The Angler’s Bible, the Sportsman’s Bible, the Businessman’s Bible, the old-fashioned Revised Standard Christian Bible. Now the atheists get their shot.

University of London professor AC Grayling, the freshly elected president of Britain’s Atheist — sorry, Humanist — Association, is making the rounds on this side of the pond, touting his new creation “The Good Book: A Humanist Bible.’’ Ostensibly 30 years in the making, his oddball compendium of warmed-over history, feel-good apothegms, and ethical chestnuts is being dubbed the Atheists’ Bible.

We need to review some nomenclatures. Atheists, like nudists, rebranded themselves a while back for public relations purposes. We started calling ourselves humanists, one nabob explained to me a few years ago, because we wanted to be perceived as for something, rather than against God. Without apparent irony, humanists like to assemble on Sunday mornings, and have elevated Charles Darwin to quasi-deific status. Why on earth the nudists re-christened themselves “naturists’’ is an entirely different and equally perplexing question.

Grayling, a shaggy-haired don with an Oxford connection — he wants you to know that he is thisclose to Richard Dawkins, emeritus Oxford fellow and reigning pope of the world atheist movement — is having a marvy time in America. He popped up on CNN. He allowed himself to be gently buffeted by Stephen Colbert, which generally pumps up book sales. I caught his act a few Sundays ago while he was preening for the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy.

Grayling is charmingly immodest in that superior, British sort of way. He’s heard the criticisms (“Is this book an odd joke?’’ Mark Oppenheimer asked in The New York Times), and he thinks they’re all bosh. “People ask, ‘Why do you need a Bible?’ ’’ he said. “The answer is that you don’t.’’ “Bible,’’ he points out, is just a Greek word meaning “book.’’ Compiling a Bible hardly makes you a god, he quipped, “although I couldn’t be any worse than the others.’’ This ain’t no sacred text, he insisted: “I’d hate for it to become fetishized. I’d be delighted if people burn this book, as long as they go out and buy another one.’’

The book itself? I was hoping you wouldn’t ask. It has biblical-sounding chapters, like Acts, Epistles, Lamentations, and so on, that feature randomly selected excerpts from various great works. The prose is ridiculous, cast in a stilted, century-old English that reads like the faux-historical “crawl’’ that precedes a lost-in-space sci-fi movie.

Here is Grayling’s Genesis Chapter 7, verses 4-5:

“Raiment, hung by the surf-beaten shore, grows moist;

the same, spread before the sun, then dries;

No one saw how the moisture sank in, nor how it was lifted by the heat.’’

Huh?

The Creation story is an account of the apple falling on Sir Isaac Newton’s head — get it? There is a 286-page Histories chapter in which Grayling spins either Herodotus or Thucydides through his typewriter. Good luck finding out which, as the book has no footnotes. “By wrenching a few nuggets of wisdom from Aristotle’s ‘Metaphysics’ or Mill’s ‘On Liberty,’ he has reduced these and other thinkers to Deepak Chopra-style providers of happy-clappy advice for how to live a decent, upstanding life,’’ commented Brendan O’Neill, editor of the website Spiked (spiked-online.com).

It has escaped no one’s notice that Grayling is flogging his silly Bartlett’s collection of semi-uplifting quotations at the same time that the best English Bible, likewise produced by eminent British scholars, is celebrating its 400th anniversary. No less an unbeliever than Christopher Hitchens recently hailed the King James Bible’s milestone in Vanity Fair, calling the translation “a repository and edifice of language which towers above its successors.’’

Hitchens and others have remarked that almost as much of our current language comes from the King James Bible as from Shakespeare. Catch phrases such as “the powers that be,’’ “salt of the earth,’’ “from strength to strength,’’ and of course Abraham Lincoln’s famous evocation of the “house divided against itself’’ all hail from the 17th-century text. Hitchens read a passage from the King James Version at his father’s funeral, and another erudite unbeliever, George Orwell, made sure that a selection from the KJV was read at his own service.

Will people start arranging for readings from Mr. Grayling’s “Good Book’’ at their funeral services? Somehow I doubt it.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.

© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.