The Gospel According to . . .

Image Gallery Keith Greiman / www.keithgreiman.com

Any respectable bible begins at the beginning. But in this one, the Garden of Eden is replaced by Isaac Newton’s garden, and the apple that denotes the downfall of man is replaced by the apple that drops on Newton’s head. The Good Book, an ambitious 597-page volume written by philosopher A.C. Grayling, is a bible without God, with humanism taking the place of religion.

“The way I made it,” Grayling says, “was to plunder from the great traditions’ texts . . . weaving them together, editing them, interpolating other texts and sometimes my own, just as the Bible makers worked. It was tremendous fun.”

Here you’ll find snippets from Spinoza; nuggets of Nietzsche; Homeric homilies; dollops of Darwin; kernels from Kant; and gems from Goethe, Godwin, and, of course, Grayling.

Like the English Bible, The Good Book: A Humanist Bible adopts the double-column format and is structured by book, chapter, and verse. “One reason for the potency of scriptural writings is how they are organized, inviting people to sample small bits of text and reflect on them,” Grayling says. In addition, the structure reinforces The Good Book’s aim to stand alongside religious texts, such as the Bible and the Koran, even while it is presenting a secular vision. “I want to show people the distilled wisdom of humanity reflecting on its own humanity, and to show that that is every bit as beautiful and powerful as the religious texts are, and in many ways much better.”

While Grayling concedes that the Bible contains some sound moral lessons and moments of great beauty (his favorite being the Song of Solomon), for him it is disfigured by phrases such as “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.” He disdains the notion of submission to a deity “in the hope that it won’t inflict too many earthquakes or tsunamis or plagues in the near future,” he says.

To rewrite the Bible, though, requires a certain amount of hubris. Ruefully, Grayling remembers a card his wife sent him that “had a picture of a rather self-satisfied-looking individual on it, and a legend that read: ‘I used to be an atheist until I realized that I am God.’ But, to coin a phrase: God forbid that should ever happen. I certainly hope not, because the message of [The Good Book] is that we are each responsible for ourselves. We’ve got to think for ourselves. And . . . we’ve got to go beyond our teachers and beyond our texts.”

According to Grayling, an ongoing history of religious war makes this a particularly appropriate time to provide an alternative to the Bible and the Koran. Conflicts from the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century to 9/11 in the 21st century have, he says, “dragged the fig leaf off the claims that religion makes to be a positive and peaceful presence in society.”