The Good Book: A Secular Bible

A. C. Grayling, Britain's most popular and widely read philosopher, has created a secular bible that draws on the wisdom of 2,500 years of contemplative non-religious writing about all that it means to be human - from the origins of the universe to small matters of courtesy and kindness in everyday life. Designed to be read as narrative and also to be dipped into for inspiration, encouragement and consolation, The Good Book offers a thoughtful, non-religious alternative to the many people who do not follow one of the world's great religions. Instead, going back to traditions older than Christianity, and far richer and more various, including the non-theistic philosophical and literary schools of the great civilisations of both West and East, from the Greek philosophy of classical antiquity and its contemporaneous Confucian, Mencian and Mohist schools in China, down through classical Rome, the flourishing of Indian and Arab worlds, the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, the worldwide scientific discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the present, Grayling collects, edits, rearranges and organises the collective secular wisdom of the world in one highly readable volume. In an interview in the New York Times, AC Grayling says it is a book that 'provides resources for thinking about what the good life might be' but points out that we 'We have to take the Socratic challenge to lead the examined life [and] transcend the teachings and the teachers ... We have to think for ourselves.'