Godless Morality

"That is an amazing book, because it was written when he was still Bishop of Edinburgh. He was very much loved as bishop because he’s a wonderful pastoral clergyman but also a man of great learning and he was anxious to say that there’s no need to found morality on religion. There is a connect, obviously, between the Christian religion and the morality that he teaches, but people can be morally highly principled, conscientious without necessarily tangling with any religion whatsoever. This is what he sought to say in this book. “People can be morally highly principled, conscientious without necessarily tangling with any religion whatsoever.” Later, in another book, he actually went further and said that he personally couldn’t believe in, let’s say, the resurrection, so he himself could hardly call himself a Christian any more. This is after he had retired from being a bishop. Here he simply wanted to drive a wedge between Christianity and, indeed, any other religion, and the foundation of morality. And in that I think he is absolutely right. It is highly derogatory of all the really good, morally thoughtful people who are not religious, to suppose that they can’t have morality without religion. I entirely agree with you, but I would rather that morality, behaving well rather than badly, is really a human necessity and people have got to be induced to recognise that all of us, every one of us, has a responsibility not to behave badly. We’re all tempted to be greedy, to take more for ourselves, to overlook the interests of others, but we’ve got to learn that everybody is of equal value, so we’ve got to take other people’s likes, dislikes, horrors and wishes as seriously as our own. So religion, in my opinion, is a kind of clothing that these moral sentiments take on to be more appealing to the imagination. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I mean, the Jews probably urgently needed a firmly-based morality when they were coming out of exile that ensured that they respected other people’s lives and property and then, out of this morality, arose the legend that Moses went up to the top of Mount Sinai and was handed the Ten Commandments, among other commandments, from God. So the morality comes first, and the story, that appeals to people and that they can understand, comes afterwards. So I would rather found religion on morality than the other way round. When it comes down to it, morality comes first. Human beings have common needs. They are very vulnerable. They are vulnerable to one another, to the elements, to awful things like storms and floods and all human beings are in the same boat. They need to protect one another, not to rock the boat, not to take too much for himself. That is common to humanity. Sound societies are founded on the respect for human life and the respect for human property, the need that people have to be allowed to bring up their families. These are basic moral needs and everybody has those needs. That seems to me to be the basis of morality. I think of the parable of the Good Samaritan. It seems to me the most marvellous invention of religion because it has everything. You have somebody who, with no gain to himself, looks after someone else and not only that but he was a Samaritan. This was a despised person, not a religious figure, but an ordinary bloke and he put himself out and that is a marvellous illustration of how society ought to be. We ought to help one another."