Good Sense

When a book is consistently burned by fearful zealots for two centuries, you know that the author was on to something good. Clearly ahead of his time, the Baron d'Holbach could be thought of as combining the hard-nosed sensibility of Richard Dawkins with the witty and impassioned style of Thomas Paine with a hearty helping of G.E. Moore's moral sense thrown in for good measure. What's more, not only was the Baron d'Holbach championing atheism well before modern anthropology and biology made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist, but even a cursory glance at the list of section titles shows that d'Holbach had anticipated and refuted all of the common and facile arguments against atheism that are used (quite frequently) even today. "Good Sense" is a supremely quotable manifesto of morality and reason that is no less important or needed today than it was when it was first written more than two centuries ago. Perhaps better, the sympathetic reader leaves the book feeling optimistic and energized about his or her lack of belief and, in an age of growing religiosity and open hostility, that's something that every one of us in the reviled 3% could use.