Religion is Human: A Review of Dan Kapr's "Politely Rejecting the Bible"

Full disclosure: I received a free review copy of Dan Kapr's "Politely Rejecting the Bible: Why You Shouldn't Believe Everything the Bible Tells You" a few weeks back. Seriously though, he didn't ask me to write this blog. It's just genuinely a good book that I think some of you might be interested in.

So, the thing to know is that faith is a human endeavor.

I used to be a minister, and if there's anything important that I learned after decades of immersion in religion, it's that faith works because it meets basic and essential human needs: community, a sense of purpose and meaning, routine, structure, stability, a sense of being a part of something bigger, an authority to appeal to and a story to tell about how the world works. In fact, successful religions are packages of practices and beliefs that seem engineered specifically to address some of the core struggles of existence in this world.

There's nothing wrong with any of that.

The sticking point with religion is really in the origin story. If you examine any religion, you get a sense of how it evolved as part of normal social and psychological processes, and can identify a raft of human flaws and failings that have integrated their way into the system. Religions themselves though, in basically every case, claim some type of divine or higher authority - insisting that their practices, beliefs and schmaltzy praise choruses have been inspired by a power that transcends this world. It's how they establish their absolute authority in the cultural market against other faiths, and it's part of the magic for believers. 

Unfortunately, it isn't true, so it leads to a lot of problems. Religions attract narcissistic leaders who believe that they transcend normal human existence and speak for a higher power - channeling God or secret knowledge. Religious organizations themselves demand loyalty and sacrifice from adherents at a cost higher than the benefits religion provides, justifying this as commanded by God. Religions identify themselves with goodness and righteousness, and behave as if their own practices are above critique. They insulate themselves from accountability, psychologically warp believers, and justify abuse against non-adherents based on a false sense of their own relationship to God and ultimate truth.

I just finished reading a review copy of "Politely Rejecting the Bible: Why You Shouldn't Believe Everything the Bible Tells You", by Dan Kapr. It struck me that it is a book wrestling with exactly this issue from a particular angle, because it's a thorough review of problematic things Christians have believed about the Bible because of the doctrine that it is scripture that has been delivered to humanity by God.

Kapr and I seem to have a lot in common, because we are both former earnest seminarians whose faith eroded through the weathering processes of life and Systematic Theology classes, and who went on to write books to warn others about what we've learned. My book "I Hope I Was Wrong About Eternal Damnation" came out as the series of WTF moments I had across decades in the church, and an attempt to find some humor in the experience of losing faith in God. His book is a lot headier, as a thoughtful consideration of the Protestant's most fundamental problem - that the Bible is meant to be the Word of God but it turns out that it's not. 

You get the sense that his target audience are thinking Christians, because he carefully walks the reader through the various arguments made about how and why the Bible should be treated as the Word of God, and dispassionately explains why all of these types of views break down - either due to Biblical inaccuracies, contradictions, historical impossibilities, or even the original intentions of the authors. It's the kind of book that college professors will assign to their undergrad religious studies courses, and that intellectuals raised in conservative environments will wrestle with as they try to come to terms with their own cognitive dissonance around the Bible. (Maybe I'm over generalizing, but I genuinely do think all serious conservative students of the Bible privately worry that their belief system doesn't work.)

The title of the book reflects the tone: Kapr is polite and thoughtful in his writing, and he treats religious beliefs seriously that a lot of outsiders might mock: for instance, the idea that the King James Version of the English Bible is somehow more God-breathed than other English versions. (I'll admit that I did mock this idea in my own book.) You get the sense that he is trying to explain what he's come to see as true to people who don't see it his way, but who he genuinely cares about. 

I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to tell you that his overarching conclusion is that the Bible shouldn't be viewed as "God-breathed" at all, and makes a lot more sense when it's treated as a collection of human stories, experiences and writings. 

This argument, interestingly enough, isn't presented as an attack on religion, as much as an attempt to explain exactly what the Christian Bible is, and what it is not. The really interesting question that I personally was left with, in the end, was about what the religious world might look like if this type of belief was accepted more generally. What would it mean for religious people to accept that their Holy Scriptures, Golden Cows and pet idols are no less human than anyone else's?

You can buy "Politely Rejecting the Bible" lots of places, but Dan Kapr's website seems like a good place to start because you can learn a lot more about him there. Seems like an interesting guy.

You can buy "I Hope I Was Wrong About Eternal Damnation" lots of places too, but I get the highest royalties when you buy it on Amazon so Bezos has me by the throat.