Flathead grad publishes first book

Missoula resident Joshua Kelly has published his first book, “Oh, Your God! The Evil Idea that is Religion.”

The book was picked up for publication last summer by United Kingdom publishing house Dangerous Little Books, which specializes in polemics and controversial literature.

The book is Kelly’s collected views on religion and its influence in the world, both historically and in the present. After watching what he calls “religion’s unrecompensed crimes” over the course of his life, Kelly was moved to write something that critically scrutinized the institution of faith and the idea of a supernatural being.  

“Free-thinking people in the world have had enough death, discrimination, inequality in politics and imprisonment on account of the delusions of the faithful,” he said. “Thankfully, people like Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger, Christopher Hitchens and many others have cleared the way for the debate to take place in the open. My book is a small contribution to that discussion.” 

Highlighting such acts as the massacre of Nigerian children on the accusation of witchcraft, the hypocrisy of fundamentalism, death cults, pieces of the Bible and the Koran that are typically ignored for the sake of moderate faith, discrimination against homosexuals, mistreatment of women, and many other topics, the book highlights what Kelly has deduced to be the most dangerous pieces of organized faith and criticizes them. 

“The single worst desecrater of civil liberty is religion — particularly monotheism,” Kelly said. “One book by one author can never encapsulate all of the evil that it has inflicted on the human race. I tried, anyway.” 

“Oh, Your God!” is available in paperback at Amazon.com, with a Kindle e-book edition coming soon.

Kelly is a Flathead High and Flathead Valley Community College alumnus currently attending the University of Montana. His further writings can be found on his blog, neverstopthequestions.blogspot.com, and on his author page on Facebook.