has because we have not been able to say no to self.
The secret is that a man can only say no to self if first he has said yes to God. A no to God makes a no to self impossible — not difficult or remote, but impossible.
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On the Net:
“Fatherless”: http://fatherlessbook.com/
