In his own time, a
respected
Cambridge theologian, A.
Richard-Dawkins-God-Delusion
U S I G N
Palestine, from Iraq to Sudan, from Ulster to the Indian sub- continent, look carefully at any region of the world where you find intractable enmity and violence between rival groups. I cannot guarantee that you'll find religions as the dominant labels for in- groups and out-groups. But it's a very good bet.
In India at the time of partition, more than a million people were
massacred in religious riots between Hindus and Muslims (and
fifteen million displaced from their homes). There were no badges
other than religious ones with which to label whom to kill.
Ultimately, there was nothing to divide them but religion. Salman
Rushdie was moved by a more recent bout of religious massacres in
India to write an article called 'Religion, as ever, is the poison in
101
India's blood'.
Here's his concluding paragraph:
What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And when we've done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again.
So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in India has happened in God's name.
The problem's name is God.
I do not deny that humanity's powerful tendencies towards in- group loyalties and out-group hostilities would exist even in the absence of religion. Fans of rival football teams are an example of the phenomenon writ small. Even football supporters sometimes divide along religious lines, as in the case of Glasgow Rangers and Glasgow Celtic. Languages (as in Belgium), races and tribes (especially in Africa) can be important divisive tokens. But religion amplifies and exacerbates the damage in at least three ways:
? Labelling of children. Children are described as 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' etc. from an early age, and certainly far too early for them to have made up their own
TH|{ ? (. OOD' BOOK AND THE MORAL ZEI7CEIS7 261
minds on what they think about religion (I return to this abuse of childhood in Chapter 9).
? Segregated schools. Children are educated, again often from a very early age, with members of a religious in-group and separately from children whose families adhere to other religions. It is not an exaggeration to say that the troubles in Northern Ireland would disappear in a generation if segregated schooling were abolished.
? Taboos against 'marrying out'. This perpetuates hereditary feuds and vendettas by preventing the mingling of feuding groups. Intermarriage, if it were permitted, would naturally tend to mollify enmities.
The village of Glenarm in Northern Ireland is the seat of the Earls of Antrim. On one occasion within living memory, the then Earl did the unthinkable: he married a Catholic. Immediately, in houses throughout Glenarm, the blinds were drawn in mourning. A horror of 'marrying out' is also widespread among religious Jews. Several of the Israeli children quoted above mentioned the dire perils of 'assimilation' at the forefront of their defence of Joshua's Battle of Jericho. When people of different religions do marry, it is described with foreboding on both sides as a 'mixed marriage' and there are often prolonged battles over how the children are to be brought up. When I was a child and still carried a guttering torch for the Anglican Church, I remember being dumbfounded to be told of a rule that when a Roman Catholic married an Anglican, the
children were always brought up Catholic. I could readily under- stand why a priest of either denomination would try to insist on this condition. What I couldn't understand (still can't) was the asymmetry. Why didn't the Anglican priests retaliate with the equivalent rule in reverse? Just less ruthless, I suppose. My old chaplain and Betjeman's 'Our Padre' were simply too nice.
Sociologists have done statistical surveys of religious homogamy (marrying somebody of the same religion) and heterogamy (marry- ing somebody of a different religion). Norval D. Glenn, of the University of Texas at Austin, gathered a number of such studies up
102
to 1978 and analysed them together. He concluded that there is
262 THK COD DELUSION
a significant tendency towards religious homogamy in Christians (Protestants marry Protestants, and Catholics Catholics, and this goes beyond the ordinary 'boy next door effect'), but that it is especially marked among Jews. Out of a total sample of 6,021 married respondents to the questionnaire, 140 called themselves Jews and, of these, 85. 7 per cent married Jews. This is hugely greater than the randomly expected percentage of homogamous marriages. And of course it will not come as news to anybody. Observant Jews are strongly discouraged from 'marrying out', and the taboo shows itself in Jewish jokes about mothers warning their boys about blonde shiksas lying in wait to entrap them. Here are typical statements by three American rabbis:
? ?
?
'I refuse to officiate at interfaith marriages. '
'I officiate when couples state their intention to raise children as Jews. '
'I officiate if couples agree to premarital counselling. '
Rabbis who will agree to officiate together with a Christian priest are rare, and much in demand.
Even if religion did no other harm in itself, its wanton and care- fully nurtured divisiveness - its deliberate and cultivated pandering to humanity's natural tendency to favour in-groups and shun out- groups - would be enough to make it a significant force for evil in the world.
