Customer Reviews

Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

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This book could have benefited from much better professional editing. Epstein struggles to put across his ideas in a succinct and compelling fashion. He even includes a lengthy, self-indulgent section about how he struggled to continue with the book and nearly gave up. Some of his sentences weigh in at 85 or even 100 words and barely make sense. But despite these technical criticisms I am sympathetic to what Epstein has to say about Humanism. He writes very much in the American tradition of Humanism and has no problem referring to Humanism as a `faith', as long as that means `faith in our ability to live well, based on convictions reached by free, unfettered rational enquiry'. His mentor was the late Rabbi Sherwin Wine, founder of Humanistic Judaism - a kind of secular religion similar in spirit to the Ethical Societies - which belongs to the broad and tolerant family of different Humanisms in America. He is also broadminded and generous in his appraisal of liberal and progressive forms of religion such as Unitarian Universalists, reconstructionist Jews and liberal Muslims whom he calls `allies of Humanism'. He is familiar with the positive psychology of Martin Seligman and includes many nuggets of wisdom from one of the greatest twentieth century humanistic psychologists, Erich Fromm. He is proud of the fact that `in our Humanist community at Harvard we try to spend less time staging debates between fundamentalists and atheist philosophers and more time on how to empower ourselves to respond to all the problems of life - stress, pain, ageing and death - which make people turn to religion in the first place'.

The character of British Humanism has been shaped to a large extent by the DNA of nineteenth century rationalism and secularism and it has always been suspicious of, if not downright hostile to, American versions of Humanism which cast it as a secular, non-theistic religion with secular ceremonies and Sunday schools for children. We are right to be suspicious of any attempt to turn Humanism into another dogmatic, moralistic religion. But we should not be too hard on our American cousins. There may be much to learn from them in how to make Humanism a fully constructive alternative to religion which might prove more compelling to our contemporaries than the highly politicised and secularist version of Humanism currently on offer. I urge British Humanists to read this book with an open mind.