About This Book

- The belief that one can't be good without belief in God is a prejudice and discrimination. - Goodness and morality do not require belief in a deity. - Over a billion people in the world define themselves as atheist, agnostic, or nonreligious. - Humanism is a response to the loneliness and fear of being human, and it emphasizes living a good life without relying on faith or the supernatural. - Humanists believe in seeking the best in oneself and others, pursuing truth and honesty, and balancing work, play, and rest.

Top Highlights

• To suggest that one can’t be good without belief in God is not just an opinion, a mere curious musing—it is a prejudice. It may even be discrimination. After all, would you ever ask: Is it possible to be a good person if you’re Muslim? Or Buddhist? Or Jewish? Or Christian? Would you feel comfortable working for an employer who implied that all gays...
• This prejudice ought to concern us all. Because prejudice anywhere endangers not only its targets, but all who believe that we should be judged not by the color of our skin, or our gender, or sexuality, or by our religious preference or lack thereof, but by the content of our character. If we can convince ourselves today that one entire group compr...
• It is not easy to live a good life or be a good person—with or without a god. The fact is that life is hard. Living well and being a good person are difficult to do. But that doesn’t mean we should give ourselves permission to judge an entire group of people as incapable of goodness unless they’re being good the majority’s way.
• Tolerant, fair-minded people of all religions or none do not dwell on the question of whether we can be good without God. The answer is yes. Period. Millions and millions of people are, every day. However, the question why we can be good without God is much more relevant and interesting. And the question of how we can be good without God is absolut...
• Here’s the good news: over a billion people around the world today are like you. All the major studies of world religious demographics, despite different methodologies, indicate that there are somewhere around one billion people on earth who define themselves as atheist, agnostic, or nonreligious. Even if we exclude the approximately half of nonrel...