THE MORAL ZEITGEIST
This chapter began by showing that we do not - even the religious among us - ground our morality in holy books, no matter what we may fondly imagine. How, then, do we decide what is right and what is wrong? No matter how we answer that question, there is a consensus about what we do as a matter of fact consider right and wrong: a consensus that prevails surprisingly widely. The consensus has no obvious connection with religion. It extends, however, to
HI-: 'GOOD' BOOK AND THr MORA) /. V1'iCE}S1' 263
most religious people, whether or not they think their morals come from scripture. With notable exceptions such as the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent, most people pay lip service to the same broad liberal consensus of ethical principles. The majority of us don't cause needless suffering; we believe in free speech and protect it even if we disagree with what is being said; we pay our taxes; we don't cheat, don't kill, don't commit incest, don't do things to others that we would not wish done to us. Some of these good principles can be found in holy books, but buried along- side much else that no decent person would wish to follow: and the holy books do not supply any rules for distinguishing the good principles from the bad.
One way to express our consensual ethics is as a 'New Ten Commandments'. Various individuals and institutions have attempted this. What is significant is that they tend to produce rather similar results to each other, and what they produce is characteristic of the times in which they happen to live. Here is one set of 'New Ten Commandments' from today, which I happened to
103 find on an atheist website.
? Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.
? In all things, strive to cause no harm.
? Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
? Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
? Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
? Always seek to be learning something new.
? Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
264
THR GOD DELUSION
?
?
?
Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
Question everything.
This little collection is not the work of a great sage or prophet or professional ethicist. It is just one ordinary web logger's rather endearing attempt to summarize the principles of the good life today, for comparison with the biblical Ten Commandments. It was the first list I found when I typed 'New Ten Commandments' into a search engine, and I deliberately didn't look any further. The whole point is that it is the sort of list that any ordinary, decent person today would come up with. Not everybody would home in on exactly the same list of ten. The philosopher John Rawls might include something like the following: 'Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order. ' An alleged Inuit system for sharing out food is a practical example of the Rawls principle: the individual who cuts up the food gets last pick.
In my own amended Ten Commandments, I would choose some of the above, but I would also try to find room for, among others:
? Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their
? inclinations, which are none of your business.
? Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.
? Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
? Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.
But never mind these small differences of priority. The point is
T H I: ' G O O D ' BO O K A N D T H E M O R A I, Z /? I f C I: 1 S T 265
that we have almost all moved on, and in a big way, since biblical times. Slavery, which was taken for granted in the Bible and throughout most of history, was abolished in civilized countries in the nineteenth century. All civilized nations now accept what was widely denied up to the 1920s, that a woman's vote, in an election or on a jury, is the equal of a man's. In today's enlightened societies (a category that manifestly does not include, for example, Saudi Arabia), women are no longer regarded as property, as they clearly were in biblical times. Any modern legal system would have prosecuted Abraham for child abuse. And if he had actually carried through his plan to sacrifice Isaac, we would have convicted him of first-degree murder. Yet, according to the mores of his time, his conduct was entirely admirable, obeying God's commandment. Religious or not, we have all changed massively in our attitude to what is right and what is wrong. What is the nature of this change,
and what drives it?
In any society there exists a somewhat mysterious consensus,
which changes over the decades, and for which it is not pretentious to use the German loan-word Zeitgeist (spirit of the times). I said that female suffrage was now universal in the world's democracies, but this reform is in fact astonishingly recent. Here are some dates at which women were granted the vote:
New Zealand 1893 Australia 1902
Finland 1906 Norway 1913 United States 1920 Britain 1928 France 1945 Belgium 1946 Switzerland 1971 Kuwait 2006
This spread of dates through the twentieth century is a gauge of the shifting Zeitgeist. Another is our attitude to race. In the early part of the twentieth century, almost everybody in Britain (and many other countries too) would be judged racist by today's
266 T H 1- (? O V> I) F I. U s I O N
standards. Most white people believed that black people (in which category they would have lumped the very diverse Africans with unrelated groups from India, Australia and Melanesia) were inferior to white people in almost all respects except - patronizingly - sense of rhythm. The 1920s equivalent of James Bond was that cheerfully debonair boyhood hero, Bulldog Drummond. In one novel, The Black Gang, Drummond refers to 'Jews, foreigners, and other unwashed folk'. In the climax scene of The Female of the Species, Drummond is cleverly disguised as Pedro, black servant of the arch- villain. For his dramatic disclosure, to the reader as well as to the villain, that 'Pedro' is really Drummond himself, he could have said: 'You think I am Pedro. Little do you realize, I am your arch- enemy Drummond, blacked up. ' Instead, he chose these words: 'Every beard is not false, but every nigger smells. That beard ain't false, dearie, and dis nigger don't smell. So I'm thinking, there's something wrong somewhere. ' I read it in the 1950s, three decades after it was written, and it was (just) still possible for a boy to thrill to the drama and not notice the racism. Nowadays, it would be inconceivable.
