In the Beginning Was A.C. Grayling

According to Jewish tradition, the Torah was delivered to Moses by God on Mount Sinai thousands of years ago.  A.C. Grayling's The Good Book: A Humanist Bible claims humbler origins. That text was given to us by a British philosophy professor this past summer. It's not a work of revelation, but of provocation, or maybe it's a work of revelation and provocation both: as Grayling writes in his opening Epistle to the Reader, his is "a text made from all times for all times, its aspiration and aim the good for humanity and the good of the world." The Good Book isn't a crude, anti-religious rant of the sort we've come to expect from Grayling's fellow Brits Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Grayling's project has organized religion in its crosshairs, but it also makes certain powerful claims about the meaning and purpose of human existence.