The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [1]
For this is a good book as well as a book of the good, its words from mighty pens, its thoughts from votaries of the right and true. It is a text made from all times for all times, its aspiration and aim the good for humanity and the good of the world.
Contents
Epistle to the Reader
Genesis
Wisdom
Parables
Concord
Lamentations
Consolations
Sages
Songs
Histories
Proverbs
The Lawgiver
Acts
Epistles
The Good
Some source texts
Copyright Page
Genesis
Chapter 1
1. In the garden stands a tree. In springtime it bears flowers; in the autumn, fruit.
2. Its fruit is knowledge, teaching the good gardener how to understand the world.
3. From it he learns how the tree grows from seed to sapling, from sapling to maturity, at last ready to offer more life;
4. And from maturity to age and sleep, whence it returns to the elements of things.
5. The elements in turn feed new births; such is nature’s method, and its parallel with the course of humankind.
6. It was from the fall of a fruit from such a tree that new inspiration came for inquiry into the nature of things,
7. When Newton sat in his garden, and saw what no one had seen before: that an apple draws the earth to itself, and the earth the apple,
8. Through a mutual force of nature that holds all things, from the planets to the stars, in unifying embrace.
9. So all things are gathered into one thing: the universe of nature, in which there are many worlds: the orbs of light in an immensity of space and time,
10. And among them their satellites, on one of which is a part of nature that mirrors nature in itself,
11. And can ponder its beauty and significance, and seek to understand it: this is humankind.
12. All other things, in their cycles and rhythms, exist in and of themselves;
13. But in humankind there is experience also, which is what makes good and its opposite,
14. In both of which humankind seeks to grasp the meaning of things.
Chapter 2
1. Those who first set themselves to discover nature’s secrets and designs, fearlessly opposing mankind’s early ignorance, deserve our praise;
2. For they began the quest to measure what once was unmeasurable, to discern its laws, and conquer time itself by understanding.
3. New eyes were needed to see what lay hidden in ignorance, new language to express the unknown,
4. New hope that the world would reveal itself to inquiry and investigation.
5. They sought to unfold the world’s primordial sources, asking how nature yields its abundance and fosters it,
6. And where in its course everything goes when it ends, either to change or cease.
7. The first inquirers named nature’s elements atoms, matter, seeds, primal bodies, and understood that they are coeval with the world;
8. They saw that nothing comes from nothing, so that discovering the elements reveals how the things of nature exist and evolve.
9. Fear holds dominion over people when they understand little, and need simple stories and legends to comfort and explain;
10. But legends and the ignorance that give them birth are a house of limitations and darkness.
11. Knowledge is freedom, freedom from ignorance and its offspring fear; knowledge is light and liberation,
12. Knowledge that the world contains itself, and its origins, and the mind of man,
13. From which comes more knowledge, and hope of knowledge again.
14. Dare to know: that is the motto of enlightenment.
Chapter 3
1. All things take their origin from earlier kinds:
2. Ancestors of most creatures rose from the sea, some inhabitants of the sea evolved from land-dwelling forefathers;
3. Birds descend from creatures that once ran flightless on the ground;
4. Horned cattle,