Thomas Henry Huxley, by the standards of his times, was an
enlightened and liberal progressive. But his times were not and in 1871 he wrote the following:
No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the
average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of
the white man. And if this be true, it is simply incredible
that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our
prognathous relative has a fair field and no favor, as well
as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully
with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a
contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by
bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization
will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky
104 cousins.
ours,
It is a commonplace that good historians don't judge statements from past times by the standards of their own. Abraham Lincoln, like Huxley, was ahead of his time, yet his views on matters of race
1 M I. ? C; O () I) ' B O O K A N D 1 ! ! F. . VI O R A L. Z I: / T (, V. I S 7 267
also sound backwardly racist in ours. Here he is in a debate in 1858 with Stephen A. Douglas:
I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor
of bringing about in any way the social and political
equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor
ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of
negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to
intermarry with white people; and I will say, in addition
to this, that there is a physical difference between the
white and black races which I believe will forever forbid
the two races living together on terms of social and
political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live,
while they do remain together there must be the position
of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man
am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the
105
white race.
Had Huxley and Lincoln been born and educated in our
they would have been the first to cringe with the rest of us at their own Victorian sentiments and unctuous tone. I quote them only to illustrate how the Zeitgeist moves on. If even Huxley, one of the great liberal minds of his age, and even Lincoln, who freed the slaves, could say such things, just think what the average Victorian must have thought. Going back to the eighteenth century it is, of course, well known that Washington, Jefferson and other men of the Enlightenment held slaves. The Zeitgeist moves on, so inexorably that we sometimes take it for granted and forget that the change is a real phenomenon in its own right.
There are numerous other examples. When the sailors first landed in Mauritius and saw the gentle dodos, it never occurred to them to do anything other than club them to death. They didn't even want to eat them (they were described as unpalatable). Presumably, hitting defenceless, tame, flightless birds over the head with a club was just something to do. Nowadays such behaviour would be unthinkable, and the extinction of a modern equivalent of the dodo, even by accident, let alone by deliberate human killing, is regarded as a tragedy.
time,
268 THE GOD DELUSION
Just such a tragedy, by the standards of today's cultural climate, was the more recent extinction of Thylacinus, the Tasmanian wolf. These now iconically lamented creatures had a bounty on their heads until as recently as 1909. In Victorian novels of Africa, 'elephant', 'lion' and 'antelope' (note the revealing singular) are 'game' and what you do to game, without a second thought, is shoot it. Not for food. Not for self-defence. For 'sport'. But now the Zeitgeist has changed. Admittedly, rich, sedentary 'sportsmen' may shoot wild African animals from the safety of a Land-Rover and take the stuffed heads back home. But they have to pay through the nose to do so, and are widely despised for it. Wildlife conservation and the conservation of the environment have become accepted values with the same moral status as was once accorded to keeping the sabbath and shunning graven images.
The swinging sixties are legendary for their liberal modernity. But at the beginning of that decade a prosecuting barrister, in the trial for obscenity of Lady Cbatterley's Lover, could still ask the jury: 'Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters - because girls can read as well as boys [can you believe he said that? ] - reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read? ' This last rhetorical question is a particularly stunning illustration of the speed with which the Zeitgeist changes.
The American invasion of Iraq is widely condemned for its civilian casualties, yet these casualty figures are orders of magnitude lower than comparable numbers for the Second World War. There seems to be a steadily shifting standard of what is morally acceptable. Donald Rumsfeld, who sounds so callous and odious today, would have sounded like a bleeding-heart liberal if he had said the same things during the Second World War. Something has shifted in the intervening decades. It has shifted in all of us, and the shift has no connection with religion. If anything, it happens in spite of religion, not because of it.
The shift is in a recognizably consistent direction, which most of us would judge as improvement. Even Adolf Hitler, widely regarded as pushing the envelope of evil into uncharted territory, would not have stood out in the time of Caligula or of Genghis Khan. Hitler
T H E ' G ( ) O I ) ' B O O K A N D T ! I ! M O R A I / /: / 7 ' ( 7 t I S 7 ' 269
no doubt killed more people than Genghis, but he had twentieth- century technology at his disposal. And did even Hitler gain his greatest pleasure, as Genghis avowedly did, from seeing his victims' 'near and dear bathed in tears'? We judge Hitler's degree of evil by the standards of today, and the moral Zeitgeist has moved on since Caligula's time, just as the technology has. Hitler seems especially evil only by the more benign standards of our time.
Within my lifetime, large numbers of people thoughtlessly bandied derogatory nicknames and national stereotypes: Frog, Wop, Dago, Hun, Yid, Coon, Nip, Wog. I won't claim that such words have disappeared, but they are now widely deplored in polite circles. The word 'negro', even though not intended to be insulting, can be used to date a piece of English prose. Prejudices are indeed revealing giveaways of the date of a piece of writing.
