The GOD Delusion (35 page)

Most
thoughtful people would agree that morality in the absence of policing
is somehow more truly moral than the kind of false morality that
vanishes as soon as the police go on strike or the spy camera is
switched off, whether the spy camera is a real one monitored in the
police station or an imaginary one in heaven. But it is perhaps unfair
to interpret the question 'If there is no God, why bother to be good?'
in such a cynical way.* A religious thinker could offer a more
genuinely moral interpretation, along the lines of the following
statement from an imaginary apologist. 'If you don't believe in God,
you don't believe there are any absolute standards of morality. With
the best will in the world you may intend to be a good person, but how
do you decide what is good and what is bad? Only religion can
ultimately provide your standards of good and evil. Without religion
you have to make it up as you go along. That would be morality without
a rule book: morality flying by the seat of its pants. If morality is
merely a matter of choice, Hitler could claim to be moral by his own
eugenically inspired standards, and all the atheist can do is make a
personal choice to live by different lights. The Christian, the Jew or
the Muslim, by contrast, can claim that evil has an absolute meaning,
true for all time and in all places, according to which Hitler was
absolutely evil.'

* H.
L. Mencken, again with characteristic cynicism, defined conscience as
the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.

Even
if it were true that we need God to be moral, it would of course not
make God's existence more likely, merely more desirable (many people
cannot tell the difference). But that is not the issue here. My
imaginary religious apologist has no need to admit that sucking up to
God is the religious motive for doing good. Rather, his claim is that,
wherever the
motive
to be good comes from, without
God there would be no standard for
deciding
what
is good. We could each make up our own definition of the good, and
behave accordingly. Moral principles that are based only upon religion
(as opposed to, say, the 'golden rule', which is often associated with
religions but can be derived from elsewhere) may be called absolutist.
Good is good and bad is bad, and we don't mess around deciding
particular cases by whether, for example, somebody suffers. My
religious apologist would claim that only religion can provide a basis
for deciding what is good.

Some
philosophers, notably Kant, have tried to derive absolute morals from
non-religious sources. Though a religious man himself, as was almost
inevitable in his time,* Kant tried to base a morality on duty for
duty's sake, rather than for God's. His famous categorical imperative
enjoins us to 'act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same
time will that it should become a universal law'. This works tidily for
the example of telling lies. Imagine a world in which people told lies
as a matter of principle, where lying was regarded as a good and moral
thing to do. In such a world, lying itself would cease to have any
meaning. Lying needs a presumption of truth for its very definition. If
a moral principle is something we should wish everybody to follow,
lying cannot be a moral principle because the principle itself would
break down in meaninglessness. Lying, as a rule for life, is inherently
unstable. More generally, selfishness, or free-riding parasitism on the
goodwill of others, may work for me as a lone selfish individual and
give me personal satisfaction. But I cannot wish that everybody would
adopt selfish parasitism as a moral principle, if only because then I
would have nobody to parasitize.

*
This is the standard interpretation of Kant's views. However, the noted
philosopher A. C. Grayling has plausibly argued
(New
Humanist,
July-Aug. 2006) that, although Kant publicly went
along with the religious conventions of his time, he was really an
atheist.

The
Kantian imperative seems to work for truth-telling and some other
cases. It is not so easy to see how to broaden it to morality
generally. Kant notwithstanding, it is tempting to agree with my
hypothetical apologist that absolutist morals are usually driven by
religion. Is it always wrong to put a terminally ill patient out of her
misery at her own request? Is it always wrong to make love to a member
of your own sex? Is it always wrong to kill an embryo? There are those
who believe so, and their grounds are absolute. They brook no argument
or debate. Anybody who disagrees deserves to be shot: metaphorically of
course, not literally - except in the case of some doctors in American
abortion clinics (see next chapter). Fortunately, however, morals do
not have to be absolute.

Moral
philosophers are the professionals when it comes to thinking about
right and wrong. As Robert Hinde succinctly put it, they agree that
'moral precepts, while not necessarily constructed by reason, should be
defensible by reason'.
⁸⁹
They classify
themselves in many ways, but in modern terminology the major divide is
between 'deontologists' (such as Kant) and 'consequentialists'
(including 'utilitarians' such as Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832).
Deontology is a fancy name for the belief that morality consists in the
obeying of rules. It is literally the science of duty, from the Greek
for 'that which is binding'. Deontology is not quite the same thing as
moral absolutism, but for most purposes in a book about religion there
is no need to dwell on the distinction. Absolutists believe there are
absolutes of right and wrong, imperatives whose Tightness makes no
reference to their consequences. Consequentialists more pragmatically
hold that the morality of an action should be judged by its
consequences. One version of consequentialism is utilitarianism, the
philosophy associated with Bentham, his friend James Mill (1773-1836)
and Mill's son John Stuart Mill (1806-73). Utilitarianism is often
summed up in Bentham's unfortunately imprecise catchphrase: 'the
greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals
and legislation'.

Not
all absolutism is derived from religion. Nevertheless, it is pretty
hard to defend absolutist morals on grounds other than religious ones.
The only competitor I can think of is patriotism, especially in times
of war. As the distinguished Spanish film director Luis
Bunuel said, 'God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all
records for oppression and bloodshed.' Recruiting officers rely heavily
on their victims' sense of patriotic duty. In the First World War,
women handed out white feathers to young men not in uniform.

Oh,
we don't want to lose you, but we think you ought to go, 

For your King
and your country both need you so.

