Holy Rascals: Advice for Spiritual Revolutionaries

By Rami Shapiro and JP Sears

God is real. Everything we say about God is made up. Holy Rascals is a rousing call to anyone ready to go beyond “isms” and ideologies, and live in the world as a liberating force of justice, compassion, and joy.

“Holy rascals are spiritual culture jammers who use humor, play, creativity, and critical thinking to reveal the human origins of religions—and how religions mask their true origins behind the conceit of divine origins,” writes Rabbi Rami. Here, he illuminates:

• The making of a holy rascal and the great task of “freeing religion from the parochial and for the perennial”

• The art of “hacking the holy,” or pulling back the curtain on religion’s fear-based mechanisms of control

• The provocative tools and one-of-a-kind practices of the holy rascal, with guidance for creating your very own “rascally” ways

“Holy rascality is about rekindling spiritual creativity and critical thinking,” explains Rabbi Rami. “It is about freeing the human capacity for religiosity—the capacity for making meaning—from the confines of brand-name religion. Holy rascals are playful and lighthearted. While our task is serious—the liberation of humanity from the madness of unhealthy and harmful religions and religious beliefs—our attitude is not.” Holy Rascals brings you Rabbi Rami’s one-of-a-kind inspiration, humor, and practical insight to help you on your mission.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sounds True
• Release date: Dec 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781622037476

Book preview

2017

Introduction

This book is an act of holy rascality. It isn’t well reasoned, well argued, or even well thought out. It is simply an exercise in truth telling.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, The Mind of a Rascal: An Unauthorized Autobiography, offers a glimpse into my personal path to holy rascality. The second, Religion Unveiled: The Tao of Toto, is a holy rascal-esque look at different aspects of religion and spirituality. The third, Hacking the Holy, shares the primary tools of spiritual culture jamming and invites you to get in the game of holy rascality. The book closes with an epilogue titled There’s a God at the End of This Book!, an example of holy rascality.

Because the art of holy rascality relies heavily on short writing, most chapters are brief, with each one asserting its point rather than arguing on its behalf. In this way you are invited to say yes or no to each point without overthinking it. If you say yes, you are rewarded with a quick hit of endorphins. If you say no, you suffer pangs of buyer’s remorse.

To save you time, here are the underlying assumptions of this book:

1Brand-name parochial religions are concerned with their respective truths rather than the Perennial Wisdom at the mystic heart of all religion.

2Knowing this allows you to learn from and even participate in all religions without becoming trapped in any of them.

3Those who hold the copyright to brand-name religions don’t want you to know this.

4Holy rascals do.

5The best way to free religion from the parochial and for the perennial is humor.

Now that you no longer have to wonder what this book is about, you are free to read it just for fun. After all, that’s why I wrote it.

The mind of a

RASCAL

an unauthorized autobiography

Truth is one. Different people call it by different names. All of them are wrong.

RR

1

PROLOGUE A Holy Rascal Manifesto

Religiosity is the human capacity for making meaning out of the raw facts of human existence. Brand-name religions have abandoned the making in order to worship the made. While religion at its best calls us to a community of the curious and a unity beyond dogma and tribalism, religion at its worst calls us to worship the very things that divide us and to pit people against one another in the name of one fantasy or other.

Using humor, play, and fearless joy, holy rascals free people from idolatry and open them to the creative art of meaning making at the heart of human religiosity. In so doing we free brand-name religions from the madness that robs them of creativity and meaning as well.

We welcome all religious teachings that promote dignity, justice, compassion, humility, respect, awe, and love for all beings. We reject all religious teachings that promote fear, hatred, and the exploitation or demonization of the other. And we shun all Gods who sanction violence in this world or the next.

The God© who can be branded is not the Eternal God. The same is true of the God© who can be copyrighted.

RR

We call upon peoples of every religion to cleanse their texts and teachings of violence, injustice, and hatred; to boldly speak out when their religion is hijacked by evil; and to continually move their religion beyond the zero-sum world view of us against them and toward the nonzero world view of all of us