In his own time, a respected Cambridge theologian, A. C. Bouquet, was able to begin the chapter on Islam of his Comparative Religion with these words: 'The Semite is not a natural monotheist, as was supposed about the middle of the nineteenth century. He is an animist. ' The obsession with race (as opposed to culture) and the revealing use of the singular ('The Semite . . . He is an animist') to reduce an entire
plurality of people to one 'type' are not heinous by any standards. But they are another tiny indicator of the changing Zeitgeist. No Cambridge professor of theology or any other subject would today use those words. Such subtle hints of changing mores tell us that Bouquet was writing no later than the middle of the twentieth century. It was in fact 1941.
Go back another four decades, and the changing standards become unmistakeable. In a previous book I quoted H. G. Wells's Utopian New Republic, and I shall do so again because it is such a shocking illustration of the point I am making.
And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? . . . the yellow man? . . . the Jew? . . . those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty- white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go . . . And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic,
270
i H r c; o ! ) i) 1; i. u s i o x
the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity - beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds . . . And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness . . . is death . . . The men of the New Republic . . . will have an ideal that will make the killing worth the while.
That was written in 1902, and Wells was regarded as a progressive in his own time. In 1902 such sentiments, while not widely agreed, would have made for an acceptable dinner-party argument. Modern readers, by contrast, literally gasp with horror when they see the words. We are forced to realize that Hitler, appalling though he was, was not quite as far outside the Zeitgeist of his time as he seems from our vantage-point today. How swiftly the Zeitgeist changes - and it moves in parallel, on a broad front, throughout the educated world.
Where, then, have these concerted and steady changes in social consciousness come from? The onus is not on me to answer. For my purposes it is sufficient that they certainly have not come from religion. If forced to advance a theory, I would approach it along the following lines. We need to explain why the changing moral Zeitgeist is so widely synchronized across large numbers of people; and we need to explain its relatively consistent direction.
First, how is it synchronized across so many people? It spreads itself from mind to mind through conversations in bars and at dinner parties, through books and book reviews, through news- papers and broadcasting, and nowadays through the Internet. Changes in the moral climate are signalled in editorials, on radio talk shows, in political speeches, in the patter of stand-up comedians and the scripts of soap operas, in the votes of parlia- ments making laws and the decisions of judges interpreting them. One way to put it would be in terms of changing meme frequencies in the meme pool, but I shall not pursue that.
Some of us lag behind the advancing wave of the changing moral Zeitgeist and some of us are slightly ahead. But most of us in the
:
G O OI") ' B O O K A N D T 1 i I ,\! O R A I, '/I. I 7 <; l . I S i 2 7 1
twenty-first century are bunched together and way ahead of our counterparts in the Middle Ages, or in the time of Abraham, or even as recently as the 1920s. The whole wave keeps moving, and even the vanguard of an earlier century (T. H. Huxley is the obvious example) would find itself way behind the laggers of a later century. Of course, the advance is not a smooth incline but a meandering sawtooth. There are local and temporary setbacks such as the United States is suffering from its government in the early 2000s. But over the longer timescale, the progressive trend is unmistake- able and it will continue.
What impels it in its consistent direction? We mustn't neglect the driving role of individual leaders who, ahead of their time, stand up and persuade the rest of us to move on with them. In America, the ideals of racial equality were fostered by political leaders of the calibre of Martin Luther King, and entertainers, sportsmen and other public figures and role models such as Paul Robeson, Sidney Poitier, Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson. The emancipations of slaves and of women owed much to charismatic leaders. Some of these leaders were religious; some were not. Some who were religious did their good deeds because they were religious. In other cases their religion was incidental. Although Martin Luther King
was a Christian, he derived his philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience directly from Gandhi, who was not.
Then, too, there is improved education and, in particular, the increased understanding that each of us shares a common humanity with members of other races and with the other sex - both deeply unbiblical ideas that come from biological science, especially evolution. One reason black people and women and, in Nazi Germany, Jews and gypsies have been treated badly is that they were not perceived as fully human. The philosopher Peter Singer, in Animal Liberation, is the most eloquent advocate of the view that we should move to a post-speciesist condition in which humane treatment is meted out to all species that have the brain power to appreciate it. Perhaps this hints at the direction in which the moral Zeitgeist might move in future centuries. It would be a natural extrapolation of earlier reforms like the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women.
It is beyond my amateur psychology and sociology to go any
272 T H E G O D D E L U S I O N
further in explaining why the moral Zeitgeist moves in its broadly concerted way. For my purposes it is enough that, as a matter of observed fact, it does move, and it is not driven by religion - and certainly not by scripture. It is probably not a single force like gravity, but a complex interplay of disparate forces like the one that propels Moore's Law, describing the exponential increase in computer power. Whatever its cause, the manifest phenomenon of Zeitgeist progression is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good, or to decide what is good.
WHAT ABOUT HITLER AND STALIN? WEREN'T THEY ATHEISTS?
