The Good People's Project

Our Fundamental Problem: Two Kinds of Believer

Almost every major faith has two kinds of believer: first, those for whom, sadly, their scripture is a weapon — justifying violence, intolerance, or domination — and then the much larger group for whom it is a source of peace, comfort, ethics, and meaning.

That second group, for the purposes of this project, are called “The Good People.” They may know that their own texts contain difficult passages, and mostly they cope by holding those passages at a distance. The problem is that the passages don’t go away — they keep getting used by people who treat religion as a weapon, and that spoils the faith for everyone else.

A Solution: Books for the Good People

The Good People’s Project takes five major scriptural texts: The Quran, The Gospels, The Torah, The Bhagavad Gita and Buddhist Texts, and Claude AI edits each one against the same ten standard filters, chosen with Claude, simply to remove everything that is not Good.

So Claude applies the ten standard filters that remove from each text any passage that:

• Requires or encourages violence
• Is intolerant of other faiths, or none
• Denies the moral standing of non-believers, or condemns them purely for their different faith
• Accepts or encourages discrimination on grounds of sex, religion, class, or ethnicity
• Endorses slavery or cruel punishments
• Glorifies aggression or war
• Prevents freedom of speech or thought
• Seeks world domination
• Imposes onerous conditions on leaving the faith
• Is purely repetitious or irrelevant

The Process: All Done Even-Handedly by Claude

The same ten filters are applied identically, mechanically, to all five texts — no tradition is treated more leniently than another. Every cut is logged in a separate Removal Chart that names the passage and the reason it was removed, so nothing is hidden or unaccountable.

What’s left is then condensed, on a different and simpler principle. These are ancient texts, and much of their length comes from telling the same story, law, or image many times over. So where a theme recurs, only one version is kept — the most complete, most vivid, and most generous telling of it — and the others are noted but not reproduced in full.

The result is re-organised thematically into a text that can be read in an evening or a lifetime. For transparency, what is edited out is shown in a Removal Chart. A separate Comparison Chart then shows how the five faiths line up against each other on key shared themes.

Editing isn’t a new idea — just a more systematic, even-handed version of something each tradition already does in its own way — reinterpreting, recontextualising, and quietly setting aside its own hardest passages. The result is offered respectfully, with open access to whatever interests you. The filters themselves might have been chosen differently, or could be improved — but a start has to be made somewhere, and revisions may follow.

What the Editing Turns Up

The remaining Good Texts are wonderful, usable

Stripped of all violent and intolerant material, the five traditions converge towards a strikingly consistent and uplifting ethical core. Please have a look.

What’s removed is of course very interesting too, not least because Good People generally ignore it. Please have a look, but no need to dwell.

What This Is Not…

This is not an argument that all religions are the same. They are not. The disagreements are named honestly in the comparison chapters of this book, and no attempt is made to resolve them. Each to his own.

This is not an argument that religion is good and has always been good. The historical record is plain. The texts edited out in this Project have been used to justify crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, genocides, the burning of heretics, the subordination of women, the persecution of gay people, the conquest of continents, and the enslavement of millions. The passages that provided cover for these things are in this book’s editorial notes, named and condemned. Religion has done enormous harm. This Project does not pretend otherwise.

This is not a liberal rewriting of ancient texts to make them say what we would prefer them to say. The editing is not done by adding progressive ideas that were not there. It is done by removing ideas that are plainly there and plainly harmful, and asking what is left when they are gone. What is left is not a modern liberal invention.

This is not a new religion and does not seek to proselytise for “Good People-ism”. It demonstrates most clearly that good ethics do not require any specific theological commitment. Even the Abrahamic texts, in their edited forms, contain much that a secular humanist can read with recognition: the Sermon on the Mount, the Verse of the Throne, the death of Moses on Mount Nebo, the four noble truths.

How to Use This

The Good People’s Project Complete includes all five Good texts, the removal charts, a comparison table, and the Hadith appendix — 277 pages. You can download it all and save any of it you like.

Open it in Word and tick the Navigation Pane (under “View”) — this gives you a sidebar showing every section heading so you can jump instantly to whichever scripture, removal chart, or table interests you.

Everything here is free, with no copyright and no sign-up. Download it, copy it, share it, translate it.