Transcript of Thought For the World's thought for the day

Iain McWhirter

13th February 2008

So where do we get our morality in a godless world? Religion says we can't do without supreme being, because we are sinners. Without God,s moral code' they say, what is to stop us shooting each other, deserting our children, ignoring the poor and the weak? Politicians in America and Britain, like George W Bush and Tony Blair seem to agree - they've been bigging up God in order to give themselves a moral edge.

Gordon Brown's favourite philosopher, the American neo-conservative Gertrude Himmelfarb, insists that faith in God underpins stable society, family values, civilisation itself. May explain why the Prime Minister, who was never a churchgoer in his Red Paper days, has taken to bible bashing in his political speeches. Quoting his minister father. Flourishing his moral compass.

But if we really are dependent on a supreme being for our good behaviour, then surely we should be in a bad way. After all, very few people truly believe in God anymore, and even fewer turn out to worship Him on Sunday. By rights we should be in a state of moral and social collapse - but clearly we aren't.

In secular irreligious Britain, crime has been declining for generations, despite what the moral guardians tell us. And most of us would find the liberal and tolerant times we live today infinitely preferable to the uptight and authoritarian world of the God-fearing 19th Century Victorians, whom Gertrude Himmelfarb wants us to emulate. Sexual freedom, the emancipation of women, acceptance of other cultures are the moral achievements of the secular age - and religious Victorians resisted every one of them.

As we know from, Dickens, life in Victorian England wasn't exactly a bed of roses, except for the evangelical hypocrites who waved the bible while they colonised the world often destroying entire cultures in the process. Conservatives may long for the moral certainties of religious society, but fortunately they will never succeed, because they can't recreate the climate of naiveté and superstition that allowed fear of God to cramp people's spirit and haunt their dreams.

The lesson of history is that religious societies don't behave any better than secular ones. Since the Crusades, a thousand years ago, God's champions have been slaughtering each other on the battlefields, convinced that He is on their side. The paradox of religion is that it professes universal peace, while all too often preparing for war. This is because belief in an afterlife inclines some religious people to invest rather less importance on life on earth. The promise of paradise is a potent motivator for modern martyrs as they wrap themselves in the suicide belt.

Enough. We've got this morality thing entirely the wrong way round. The truth is that God is a moral cop out, an excuse for our failure to live up our own humanity. After all, where did the idea of God, and his moral code, come from? It came from our own minds, from our own social experience. That's where allmorality comes from, as he great Scottish philosopher David Hume said, not on tablets of stone from on high. We don't need God to tell us that we do wrong when we do things to others which we would not wish them to do to us. God is nothing more than the alienated essence of our own humanity. It's time to bring God back down to earth.

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