The Zeitgeist may move, and move in a generally progressive direc- tion, but as I have said it is a sawtooth not a smooth improvement, and there have been some appalling reversals. Outstanding rever- sals, deep and terrible ones, are provided by the dictators of the twentieth century. It is important to separate the evil intentions of men like Hitler and Stalin from the vast power that they wielded in achieving them. I have already observed that Hitler's ideas and intentions were not self-evidently more evil than those of Caligula - or some of the Ottoman sultans, whose staggering feats of nasti- ness are described in Noel Barber's Lords of the Golden Horn. Hitler had twentieth-century weapons, and twentieth-century com- munications technology at his disposal. Nevertheless, Hitler and Stalin were, by any standards, spectacularly evil men.
'Hitler and Stalin were atheists. What have you got to say about that? ' The question comes up after just about every public lecture that I ever give on the subject of religion, and in most of my radio interviews as well. It is put in a truculent way, indignantly freighted with two assumptions: not only (1) were Stalin and Hitler atheists, but (2) they did their terrible deeds because they were atheists. Assumption (1) is true for Stalin and dubious for Hitler. But assumption (1) is irrelevant anyway, because assumption (2) is false. It is certainly illogical if it is thought to follow from (1). Even
T H E ' G O O D " B O O K A N D T H E M O R A L Z E / f G ? / S 7 273
if we accept that Hitler and Stalin shared atheism in common, they both also had moustaches, as does Saddam Hussein. So what? The interesting question is not whether evil (or good) individual human beings were religious or were atheists. We are not in the business of counting evil heads and compiling two rival roll calls of iniquity. The fact that Nazi belt buckles were inscribed with 'Gott mit uns' doesn't prove anything, at least not without a lot more discussion.
What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does.
There seems no doubt that, as a matter of fact, Stalin was an atheist. He received his education at an Orthodox seminary, and his mother never lost her disappointment that he had not entered the priesthood as she intended - a fact that, according to Alan Bullock,
106
caused Stalin much amusement. Perhaps because of his training
for the priesthood, the mature Stalin was scathing about the Russian Orthodox Church, and about Christianity and religion in general. But there is no evidence that his atheism motivated his brutality. His earlier religious training probably didn't either, unless it was through teaching him to revere absolutist faith, strong authority and a belief that ends justify means.
The legend that Hitler was an atheist has been assiduously cultivated, so much so that a great many people believe it without question, and it is regularly and defiantly trotted out by religious apologists. The truth of the matter is far from clear. Hitler was born into a Catholic family, and went to Catholic schools and churches as a child. Obviously that is not significant in itself: he could easily have given it up, as Stalin gave up his Russian Orthodoxy after leaving the Tiflis Theological Seminary. But Hitler never formally renounced his Catholicism, and there are indications throughout his life that he remained religious. If not Catholic, he seems to have retained a belief in some sort of divine providence. For example he stated in Mein Kampf that, when he heard the news of the declar- ation of the First World War, 'I sank down on my knees and thanked Heaven out of the fullness of my heart for the favour of
107
having been permitted to live in such a time. '
when he was still only twenty-five. Perhaps he changed after that?
But that was 1914, In 1920, when Hitler was thirty-one, his close associate Rudolf
2 7 4 T i l h (", O D D E L U S I O N
Hess, later to be deputy Fu? hrer, wrote in a letter to the Prime Minister of Bavaria, 'I know Herr Hitler very well personally and am quite close to him. He has an unusually honourable character, full of
108
profound kindness, is religious, a good Catholic. '
could be said that, since Hess got the 'honourable character' and the 'profound kindness' so crashingly wrong, maybe he got the 'good Catholic' wrong too! Hitler could scarcely be described as a 'good' anything, which reminds me of the most comically audacious argument I have heard in favour of the proposition that Hitler must have been an atheist. Paraphrasing from many sources, Hitler was a bad man, Christianity teaches goodness, therefore Hitler can't have been a Christian! Goering's remark about Hitler, 'Only a Catholic could unite Germany,' might, I suppose, have meant somebody brought up Catholic rather than a believing Catholic.
In a speech of 1933 in Berlin, Hitler said, 'We were convinced
that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore
undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not
merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it
109
out. '
'believed in belief. But as late as 1941 he told his adjutant, General Gerhard Engel, 'I shall remain a Catholic for ever. '
Even if he didn't remain a sincerely believing Christian, Hitler would have to have been positively unusual not to have been in- fluenced by the long Christian tradition of blaming Jews as Christ-killers. In a speech in Munich in 1923, Hitler said, 'The first thing to do is to rescue [Germany] from the Jew who is ruining our country . . . We want to prevent our Germany from suffering, as
110
Another did, the death upon the Cross. '
Definitive Biography, John Toland wrote of Hitler's religious position at the time of the 'final solution':
Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of god. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god - so long as it was done impersonally, with- out cruelty.
