Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist - Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

Newman said that when non-Christians read the Christian Bible “they are much struck with the high tone of its precepts” (Sermon on John xiii. 17). That is contrary to my experience. I shall never forget the first time I read the Old Testament after I had acquired the habit of independent judgment. I was horrified at its barbarity, and bewildered that it had been widely held up as a store of ideals. It seemed to describe a savage people, fierce and brutal, no more admirable than the worse of the savage cultures that anthropologists describe to us today, and a great deal less admirable than the gentler cultures they report.

Nor will Newman’s words fit the impression made by the synoptic gospels. They are a beautiful and fascinating piece of literature; and they preach the great precept “love thy neighbour.” But this precept is overshadowed in them both by the harsh unloving behaviour of the preacher, and by its absolute subordination to the unreasonable commands to love God and believe in Jesus. (pp. 150–151)

Robinson urges us to reject these commands and the associated values of piety, faith, and improvidence. He reminds us that “many of man’s most terrible actions have been done out of piety, and that piety is responsible for our shameful wars of religion.” He also characterizes the view that belief, or disbelief, can be sinful as a “blasphemy against reason.” He says that we should accept the precept to love our neighbours, “extended as Jesus perhaps extended it to love of all humanity, and still further to love of all life, as he certainly did not extend it”(Chapter 21), and such consequential attitudes as generosity, gentleness, mercy, and the observance of the golden rule. However, we might well query (though Robinson does not) the precise command to love your neighbour as yourself. This seems unrealistically to prescribe a degree of altruism that is in general not humanly possible, and so to make of morality a fantasy rather than something that people can seriously try to practise and can ask of one another. Robinson does query the injunction to be pure in heart, and also the call for humility: it is better to make true estimates both of oneself and of others, and not lie about them, though in public “the right choice will usually be to refrain from drawing attention either to our superiorities or to our inferiorities” (pp. 153–154).

The later tradition of Christian ethics has tended to add to Jesus’s teaching some deplorable elements, such as hostility to sex, and many more admirable ones, such as concern with justice and the other requirements for the nourishing of human life in society, and ideals of beauty, truth, knowledge, and (up to a point) reason. But it has in general retained the concern with salvation and an afterlife, and the view that disbelief, or even doubt, or criticism of belief, is sinful, with the resulting tendencies to the persecution of opponents—including, of course, the adherents of rival Christian sects and rival religions—the discouragement of discussion, hostility (even now in some places) to the teaching of well-confirmed scientific truths, like the theory of evolution, and the propagation of contrary errors, and the intellectual dishonesty of trying to suppress one’s own well-founded doubts. Many people are shocked at the way in which the Unification Church (‘the Moonies’) entraps converts and enslaves their minds and emotions; but the same methods have been and are used by many more orthodox sects. Religion has, indeed, a remarkable ability to give vices the air of virtues, providing a sanctified outlet for some of the nastiest human motives. It is fashionable to ascribe the horrors of Nazism to an atheistic nationalism; but in fact the attitudes to the Jews which it expressed had long been established within the Christian tradition in Germany and elsewhere (sanctioned, for example, by Luther’s writing [22] 11. E.g., On the Jews and their Lies , in Vol. 47 of Luther’s Works , edited by H. T. Lehman (Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1971), pp. 121–306, recommends the burning of synagogues and of the Jews’ houses, confiscation of their books, forbidding of worship and teaching, or alternatively expulsion of the Jews from the country. ), and the Old Testament itself reports many atrocities as having been not merely approved but positively demanded by God and his spokesmen. [23] 12. E.g. Joshua 8, 10, and 11; Samuel 15. And while, following Robinson, I have spoken here particularly of Christian ethics, it is only too obvious that Islamic fundamentalism displays today, more clearly than Christianity has done recently, the worst aspects of religious morality. We do not need to go back in history to illustrate the dictum of Lucretius: Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (So great are the evils that religion could prompt!) [24] 13. De Rerum Natura , Book I, line 101. By contrast, there is a long tradition of an essentially humanist morality, from Epicurus to John Stuart Mill and modern writers, including Richard Robinson himself, centred on the conditions for the flourishing of human life and stressing intellectual honesty, tolerance, free inquiry, and individual rights.

There are, then, some marked dangers in a distinctively religious morality. But they are dangers only, not inevitable consequences of associating morality with religion. We can echo, in reverse, Küng’s concession: it is possible—for even a religious believer “to lead a genuinely human, that is humane, and in this sense moral life”; even theists are not necessarily narrow-minded dogmatists, intolerant persecutors, or propagators of timid credulity and a crudely calculating selfish version of morality itself. Even within Islam there have been thinkers who have tried to develop its humane and liberal tendencies, and to tone down its cruelty, intolerance, and its unfairness between the sexes, though at present their influence is in decline.

But are there no corresponding dangers in a distinctively non-religious morality? Admittedly, there are. As Robinson says, the Roman Catholic church is only “The second most intolerant and active body in the world today” (Chapter 28). Communist parties are expressly anti-religious, and profess an overriding concern with human welfare, but they are also intolerant, ruthless, and, once in power, they too make virtues of tyranny and persecution. And one must recognize that the Catholic church, despite its own illiberal tendencies, sometimes contributes significantly to the resistance to tyrannical states, whether communist or not. More generally, humanist moral thinking is prone either to illusions about necessary progress or to an over-optimistic voluntarism—that is, to assuming that “we” (whoever that may be) can make or remake the world as we would wish it to be, forgetting that the interplay of many different purposes is liable to result in the fulfillment of none of them.

An alleged weakness, not of non-religious moralities in general, but specifically of moralities explained and understood in the naturalistic way outlined above, is that different groups of people can develop different moral views, which will produce conflict when these groups are in contact with one another, and that there is, on this basis, no clear way of resolving such conflicts. This is true. But it is not a distinctive weakness of the naturalistic approach. Absolutist and objectivist moralities, including ones with religious attachments, also differ from one another, and there is no clear way of resolving their conflicts either. That each party believes that some one morality is objectively right is no guarantee that they will be able to agree on what it is. Indeed, conflicts between rival absolutists are likely to be less resolvable than conflicts between those who understand morality in a naturalistic way, for the latter can more easily appreciate the merits of compromise and adjustment, or of finding, for the areas of contact, a ius gentium, a common core of principles on which they can agree.