Stephen's got Philosopher A.C. Grayling, on a favorite subject:
In the unholy trinity of professional atheists, AC Grayling has always tended to be regarded as the good cop. Less coldly clinical in tone than Richard Dawkins, less aggressively combative than Christopher Hitchens, Grayling approaches the God debate with a gently teasing charm that could almost – but should never – be mistaken for conciliation. "Yes, I'm the velvet version," he chuckles.
So he insists that his new book does not belong in the same canon as Dawkins's The God Delusion and Hitchens's God Is Not Great. "No, because it's not against religion. There's not one occurrence of the word God, or afterlife, or anything like that. It doesn't attack religion, it's a positive book, there's nothing negative in it. People may think it's against religion – but it isn't." But then he says, with a mischievous twinkle: "Of course, what would really help the book a lot in America is if somebody tries to shoot me."
With any luck it shouldn't come to that, but Grayling is almost certainly going to upset a lot of Christians, for what he has written is a secular bible. The Good Book mirrors the Bible in both form and language, and is, as its author says, "ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who've really experienced life, and thought about it". Drawing on classical secular texts from east and west, Grayling has "done just what the Bible makers did with the sacred texts", reworking them into a "great treasury of insight and consolation and inspiration and uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world". He has been working on his opus for several decades, and the result is an extravagantly erudite manifesto for rational thought...
The book is titled The Good Book: A Humanist Bible . Here's from Library Journal via B&N:
Grayling (philosophy, Birkbeck Coll., Univ. of London; Ideas That Matter) has risen to controversial eminence as a public intellectual. This book, which his publisher rightly describes as "audacious," continues his humanist explorations with his creation of an entire scripture for atheists and agnostics. Grayling's "Genesis" has Isaac Newton's apple, rather than Eve's; the wars of Persia against Greece take the place of the rise of Davidic Israel; the lives of Lycurgus, Pericles, and Cicero stand for the wanderings of Jesus's disciples. Grayling's cagey "Epistle to the Reader" does not suggest why his humanist replacements, e.g., the defeat of Persia—in which no one emerges with much credit—have more power than, say, the death of Absalom. Throughout are faint echoes of Chinese poets, Seneca the Younger, Herodotus, Thucydides, and the Bible itself, which will simply leave many hungry for the originals. VERDICT This reasonable, rationalistic, and dull "scripture" is likely to make informed readers long for the spiky, idiosyncratic poems, histories, essays, and narratives Grayling's work at once springs from and criticizes. Some convinced humanists may enjoy this, and it may appeal to nontheistic denominations and congregations in search of a worship resource. Not likely to be of interest to the general reader.—Graham Christian, Pelham, MA
I found lots of reviews in the usual places, various discussions, interviews, etc., etc.
I'm unimpressed, but then we know I'm bored with the topic. I'd be less bored if it appeared that this work was something more than "British Classics Tradition, Rearranged and Distilled" with perhaps a touch of "Important Non-European Thought." But hey, y'know...
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