A former Roman Catholic, Frank Bolger Kelly has long wondered why thinking humans as a whole in the 21st century have not yet been able to disenthrall themselves from the demonstrable falsehoods and sectarian nonsense of organized religion. A few years ago, Kelly decided to sit down with the "sacred" scriptures of several of the world's major religions, the alleged bedrocks of these various creeds, in a last-ditch effort to achieve holy inspiration. Instead, he became wholly disenchanted, and Scoffing at Scripture: A Commoner Reads the World's Holy Writ and Rejects Traditional Religion is the result. Far from representing that all-elusive "Word of God," creedal scripture the world over, it seems to Kelly, merely cloaks the tribal agendas and cultural designs of the world's priestly (and virtually allmale) elites. With the general reader in mind, the author has grouped together a series of compact discussions of religion and scripture for cross-cultural comparative reference. Kelly's intent is to facilitate critical analysis of the world's holy writ and, in particular, to encourage younger, skeptical readers of a secular mind to confront the doctrinal, scriptural, and ritual absurdities of those faiths into which they were born and continue to be indoctrinated. Frank Bolger Kelly grew up in an Irish Catholic family in the Bronx, New York, matriculated to a noted Jesuit college in New England, and subsequently did time at a prestigious non-sectarian institution of higher learning in the Midwest. It was during his enlightening time at the latter that Kelly first began seriously to question not only his own religious upbringing but the scriptural bases of all the world's major religions. Kelly was quickly convinced that the vast majority of "the faithful" the world over, commoners like himself, just might reconsider their religious roots and motivations in a new light if they actually bothered to immerse themselves for a time in their own "sacred scriptures," rather than merely fake familiarity with them. Actually to read scripture in all its antiquated, tendentious, sectarian absurdity, Kelly reasoned, is to take a first, giant step in renouncing irrational creeds of all kinds. Thus was born Scoffing at Scripture: A Commoner Reads the World's Holy Writ and Rejects Traditional Religion, a book from which the author hopes the open-minded reader will draw a secularly pure, spiritual sustenance.
