Letters | 20 June 2013

Being good without God

Sir: It is a rash person who tangles with the Chief Rabbi, but his piece on ‘Atheism and barbarism’ (15 June) shocked me. After championing until his last paragraph the old lie that religious belief is a necessary foundation for morality, he suddenly says he doesn’t believe ‘that you have to be religious to be moral’, which effectively contradicts his whole thesis. But there are several derailments before that.

He questions the ability of society ‘to survive without the rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and sustain the social bond’. Rituals and practices, OK, so long as they don’t entail any indefensible beliefs, but narratives have to stand up to empirical testing, and their supposedly unique sustenance of the social bond would not be evidence of their truth.

He declares that ethics ‘manifestly isn’t’ natural. But the strong case for the opposite view espoused by humanists is too important to be dealt with by mere declaration.