Reddit reviews The Good Book: A Humanist Bible
We found 17 Reddit comments about The Good Book: A Humanist Bible. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Orders are despatched from our UK warehouse next working day.
Yes.
From a month or two ago, my favorite is still Sense and Goodness Without God by Richard Carrier. (Link goes to my review of it).
Carrier's discussion of Christian history led me to The Dark Side of Christian History by Ellen Ellerbe. A bit off the beaten track of atheist books because Ellerbe is a feminist, pagan/wicca-friendly Christian. But if you ignore the agenda and bias, you can use the book of a thin 200 or so pages as a quick summary of the history of Christianity as viewed from the non-apologist's point of view.
When I heard about A.C. Grayling's The Good Book: A Humanist Bible, I ordered that up, along with [Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life without God](Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life without God); the latter mainly because I found the cover interesting. The Good Book comes around 900 pages and I must admit I haven't read it yet. It's strongly modeled on the Bible and even includes many of the same chapters and a verse format. It looks to be an interesting collection of human wisdom through the ages but most people find it kinda presumptuous. Life, Sex and Ideas is a thin little paperpack put together mostly from essays of Grayling's in The Guardian. He has interesting and sensible things to say about thinking, reading, religion, politics, power, death and many other topics. Most of those essays are 2-3 pages in length, so it's interesting and light casual reading. Grayling occasionally takes a vicious swipe at religion but doesn't devote a lot of the book to it. Somewhat disappointingly to this aged horny net geek, he doesn't say a lot about sex either.
I'm currently reading Another book of Carrier's, Not the Impossible Faith, where he counters Christian apologist J.P. Holding's assertion that Christianity would never have succeeded without the "irrefutable evidence of Christ's resurrection." Carrier thoroughly and competently dismantles Holding's arguments. It's slightly strange reading in that it's like listening to just one side of an 18 hour debate (one hour per chapter). But the information that's related in passing is an eye-opening description of social and especially religious dynamics in the first century (and more, later) of Christianity. History allows us to piece together how people acted and thought, and the politics that led to the formation of dozens of religious cults in the Roman Empire. American Christians would be deeply embarrassed to discover that early Christianity was essentially a Communist/Socialist popular movement.
http://amzn.com/0802717373
Done.
There isn't an atheist bible, but if you're looking for something inspirational A.C. Grayling's The Good Book isn't bad.
That is very sweet. :) The idea that souls hang around is very comforting, and sounds like it helped her handle it.
Have you read The Good Book? It's got a section about grief and I find it useful to turn to when I need something inspirational and consoling without myths. I think the relevant section was probably either Consolations or Lamentations.
You can read part of the book on amazon, like 15 pages I think.
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Book-Humanist-Bible/dp/0802717373
As a gift, the The Good Book: A Humanist Bible is a good idea.
The Good Book consciously takes its design and presentation from the Bible ...offering to the non-religious seeker all the wisdom, insight, solace, inspiration, and perspective of secular humanist traditions that are older, far richer and more various than Christianity.
The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True would also make a nice gift.
There is a chance that most of the more popular Atheist books are already in your friend's personal library. A unique idea would be to get him a subscription to Skeptic Magazine.
Look, this is a tiring argument. Are there Bibles that do not include Leviticus or even the Old Testament? Yes. Are there Bibles that do not include mention of God? Yes. Is the world's most popular Bible still under revision? Yes.
The only people who are seriously bothered by Leviticus are mentally inflexible-- on both sides. Either they take the WHOLE BIBLE as the word of God and none of it is up for debate, or they take the WHOLE BIBLE as the supposed word of God, and thereby nullify the whole thing because they don't believe in God (as they understand the word).
If you're mentally flexible you understand that whichever version of the Bible you're reading, it's an edition, and therefore edited by men and women with prejudices according to their place and time. There is also some stuff in there that seems universally true, and universally helpful, and the question becomes who was Jesus that he spoke so strongly of these universal truths, and why did people listen?
I know A.C. Grayling just came up with a secular sort of bible spin-off called The Good Book
I haven't read it or really heard anything about it though.
Edit: Just occurred to me that Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan also touches on the scientific/rational area, but in a much less philosophy (read: non biblical) sort of way.
The Good Book: A Humanist Bible by A.C. Grayling. Using the same techniques of editing, redaction, and adaptation that produced the holy books of the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic religions. The Good Book consciously takes its design and presentation from the Bible, in its beauty of language and arrangement into short chapters and verses for ease of reading and quotability, offering to the non-religious seeker all the wisdom, insight, solace, inspiration, and perspective of secular humanist traditions that are older, far richer and more various than Christianity.
http://www.amazon.ca/Good-Book-C-Grayling/dp/0802717373/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369102513&sr=8-1&keywords=the+good+book
The Good Book
I found a couple of atheist bibles wannabes. They stay away from other religions as far as I can see.
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Book-Humanist-Bible/dp/0802717373/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3Q79JLDQO968&colid=2QWS7L2BWJTBO
http://www.amazon.com/21st-Century-Testament-Preview-H3/dp/0980854946/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3IC9UNS9AN5RJ&colid=2QWS7L2BWJTBO
It's available in the UK and just now the USA, but I don't know where else. The reviews are so far either glowing or damning;
There is a Humanist Bible. That seems like a good read.
Oh, I thought you meant THE Good Book, the Humanist Bible. But I think you can get it on e-reader!
It all depends on the goal. If OP wants to send a message, then choosing The God Delusion or God Is Not Great would certainly send that message. If OP wants a book that's a good read, both are still good choices, but now there're other books that are equally good choices.
The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, The Portable Atheist, On Bullshit, On Truth, The Good Book: A Humanist Bible, The Moral Landscape, The Demon Haunted World, Religion and Science, and many others are excellent reads, but don't send that little (possibly unnecessary) jab.
I'm becoming a fan of A. C. Grayling. He makes a point to be purposefully softer than people like Dawkins or Hitchens. I enjoy Dawkins style as well, but Grayling makes a change of pace.
Also, I don't know if your mother is into heavy philosophy or not. I can think of a lot of things that are related to atheism but not directly about it. She could learn about positivism from AJ Ayer. It's been largely dropped as a popular philosophical position, but I think it still has things to contribute, even if it can't be accepted as a whole. The text for that would be "Language Truth and Logic". Also, you could give her some Hume to read.
There's lots more; that's just what I thought of off the top of my head.