Reviewed by Edward Pearce

THE title of this fierce little tract is confusing, a confusion continued in early pages touching upon philosophical views about choice. The Hercules of Greek legend had been offered the hands of two optional and theoretical ladies, representing pleasure and duty. So in the matter of friendship, Grayling notes, Aristotle and Pico Della Mirandola believed in affinity, a natural fit between friends, while Kierkegaard and Nietzsche urge a duty toward the widest circle of acquaintance.

But non-philosophers should read on for a sustained assertion of the good and reasonable life-pattern for middling intelligent mankind. This is a pungent, uncompromising book, advising, provoking and sustaining intelligent and intelligible argument. And it is straightforwardly a manifesto: the "Grayling version", covering war and peace, aesthetics, sex, drugs, family values, death and God. It is God who gets the pasting.

Religion, he writes "began as the science and technology of earliest man who, surrounded by fearsome nature, devised explanations of the universe divine commands, disobedience to which was seen as a threat to the precarious abeyance of storm and earthquake, drought and starvation, which as divine anger, always impended".

Galileo, he continues, blew apart the Earth-centred universe, designed by God and thus proof of God. Rome, resting upon Psalm 102 - "He fixed the foundations of the Earth that it shall not be moved forever" - responded with denial and force.

Up to this point, Grayling is unanswerable in his thesis that religion has ultimately rested upon the threat of force. Men declare themselves the soldiers of God and do horrors in his name. So "Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal". He quotes the full passage, what might be called God the Alibi, in the golden language of Tynedale, following it with Goethe's Prometheus addressing the Greek gods: "Scantily you feed your majesty on sacrifices and the breath of prayer; and you would starve if beggars and children were not hopeful fools."

But his case is made against institutional religion and Christian conduct, which, in both cases, is largely in the past. It may, as he points out, have taken the Roman Catholic Church until 1992 to get condemnation of a sun-centred universe off the books, but it hasn't burnt anybody for ages. However, a flourishing faction of Islam is still into combustion, Allah still invoked in places to stone women for adultery. A presumptuous crediting of God for cruelty has present application.

Similarly, while valiant ignorance subsists among extreme evangelicals denying evolution, Christianity, outside the American south and west, has retreated from such literalism. Core belief now lies outside the midrash, the magic of annunciation and assumption, and lives in ethics.

Here Grayling becomes perfunctory and dismissive. Christianity is "jejeune" in its principles, and "what little Christianity offers by way of positive moral injunctions is indistinguishable from the Judaism that preceded it or from Mohism in ancient China". For a philosopher, Grayling is too deep into dislike.

Grayling is a libertarian, invoking freedom where no hurt is done which, in sexual matters, is easier proclaimed than guaranteed. Choice is singular, but love is not and hurt inflicted all the time. Discretion to the point of downright lying becomes a practical virtue.

Grayling is also an uncertain guide in politics. A child of the old Rhodesia, he is hung up about white residents such as his parents. The record of their successors is measured long in murder and starvation, but emotion and a rather too easy indignation take over. No matter, The Choice Of Hercules exists to be argued with.