That might indicate only that, like many others, Hitler
Of course, it
In his Adolf Hitler: The
T III ' (, () O D ' H O () K A X D ']' 1 i H M O R A t. 7. r. I f (, I: / . V 7 275
Christian hatred of Jews is not just a Catholic tradition. Martin Luther was a virulent anti-Semite. At the Diet of Worms he said that 'All Jews should be driven from Germany. ' And he wrote a whole book, On the Jews and their Lies, which probably influenced Hitler. Luther described the Jews as a 'brood of vipers', and the same phrase was used by Hitler in a remarkable speech of 1922, in which he several times repeated that he was a Christian:
My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian 1 have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice . . . And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also
111
It is hard to know whether Hitler picked up the phrase 'brood of vipers' from Luther, or whether he got it directly from Matthew 3: 7, as Luther presumably did. As for the theme of Jewish persecution as part of God's will, Hitler returned to it in Mein Kampf: 'Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the
Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. " That was 1925. He said it again in a speech in the Reichstag in 1938, and he said similar things throughout his career.
Quotations like those have to be balanced by others from his
a duty to my own people.
276 THE C;OU DELUSIGN
Table Talk, in which Hitler expressed virulently anti-Christian views, as recorded by his secretary. The following all date from 1941:
The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity . . .
The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.
When all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards should free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let's be the only people who are immunised against the disease.
Hitler's Table Talk contains more quotations like those, equating Christianity with Bolshevism, sometimes drawing an analogy between Karl Marx and St Paul and never forgetting that both were Jews (though Hitler, oddly, was always adamant that Jesus himself was not a Jew). It is possible that Hitler had by 1941 experienced some kind of deconversion or disillusionment with Christianity. Or is the resolution of the contradictions simply that he was an opportunistic liar whose words cannot be trusted, in either direction?
It could be argued that, despite his own words and those of his associates, Hitler was not really religious but just cynically exploit- ing the religiosity of his audience. He may have agreed with Napoleon, who said, 'Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet,' and with Seneca the Younger: 'Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. ' Nobody could deny that Hitler was capable of such insincerity. If this was his real motive for pretending to be religious, it serves to remind us that Hitler didn't carry out his atrocities single-handed. The terrible deeds themselves were carried out by soldiers and their officers, most of whom were surely Christian. Indeed, the Christianity of the German people underlies
often
T H H ' G O ( ) D ' B O O K A N D T I I I- M O R A L Z E / T G /:. ' / S T 277
the very hypothesis we are discussing - a hypothesis to explain the supposed insincerity of Hitler's religious professings! Or, perhaps Hitler felt that he had to display some token sympathy for Christianity, otherwise his regime would not have received the support it did from the Church. This support showed itself in various ways, including Pope Pius XIIs persistent refusal to take a stand against the Nazis - a subject of considerable embarrassment to the modern Church. Either Hitler's professions of Christianity were sincere, or he faked his Christianity in order to win - success- fully - co-operation from German Christians and the Catholic Church. In either case, the evils of Hitler's regime can hardly be
held up as flowing from atheism.
Even when he was railing against Christianity, Hitler never
ceased using the language of Providence: a mysterious agency which, he believed, had singled him out for a divine mission to lead Germany. He sometimes called it Providence, at other times God. After the Anschluss, when Hitler returned in triumph to Vienna in 1938, his exultant speech mentioned God in this providential guise: 'I believe it was God's will to send a boy from here into the Reich, to let him grow up and to raise him to be the leader of the nation
112 so that he could lead back his homeland into the Reich. '
When he narrowly escaped assassination in Munich in
November 1939, Hitler credited Providence with intervening to
save his life by causing him to alter his schedule: 'Now I am com-
pletely content. The fact that I left the Biirgerbraukeller earlier than
usual is a corroboration of Providence's intention to let me reach
113
my goal. ' After this failed assassination the Archbishop of
Munich, Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, ordered that a Te Deum should be said in his cathedral, 'To thank Divine Providence in the name of the archdiocese for the Fiihrer's fortunate escape. ' Some of Hitler's followers, with the support of Goebbels, made no bones about building Nazism into a religion in its own right. The follow- ing, by the chief of the united trade unions, has the feel of a prayer, and even has the cadences of the Christian Lord's Prayer ('Our Father') or the Creed:
Adolf Hitler! We are united with you alone!
Palestine, from Iraq to Sudan, from Ulster to the Indian sub- continent, look carefully at any region of the world where you find intractable enmity and violence between rival groups. I cannot guarantee that you'll find religions as the dominant labels for in- groups and out-groups. But it's a very good bet.
In India at the time of partition, more than a million people were
massacred in religious riots between Hindus and Muslims (and
fifteen million displaced from their homes). There were no badges
other than religious ones with which to label whom to kill.
