I really wanted to say something good about The Good Book: A Humanist Bible , by the English philosophy professor and atheist A.C. Grayling. Given the harm that belief in the divine origins of sacred texts has done throughout the ages, how could it hurt for a nonbeliever to compile a volume of human wisdom that, for once, does not lay claim to divine authority? But this particular compilation does hurt, as I found after looking over the tome of nearly 600 pages, arranged to look like a conventional bible. Grayling’s production contains the completely unattributed wisdom of the ages, put through a word processor and translated into faux-elevated language that sounds a little like Euripides, a little like Cicero, a little like Voltaire and, alas, a lot like Khalil Gibran.

Let me quote from the first chapter of the first “book” (again, modeled after the format of a standard bible), called—what else?—Genesis. “In the garden stands a tree. In springtime it bears flowers; in the autumn, fruit. The fruit is knowledge, teaching the good gardener how to understand the world…When Newton sat in his garden, and saw what no one had ever seen before: that an apple draws the earth to itself, and the earth the apple….”

You can’t satirize this stuff. Forget the vapidity of the language. It’s not even factually accurate, which, at a minimum, a secular bible ought to be. Another chapter (9:18) has arteries carrying “nascent blood,” while “lengthening veins return the crimson flood.” Wrong again. Arteries carry bright red blood, because it is fully oxygenated, away from the heart, while the returning blood in veins is much darker because it is generally deoxygenated.

The Good Book is subtitled, “A Humanist Bible” in the United States and “A Secular Bible” in the United Kingdom. Perhaps its English publisher, Walker & Company, was advised by marketers that, to faith-based American ears, humanist sounds less threatening than secular.

When I first heard about this book, I mistakenly assumed that it was a reference work devoted to nonreligious wisdom—a secular version of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Instead, it is a collection of largely anonymous, often slightly altered quotes, interspersed with storytelling of the kind that appears in “Genesis.” This bible has 14 books: Genesis, Wisdom, Parables, Concord, Lamentations, Consolations, Songs, Sages, Histories, Proverbs, The Lawgiver, Acts, Epistles, and The Good. In “The Good,” Grayling offers his humanist version of the Ten Commandments: “Love well; seek the good in all things; harm no others; help the needy; think for yourself; take responsibility; respect nature; do your utmost; be informed; be courageous: at least, sincerely try.” Oh, that “sincerely try” is sincerely awful.

It is difficult to inform yourself when presented with a hodgepodge of quotes that you know you’ve heard somewhere but cannot identify precisely. Astonishingly, most of the English reviewers failed to note that the quotes—unlike those in good old Bartlett’s—are not accompanied by references. Are they used to this sort of sloppiness from their university-level philosophers across the pond?

As Mark Oppenheimer notes in The New York Times, reading this so-called book requires constant Googling to track down the unattributed quotes. It is genuinely maddening to read something vaguely familiar and not be entirely sure whether it’s from Seneca or Spinoza. The nature of faux-elevated language is that it erases distinctions enabling you to tell, without looking it up, whether something was written in the first century or the seventeenth.

What is missing here is context, which matters in a secular as well as a religious anthology. Indeed, all of the trouble caused in the world by “holy” books emerges out of a contextless, literal interpretation. If the Bible and the Koran were simply viewed as the products of fallible men of different eras—in which humanity knew much less about the material world than it does today—who would torture themselves (and others) by insisting that the authors of these books knew anything about, say, the origins of life? Unlike religious believers, Grayling does not claim that his bible contains absolute truth, but the evolution of secular thought can no more be understood in a historical vacuum than the evolution of religion.

Grayling has been called a :”velvet atheist,” to distinguish him from his countrymen Christopher Hitchens (who is now a U.S. citizen) and Richard Dawkins, who presumably wear hair shirts. His book should not be compared to Hitchens’s God Is Not Great or Dawkins’s The God Delusion, the author says, because it does not attack religion and is “a positive book, there’s nothing negative in it.”

Actually, the material that comes to mind when one beholds this book—which correctly advertises itself as having been “made” rather than written—is not velvet but pleather. One big difference between Grayling’s pastiche and the works of Hitchens and Dawkins is that Hitchens and Dawkins wrote, not made, their books. And they wrote in plain English. Hitchens has also edited an anthology, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for Nonbelievers , that is genuinely useful (fully attributed, with no apples drawing the earth to their bosoms or crimson blood coursing through veins) to anyone interested in the history of secularism.

Grayling’s bible is already a bestseller in the U.K. (it did particularly well over Easter weekend) although it may not do as well in the United States because, while available on Amazon, it has a British publisher. The author had the chuztpah to describe his bible as a “tribute to the Hebrew Bible’s editors, who took the legends of their forebears and wove them into one compelling, if digressive narrative.”

There has already been a good deal written, particularly in England, about whether Grayling’s bible insults religion. This is utterly beside the point, since the book is an insult to language, to authors who deserve credit for their words, to translators who deserve credit for translating those words, and, above all, to the intelligence of secular readers. We don’t have one Good Book. We have good books, thousands of years of them, and the real Euripides, Shakespeare, Spinoza and Darwin are all available to provide a genuine humanistic education.

People who prize reason ought to have the discrimination and energy to read genuine works of literature and philosophy and leave the pleather to to those who are too lazy to care about intellectual and historical context.

Note: This week’s religious quackery award goes to the Brooklyn Hasidic newspaper, Der Zeitung, for deleting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and counterterrorism expert Audrey Tomasen from the front-page photograph of President Obama and his staff watching the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. The newspaper issued a statement Monday saying it was sorry if the woman-free version of the picture was “seen as offensive,” but claimed that Jewish modesty laws forbade publishing any pictures of women. Several non-Hasidic rabbis took issue with the statement, noting that nothing in Jewish law forbids the publication of photographs of normally clothed women. I’m guessing that the ultra-Orthodox bullies who run this insular Hasidic paper don’t like the idea of any women with power. What would they do if Golda Meir were still alive and the Prime Minister of Israel?

Update: This post originally read that according to Newton’s Law of gravity,“the apple does not draw the earth to itself.” In fact, the apple does draw the earth, though the effect is so small as to be scientifically immeasurable.