Nicholas Oliva (“o-lee-va”) has been a musician, writer, poet, photographer, audio engineer, and entertainment and technical director for over twenty-five years.
His first book, Only Moments, was published in 2007, which was a novel that followed the lifetime journey and professional musical career of a husband and wife team to the year 2020.
His latest book is Finding God: To Believe or Not To Believe, now available at Amazon.com as well as Barnes and Noble and will be available in the Kindle store soon. To visit the website, go to Tobelieveornot.com. Mr. Oliva’s other websites are OnlyMoments and for his first book Only Moments by Nick Oliva. You can find him on Facebook as well on either the book page, Finding God: To Believe or Not To Believe or his home page, Facebook.com/noliva.
Oliva lives in the quiet mountains of Nevada.
Q. Thank you for this interview, Nicholas. Can we begin by having you tell us why you chose to write a nonfiction spiritual book as opposed to what you’ve been writing?
First of all, thank you for allowing me the ability to promote what I think is an important subject in our world today. I waited a long time to begin writing this book. The incidents contained within occurred in October 2004, while at a hospital in Nevada. There are a few reasons why I chose to wait this long to tell my story. The first and most influential was the reasoning that by taking a stand on what I experienced and believe, I would have many detractors and people who would attack me in order to perpetuate and bolster their own beliefs and/or lack of beliefs and use me as an example. In order to fully explain what I’ve gone through, I had to touch upon religion, morality, and ethics—all controversial subjects in the context of what this book is about. The theme promotes the energy within us all as Godly, not the looking outward for all of the answers.
Q. What is the most unusual or interesting thing about your book?
I think the fact that the NDE actually happened to me after I wrote about it years earlier is very unusual but the entire picture of the book is much more than that. The conversations with atheists and Christians produced a very interesting picture of how people seem to be threatened by small things as the word “spirit” or “devout” or that the illusion of what they perceive is so righteous as to completely cut off any and all other possibilities when faced with the real facts of what religions are based in: myth. I say that not to fan the fires of those who have taken that leap of faith so vehemently, I say it because it is true and I prove it. That being said, no one who is steadfast in their thoughts is going to budge, regardless of the facts of the matter. That is where the wars start with such thought. Ideologies that do not bend usually end up being fought by warring factions of different ideologies as we have around the world today. Whose God is the only supreme God … does this matter when there is no empirical or scientific evidence whatsoever to prove the existence of any God? And then the first sword came down and the blood poured forth. It never ends and if the human race is to evolve, we need to get past this violence that gets us nowhere and begin to understand that love trumps over all these ideologies and put all of this nonsense to rest.
