Holy Rascals, by Rami Shapiro

Rami Shapiro is a holy rascal.  I thought his book Holy Rascals: Advice for Spiritual Revolutionaries would be a fun, satirical poke at organized religion.  He is, or was, after all, a rabbi who served in a congregation for many years.  But, disappointingly, he is unfunny, arrogant, and one-dimensional.  He wants "people to see religion for what it is: a cultural construct, rather than what religious claim to be: absolute truth."

Given his rejection of absolute truth, he goes to the other extreme: self-centered, self-proclaimed truth.  "Believe only what you yourself judge to be true."  This leaves little room for any objective truth or power outside of oneself.  As it should be, he would argue from his panentheistic perspective.  You are God, so create and believe your own truth.

His advice to holy rascal wanna-bes is not "to make fun of what others believe, or to mock those who believe it, but to skillfully pull back the curtain that masks the absurdities of belief systems and that protects those who benefit from them."  This is fine, as far as it goes.  Some religious beliefs, frankly, deserve mocking.  The problem is that he rolls all faiths together, as if none had any historic grounding or credibility.  It's as if this guy--who holds a Ph.D. from an esteemed seminary which, in prior generations, produced great Christian thinkers, but now can barely be called theist--has never heard of the field of Christian apologetics and disregards the historical basis on which Christianity is based.

If you are going to mock something, please do so with a basis in truth.  Shapiro's approach, claiming that there is no truth besides whatever you decide to believe, is unhelpful in that it ignores any objective elements of faith.  Really, though, the biggest problem is that Holy Rascals completely fails to be funny.  At least make me laugh while you skewer belief systems.  Shapiro comes across more as a curmudgeon whom you certainly would not invite to dinner again after he acted like such a jerk last time you had him over.



Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!