British academic A.C. Grayling says that he has been long been pondering the following possibility: What if those ancient authors and editors who produced Bibles and other religious works over the centuries had instead focussed their efforts on compiling the greatest non-religious wisdom of their cultures?
This question resulted in a “lifetime’s work” for Grayling who recently published this exact kind of book - a book filled with the wisdom of Aristotle and other of civilisation’s great thinkers, reports CNN.com. Grayling has called his publication “The Good Book: A Humanist Bible,” subtitled “A Secular Bible” in the United Kingdom.
The Bible would surely have been “a very different book and may have produced a very different history for mankind,” had it relied upon the thoughts of philosophers and not prophets insists the atheist Grayling, a philosopher and professor at Birkbeck College, University of London.
“Humanist ethics didn’t claim to be derived from a deity," he says. "(They) tended to start from a sympathetic understanding of human nature and accept that there’s a responsibility that each individual has to work out the values they live by and especially to recognize that the best of our good lives revolve around having good relationships with people.”
Humanists and some atheists attempt to find meaning and purpose in life through human reason rather than religious experience.
As part of a concerted attempt to make his work accessible to ordinary folk, Grayling wrote his ‘secular’ Bible much like the original Bible, complete with double columns, chapters (the first is even called Genesis) and short verses.
Furthermore, "The Good Book," opens with a garden scene just as the original Bible does, but instead of featuring Adam and Eve, Grayling’s version includes Isaac Newton, the British scientist who pioneered the study of gravity.
"It was from the fall of fruit from such a tree that new inspiration came for inquiry into the nature of things," states a verse from "The Good Book's" opening chapter.
"When Newton sat in his garden, and saw what no one had seen before: that an apple draws the earth to itself, and the earth the apple," the verse continues, "Through a mutual force of nature that holds all things, from the planets to the stars, in unifying embrace."
The book's last chapter includes a secular humanist version of the Ten Commandments: "Love well, seek the good in all things, harm no others, think for yourself, take responsibility, respect nature, do your utmost, be informed, be kind, be courageous: at least, sincerely try."
Grayling has often been described as the “velvet atheist” or the “acceptable face of atheism,” since his style is so much more gentle than the fiercely anti-religious atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.
While Grayling admits he has written critically of religion in the past, he insists he is not trying to pick a fight with “The Good Book.”
“It’s not part of a quarrel,” Grayling said. “It’s a modest offering… another contribution to the conversation that mankind must have with itself.”
With that in mind, Grayling hopes that everyone will appreciate and read his book, and that includes Bible lovers.
Grayling’s main aim with “The Good Book” is that it will encourage people to “go beyond your teachers, your text” to understand that “we have to respect and relate to one another.”
“The Good Book” is already number 41 on Amazon’s UK bestseller list.