Morality with and without a god.

The most common arguments that are often presented to make the claim that you can’t be truly good without a religious belief are as follows: Divine Command: Belief has absolute, god given rules. If you reject god, then you are simply making up your own ethical standard and so your morality would be relative and … Read more

Top 5 Non-Religious Books on Living a Good Life

There is a prevailing, and fairly common belief, that we need religion to live a truly ethical and moral life, and that a life without a god (pick any, they all claim it), leads you down the road to immorality. It is pure nonsense of course, and tempting as it might be to explain why, my immediate motivation for this post is not to go there, but rather to highlight a rather interesting list of secular books on the topic of living a good, and yet completely godless, life.

Well-known British philosophy professor, A.C. Grayling, has had a lifetime ambition to distill into one volume the very best secular thoughts, and so after many decades of work, he finally completed it, (if curious, you can click here for more details on his new publication “The Good Book”). Anyway, my point is not to point you at that specific book, but since I’m on the topic, do check it out. Instead I want to make the observation that he spent a heck of a long time  plodding through thousands of texts to complete his book, so he has now got specific recommendations – a Top-5 list of books “on how to live a satisfying and morally good life.” …

I was quite surprised at a couple of them.

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UK, an evolving post-christian secular nation

Social researchers have been looking into the attitudes of the growing numbers of non-religious young Britons. Its an important question to ask because if the recent polls are correct, then the majority of the population in the UK are not religious. Let me spell that out for you … if you take every possible form of religious belief, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu and lots more, add up all the followers in the population, you find that together they are a minority.

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