People
despised conscientious objectors, even those of the enemy country,
because patriotism was held to be an absolute virtue. It is hard to get
much more absolute than the 'My country right or wrong' of the
professional soldier, for the slogan commits you to kill whomever the
politicians of some future date might choose to call enemies.
Consequentialist reasoning may influence the political decision to go
to war but, once war is declared, absolutist patriotism takes over with
a force and a power not otherwise seen outside religion. A soldier who
allows his own thoughts of consequentialist morality to persuade him
not to go over the top would likely find himself court-martialled and
even executed.

The
springboard for this discussion of moral philosophy was a hypothetical
religious claim that, without a God, morals are relative and arbitrary.
Kant and other sophisticated moral philosophers apart, and with due
recognition given to patriotic fervour, the preferred source of
absolute morality is usually a holy book of some kind, interpreted as
having an authority far beyond its history's capacity to justify.
Indeed, adherents of scriptural authority show distressingly little
curiosity about the (normally highly dubious) historical origins of
their holy books. The next chapter will demonstrate that, in any case,
people who claim to derive their morals from scripture do not really do
so in practice. And a very good thing too, as they themselves, on
reflection, should agree.

7

THE
'GOOD' BOOK AND
THE CHANGING MORAL
ZEITGEIST

Politics
has slain its thousands, but religion has slain its tens of thousands.

—
SEAN O CASEY

There
are two ways in which scripture might be a source of morals or rules
for living. One is by direct instruction, for example through the Ten
Commandments, which are the subject of such bitter contention in the
culture wars of America's boondocks. The other is by example: God, or
some other biblical character, might serve as - to use the contemporary
jargon - a role model. Both scriptural routes, if followed through
religiously (the adverb is used in its metaphoric sense but with an eye
to its origin), encourage a system of morals which any civilized modern
person, whether religious or not, would find - I can put it no more
gently - obnoxious.

To
be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain
weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology
of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and
'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists,
unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.
⁹⁰
This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But
unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold
up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living.
Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have
either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong,
in
The Sins of Scripture,
rightly observed. Bishop
Spong, by the way, is a nice example of a liberal bishop whose beliefs
are so advanced as to be almost unrecognizable to the majority of those
who call themselves Christians. A British counterpart is Richard
Holloway, recently retired as Bishop of Edinburgh. Bishop Holloway even
describes himself as a 'recovering Christian'. I had a public
discussion with him in Edinburgh, which was one of the most stimulating
and interesting encounters I have had.
⁹¹

THE
OLD TESTAMENT

Begin
in Genesis with the well-loved story of Noah, derived from the
Babylonian myth of Uta-Napisthim and known from the older mythologies
of several cultures. The legend of the animals going into the ark two
by two is charming, but the moral of the story of Noah
is appalling. God took a dim view of humans, so he (with the exception
of one family) drowned the lot of them including children and also, for
good measure, the rest of the (presumably blameless) animals as well.

Of
course, irritated theologians will protest that we don't take the book
of Genesis literally any more. But that is my whole point! We pick and
choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as
symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a matter of
personal decision, just as much, or as little, as the atheist's
decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision,
without an absolute foundation. If one of these is 'morality flying by
the seat of its pants', so is the other.

In
any case, despite the good intentions of the sophisticated theologian,
a frighteningly large number of people still do take their scriptures,
including the story of Noah, literally. According to Gallup, they
include approximately 50 per cent of the US electorate. Also, no doubt,
many of those Asian holy men who blamed the 2004 tsunami not on a plate
tectonic shift but on human sins,
⁹²
ranging
from drinking and dancing in bars to breaking some footling sabbath
rule. Steeped in the story of Noah, and ignorant of all except biblical
learning, who can blame them? Their whole education has led them to
view natural disasters as bound up with human affairs, paybacks for
human misdemeanours rather than anything so impersonal as plate
tectonics. By the way, what presumptuous egocentricity to believe that
earth-shaking events, on the scale at which a god (or a tectonic plate)
might operate, must always have a human connection. Why should a divine
being, with creation and eternity on his mind, care a fig for petty
human male-factions? We humans give ourselves such airs, even
aggrandizing our poky little 'sins' to the level of cosmic significance!

When
I interviewed for television the Reverend Michael Bray, a prominent
American anti-abortion activist, I asked him why evangelical Christians
were so obsessed with private sexual inclinations such as
homosexuality, which didn't interfere with anybody else's life. His
reply invoked something like self-defence. Innocent citizens are at
risk of becoming collateral damage when God chooses to strike a town
with a natural disaster because it houses sinners. In 2005, the fine
city of New Orleans was catastrophically flooded
in the aftermath of a hurricane, Katrina. The Reverend Pat Robertson,
one of America's best-known televangelists and a former presidential
candidate, was reported as blaming the hurricane on a lesbian comedian
who happened to live in New Orleans.* You'd think an omnipotent God
would adopt a slightly more targeted approach to zapping sinners: a
judicious heart attack, perhaps, rather than the wholesale destruction
of an entire city just because it happened to be the domicile of one
lesbian comedian.

* It
is unclear whether the story, which originated at
http://datelinehollywood.com/
archives/2005/09/05/robertson-blames-hurricane-on-choice-of-ellen-deneres-to-host-emmys/
is true. Whether true or not, it is widely believed, no doubt because
it is entirely typical of utterances by evangelical clergy, including
Robertson, on disasters such as Katrina. See, for example,
www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/9/emw281940.htm. The website that says
the Katrina story is untrue (www.snopes.com/katrina/
satire/robertson.asp) also quotes Robertson as saying, of an earlier
Gay Pride march in Orlando, Florida, 'I would warn Orlando that you're
right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don't think I'd be
waving those flags in God's face if I were you.'