Ultimately, there was nothing to divide them but religion. Salman
Rushdie was moved by a more recent bout of religious massacres in
India to write an article called 'Religion, as ever, is the poison in
101
India's blood'.
Here's his concluding paragraph:
What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And when we've done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again.
So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in India has happened in God's name.
The problem's name is God.
I do not deny that humanity's powerful tendencies towards in- group loyalties and out-group hostilities would exist even in the absence of religion. Fans of rival football teams are an example of the phenomenon writ small. Even football supporters sometimes divide along religious lines, as in the case of Glasgow Rangers and Glasgow Celtic. Languages (as in Belgium), races and tribes (especially in Africa) can be important divisive tokens. But religion amplifies and exacerbates the damage in at least three ways:
? Labelling of children. Children are described as 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' etc. from an early age, and certainly far too early for them to have made up their own
TH|{ ? (. OOD' BOOK AND THE MORAL ZEI7CEIS7 261
minds on what they think about religion (I return to this abuse of childhood in Chapter 9).
? Segregated schools. Children are educated, again often from a very early age, with members of a religious in-group and separately from children whose families adhere to other religions. It is not an exaggeration to say that the troubles in Northern Ireland would disappear in a generation if segregated schooling were abolished.
? Taboos against 'marrying out'. This perpetuates hereditary feuds and vendettas by preventing the mingling of feuding groups. Intermarriage, if it were permitted, would naturally tend to mollify enmities.
The village of Glenarm in Northern Ireland is the seat of the Earls of Antrim. On one occasion within living memory, the then Earl did the unthinkable: he married a Catholic. Immediately, in houses throughout Glenarm, the blinds were drawn in mourning. A horror of 'marrying out' is also widespread among religious Jews. Several of the Israeli children quoted above mentioned the dire perils of 'assimilation' at the forefront of their defence of Joshua's Battle of Jericho. When people of different religions do marry, it is described with foreboding on both sides as a 'mixed marriage' and there are often prolonged battles over how the children are to be brought up. When I was a child and still carried a guttering torch for the Anglican Church, I remember being dumbfounded to be told of a rule that when a Roman Catholic married an Anglican, the
children were always brought up Catholic. I could readily under- stand why a priest of either denomination would try to insist on this condition. What I couldn't understand (still can't) was the asymmetry. Why didn't the Anglican priests retaliate with the equivalent rule in reverse? Just less ruthless, I suppose. My old chaplain and Betjeman's 'Our Padre' were simply too nice.
Sociologists have done statistical surveys of religious homogamy (marrying somebody of the same religion) and heterogamy (marry- ing somebody of a different religion). Norval D. Glenn, of the University of Texas at Austin, gathered a number of such studies up
102
to 1978 and analysed them together. He concluded that there is
262 THK COD DELUSION
a significant tendency towards religious homogamy in Christians (Protestants marry Protestants, and Catholics Catholics, and this goes beyond the ordinary 'boy next door effect'), but that it is especially marked among Jews. Out of a total sample of 6,021 married respondents to the questionnaire, 140 called themselves Jews and, of these, 85. 7 per cent married Jews. This is hugely greater than the randomly expected percentage of homogamous marriages. And of course it will not come as news to anybody. Observant Jews are strongly discouraged from 'marrying out', and the taboo shows itself in Jewish jokes about mothers warning their boys about blonde shiksas lying in wait to entrap them. Here are typical statements by three American rabbis:
? ?
?
'I refuse to officiate at interfaith marriages. '
'I officiate when couples state their intention to raise children as Jews. '
'I officiate if couples agree to premarital counselling. '
Rabbis who will agree to officiate together with a Christian priest are rare, and much in demand.
Even if religion did no other harm in itself, its wanton and care- fully nurtured divisiveness - its deliberate and cultivated pandering to humanity's natural tendency to favour in-groups and shun out- groups - would be enough to make it a significant force for evil in the world.
THE MORAL ZEITGEIST
This chapter began by showing that we do not - even the religious among us - ground our morality in holy books, no matter what we may fondly imagine. How, then, do we decide what is right and what is wrong? No matter how we answer that question, there is a consensus about what we do as a matter of fact consider right and wrong: a consensus that prevails surprisingly widely. The consensus has no obvious connection with religion. It extends, however, to
HI-: 'GOOD' BOOK AND THr MORA) /. V1'iCE}S1' 263
most religious people, whether or not they think their morals come from scripture. With notable exceptions such as the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent, most people pay lip service to the same broad liberal consensus of ethical principles. The majority of us don't cause needless suffering; we believe in free speech and protect it even if we disagree with what is being said; we pay our taxes; we don't cheat, don't kill, don't commit incest, don't do things to others that we would not wish done to us. Some of these good principles can be found in holy books, but buried along- side much else that no decent person would wish to follow: and the holy books do not supply any rules for distinguishing the good principles from the bad.
