AC Grayling is the son of a bitch atheist who is writing an atheist bible. In other words, he’s my competition. (In my tiny, feeble, twitching mind.) And really, he’s not my competition because he’s actually, like, a published author with a track record, and I’m just somebody trying to come up with 52 Sundays worth of atheistic bleating in book format to try to cash in on what I see as an atheist publishing gravy train. Except that I really believe in what I’m doing, I just can’t help being po-mo about it. And I can’t help thinking that atheists like Roger Waters ought to be incorporated into a liturgy, don’t you? And there’s a big difference between an atheist bible and a liturgy, they are really complementary aren’t they? See how fast my point collapses, like spaghetti after it hits the boiling water.
Anyway, he’s written a DANDY rebuttal to Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor’s attack on secularism, and here’s the link.
And speakin’ of atheists, have you seen Pat Condell’s latest? It’s BRILL.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea of an atheist bible. After you point out that religions are fairy tales that are started by schizophrenics and carried on by con artists to control and exploit ordinary people, what else is there to say? Now, I’m not saying that there is nothing else to say, simply that my limited intelligence can’t figure out what that might be.
Well, lessee now (rubbing hands together).
A bible contains ‘what you need to know for a good life’.
So an atheist bible would have, in no particular order, the creation myth (big bang…), advice from older people to younger people, stories of famous and infamous people which illustrate points about the nature of humanity, Carl Sagan’s baloney detection kit, words of comfort and poetry for the grieving, words of encouragement and peace for the suffering, and appropriate words for births, deaths, marriages etc etc. Except, instead of being all about the godnotion, it would be about reality as we currently consensually hallucinate it.
Advice about how to get rid of hiccups would be useful as well.
Thanks for the explanation. In my simple minded way, I thought that these were things that children learned from observing their parents.
In a perfect world, yes, of course. Or one learns it from observation. We may comprehend how things were, and how things will be, from what we see, measure and reason. Books, however, are companions when other aspects of civilization may fail. It would be pleasant if, for a change, an atheist had a book that would attempt many of the same things various Holy Books do with something resembling usefulness in time of trouble. My current book is Lillian Eichler Watson’s Light from Many Lamps, which I recommend without reserve, but it’s jam packed with religious dogma… I must step carefully around those bits.
This is what motivates me, that there are so many of these books, stuffed with godnotions. That an atheist may have spiritual needs may be anathema to some atheists, but not to me; I have seen it demonstrated too many times, that they have spiritual needs which theists are only to happy to try to meet with clumsy words, shopworn folkways, muddy thinking and inappropriate gestures. To have something selected and written with an atheist in mind would be a kindness, and reduce the feelings of isolation many atheists feel when surrounded by unsympathetic and uncomprehending theists.