The Good Book

I was perusing CNN.com instead of doing classwork because I'm a terrible student, and while looking through the "living" section (because I'm a sucker for lifestyle articles) and discovered this awesome article "Leading atheist publishes secular Bible". I've often wondered if I should read such books like "The God Delusion" and similar atheist works to pad my nontheistic cred and make my brain wrinklier with knowledge, but I often worried about become a bit too militant. I tend to internalize everything I read and become a stringent logician when exposed to one too many articles and I then become a pain to live with. Like how I cannot read "Chicken Soup for the Soul" anymore because it makes me a depressed angsty child, I have to limit my anti-religious readings because it makes me a caricature of an atheist.

However, I feel like owning and really studying this work would both wrinkle my brain and yet leave me with some iota of tolerance of other people's belief systems because it seems to me to be less focused on proving that god is a figment of our synaptic-fires and more just discussing what makes a good person, how to be a good person and really studying the human condition.

The militant part of me feels like this book could be an insult to the legitimacy of the atheist nonbelief, since do we really need an equivalent book to religions? Then the part of me that recognizes that my understanding of all the intricacies of life and coexisting with other people is not really fleshed out and this book will help those like me - the not-fully-educated atheist who doesn't have words for all the things they think and feel about living - to comprehend the world and ourselves that much more. And I don't know a whole lot of philosophers anyway so this would be a useful crash course in Great Thinkers.

I think I'll drop the 20 dollars to get it. Seems worthwhile.