The power that comes from religious authority has been at the center of all human societies from time immemorial–but those claims of sovereignty have been disputed for just as long. In Damned Good Company: Twenty Rebels Who Bucked the God Experts, author Luis Granados explores twenty cases, from Socrates to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, of brave challenges against those claiming a special authority from God.
Damned Good Company is a book about people, not about God. People who have preached about God, taken money for sharing what they say they know about God, and ordered others about to enforce what they claim to be God’s will–and a small band of heroes who stood up to them.
In short, Damned Good Company is a Profiles in Courage for humanists.
Some of the twenty heroes of Damned Good Company are well-known: Erasmus, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Clarence Darrow, Atatürk, Nehru, Steve Biko. Others are not: people like Han Yü, banished from the 9th century Chinese court for questioning the worship of the Buddha’s finger, and Lucy Harris, who came within an inch of deflating Mormonism before it got off the ground.
Each hero is contrasted with a villain of his or her time and place: either a God expert like Martin Luther or Joseph Smith or a cynical politician like Mussolini, who never believed in God but exploited religion shamelessly to advance his political ambition.
The stories in Damned Good Company will inspire those today who want to stand up to the Christian Right, the Muslim fanatics, the oppressiveness of Catholic and Jewish orthodoxy, the rising Hindu Taliban, and everyone else who claims a God-given right to tell the rest of us what to do.
This enhanced ebook has been extensively researched, with over 1,100 footnotes. It takes full advantage of state-of-the-art features with over 100 photographs, online reader comments, linked videos, and hundreds of useful web links.
Author Bio:
I am a 58 year old Washington attorney and a student of the history of organized
religion. I publish a weekly article on www.luisgranados.com/blog relating a current
headline to an episode from religious history, demonstrating how little things change
from religion to religion, from century to century. These articles are now carried also by
Secular News Daily and Rant & Reason, the blog of the American Humanist Association.
My longer magazine articles on religious history have appeared within the last year in
Secular Nation, Free Inquiry, and The Humanist.
I am not an atheist. I am more of an agnostic/deist: a suspecter, not a believer. But I
resent being told what to do by people no better than I am who claim to speak for God. A
large portion of what is wrong with the world, for a long time, has been caused by giving
these frauds more credit than they deserve.
I want to embolden people to follow in the footsteps of the heroes of Damned Good
Company, that the world may be run more on principles of “What makes sense?” than on
principles of “What did God say about that?”
Since 2005, I have practiced law on a half-time basis, while devoting the other half to
the study of the scandals of organized religion.
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