HOLIER THAN THOU

A concise attempt to assess organized religion with a critical eye.

Motivated in part by a palpable sense of outrage at “religion-stimulated murder and terrorism of this current era,” and the terrifying possibility of nuclear weapons becoming tools of religious terror campaigns, former banking executive and debut author Grey seeks in this brief work to offer a clear understanding of how the world’s major Abrahamic religions came to be. “It is time that we put religion into its proper perspective,” he asserts, by redacting these religions’ sacred texts in order to “rid them of deadly inflammatory rhetoric.” Using charts, color illustrations, and explanatory prose, the author also aims to show the ordinary origins of major religions, touching on such well-known items as the Sumerian King List and practical sources of the Noachian Flood narrative. Throughout, Grey sticks to mundane interpretations:“The clergy, while maintaining an aura of sanctity, are effectively the salesmen and the cleric hierarchy in consort with professional advisers are the financial managers,” he states flatly at one point. The author’s passion is evident throughout this short work, which, at its best, makes for brisk and involving reading. That said, his anger against the follies and iniquities of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam will make some passages difficult to take for devout followers of those faiths. The book’s main flaw, though, is its tendency to drift into dense but tedious prose; when writing about the early pre-Abrahamic period, for example, the author writes: “There is strong reason to believe that even well before this time and as early as those eras when certain dogmas were first being concocted and passed on to others, that there were nonbelievers and they were, ironically, among religion’s creators.” Such moments nearly sink what could have been an electrifyingly irreverent treatise.

A fierce but overly wordy call to tackle faith from a realistic perspective.