"THINK FOR yourself and take responsibility for your own moral life." Thus philosopher and author AC Grayling summed up the one injunction of his latest work, The Good Book: A Secular Bible, during a lecture in Dublin last night.
Grayling, a professor of philosophy at Birbeck College at the University of London, was speaking at University College Dublin’s John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies.
Speaking on the inspiration behind the book, the philosopher said it had been born out of an idea that struck him 30 years ago during a study of ethical systems.
It occurred to him that if people had gone to non-religious literature – writings by the likes of Aristotle, Confucius, Mencius, Seneca, Cicero, Montaigne and Bacon – it would have resulted in a “different biblos”. With this he conceived the idea of a non-religious bible, one drawn from secular and philosophical literature from both eastern and western traditions.
“These non-religious traditions . . . are extraordinarily rich. There is a great treasury of insight and understanding there, a great budget of solace and consolation and advice, a great distillation of human understanding, human experience, from which everybody, no matter what their background, could profit,” Grayling said.
He noted that, while religious texts forward the idea of the deity setting obligations on human kind, “in the humanist tradition the effort starts from attempts to understand human nature and the human condition and tries to articulate ideas about the well-lived life and the well-organised society within which well-lived individual lives can flourish”.
Grayling said the book was “not an attack on religion” but said, “in adopting the same format . . . it stakes a claim to being on the same bookshelf, within the same space of discussion about reflection on our lives”.
He said the book had one injunction: “To answer the great Socratic question: ‘how is one to live?’ ”
“It’s quite extraordinary how many people don’t take that challenge for a variety of reasons. I think most people are refugees from their own intelligence, from the fact that they are in a position to think about these things . . but thinking is hard.”