Free Online Books By Kahlil Gibran

A secular bible: deliver us from lazy scholarship

I really wanted to say something good about The Good Book: A Humanist Bible , by the English philosophy professor and atheist A.C. Grayling. Given the harm that belief in the divine origins of sacred texts has done throughout the ages, how could it hurt for a nonbeliever to compile a volume of human wisdom that, for once, does not lay claim to divine authority? But this particular compilation does hurt, as I found after looking over the tome of nearly 600 pages, arranged to look like a conventional bible.Grayling production completely possesses the wisdom of the ages unattributed, subject to a word processor and translated into high false-that sounds a bit like Euripides, like Cicero, like Voltaire and, alas, like Khalil Gibran.

Let me quote from the first chapter of the first "book" (again, the model of a bible standard format), called, what else?-Genesis. "In the garden there is a tree. In the spring, she wears flowers in autumn, fruits. The fruit is knowledge, teaching the good gardener how to understand the world…When Newton sat in his garden, and saw what no one had ever seen before: that an apple draws the earth to itself, and the earth the apple….”

You can’t satirize this stuff. Forget the vapidity of the language. It’s not even factually accurate, which, at a minimum, a secular bible ought to be. Another chapter (9:18) has arteries carrying “nascent blood,” while “lengthening veins return the crimson flood.” Wrong again. Arteries carry bright red blood, because it is fully oxygenated, away from the heart, while the returning blood in veins is much darker because it is generally deoxygenated.

The Good Book is subtitled, “A Humanist Bible” in the United States and “ A Secular Bible ” in the United Kingdom. Perhaps its English publisher, Walker & Company, was advised by marketers that, to faith-based American ears, humanist sounds less threatening than secular.

When I first heard about this book, I mistakenly assumed that it was a reference work devoted to nonreligious wisdom—a secular version of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Instead, it is a collection of largely anonymous, often slightly altered quotes, interspersed with storytelling of the kind that appears in “Genesis.” This bible has 14 books: Genesis, Wisdom, Parables, Concord, Lamentations, Consolations, Songs, Sages, Histories, Proverbs, The Lawgiver, Acts, Epistles, and The Good. In “The Good,” Grayling offers his humanist version of the Ten Commandments: “Love well; seek the good in all things; harm no others; help the needy; think for yourself; take responsibility; respect nature; do your utmost; be informed; be courageous: at least, sincerely try.” Oh, that “sincerely try” is sincerely awful.

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A politician is a mess. He is always striving to prove that he is somebody. That means that he must be suffering from inferiority complex. Every politician suffers from inferiority complex. In a better world they will not be in the capitals, they will be on the psychological couches. They should be put in madhouses. Mad people are not so dangerous; they have never done anything wrong.

Prophet

The forerunner, his parables and poems

The collected works

The broken wings

The Eye of the Prophet