One way to express our consensual ethics is as a 'New Ten Commandments'. Various individuals and institutions have attempted this. What is significant is that they tend to produce rather similar results to each other, and what they produce is characteristic of the times in which they happen to live. Here is one set of 'New Ten Commandments' from today, which I happened to
103 find on an atheist website.
? Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.
? In all things, strive to cause no harm.
? Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
? Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
? Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
? Always seek to be learning something new.
? Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
264
THR GOD DELUSION
?
?
?
Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
Question everything.
This little collection is not the work of a great sage or prophet or professional ethicist. It is just one ordinary web logger's rather endearing attempt to summarize the principles of the good life today, for comparison with the biblical Ten Commandments. It was the first list I found when I typed 'New Ten Commandments' into a search engine, and I deliberately didn't look any further. The whole point is that it is the sort of list that any ordinary, decent person today would come up with. Not everybody would home in on exactly the same list of ten. The philosopher John Rawls might include something like the following: 'Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order. ' An alleged Inuit system for sharing out food is a practical example of the Rawls principle: the individual who cuts up the food gets last pick.
In my own amended Ten Commandments, I would choose some of the above, but I would also try to find room for, among others:
? Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their
? inclinations, which are none of your business.
? Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.
? Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
? Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.
But never mind these small differences of priority. The point is
T H I: ' G O O D ' BO O K A N D T H E M O R A I, Z /? I f C I: 1 S T 265
that we have almost all moved on, and in a big way, since biblical times. Slavery, which was taken for granted in the Bible and throughout most of history, was abolished in civilized countries in the nineteenth century. All civilized nations now accept what was widely denied up to the 1920s, that a woman's vote, in an election or on a jury, is the equal of a man's. In today's enlightened societies (a category that manifestly does not include, for example, Saudi Arabia), women are no longer regarded as property, as they clearly were in biblical times. Any modern legal system would have prosecuted Abraham for child abuse. And if he had actually carried through his plan to sacrifice Isaac, we would have convicted him of first-degree murder. Yet, according to the mores of his time, his conduct was entirely admirable, obeying God's commandment. Religious or not, we have all changed massively in our attitude to what is right and what is wrong. What is the nature of this change,
and what drives it?
In any society there exists a somewhat mysterious consensus,
which changes over the decades, and for which it is not pretentious to use the German loan-word Zeitgeist (spirit of the times). I said that female suffrage was now universal in the world's democracies, but this reform is in fact astonishingly recent. Here are some dates at which women were granted the vote:
New Zealand 1893 Australia 1902
Finland 1906 Norway 1913 United States 1920 Britain 1928 France 1945 Belgium 1946 Switzerland 1971 Kuwait 2006
This spread of dates through the twentieth century is a gauge of the shifting Zeitgeist. Another is our attitude to race. In the early part of the twentieth century, almost everybody in Britain (and many other countries too) would be judged racist by today's
266 T H 1- (? O V> I) F I. U s I O N
standards. Most white people believed that black people (in which category they would have lumped the very diverse Africans with unrelated groups from India, Australia and Melanesia) were inferior to white people in almost all respects except - patronizingly - sense of rhythm. The 1920s equivalent of James Bond was that cheerfully debonair boyhood hero, Bulldog Drummond. In one novel, The Black Gang, Drummond refers to 'Jews, foreigners, and other unwashed folk'. In the climax scene of The Female of the Species, Drummond is cleverly disguised as Pedro, black servant of the arch- villain. For his dramatic disclosure, to the reader as well as to the villain, that 'Pedro' is really Drummond himself, he could have said: 'You think I am Pedro. Little do you realize, I am your arch- enemy Drummond, blacked up. ' Instead, he chose these words: 'Every beard is not false, but every nigger smells. That beard ain't false, dearie, and dis nigger don't smell. So I'm thinking, there's something wrong somewhere. ' I read it in the 1950s, three decades after it was written, and it was (just) still possible for a boy to thrill to the drama and not notice the racism. Nowadays, it would be inconceivable.
Thomas Henry Huxley, by the standards of his times, was an
enlightened and liberal progressive. But his times were not and in 1871 he wrote the following:
No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the
average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of
the white man. And if this be true, it is simply incredible
that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our
prognathous relative has a fair field and no favor, as well
as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully
with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a
contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by
bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization
will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky
104 cousins.
ours,
It is a commonplace that good historians don't judge statements from past times by the standards of their own. Abraham Lincoln, like Huxley, was ahead of his time, yet his views on matters of race
1 M I. ? C; O () I) ' B O O K A N D 1 ! ! F. . VI O R A L. Z I: / T (, V. I S 7 267
also sound backwardly racist in ours. Here he is in a debate in 1858 with Stephen A. Douglas:
I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor
of bringing about in any way the social and political
equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor
ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of
negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to
intermarry with white people; and I will say, in addition
to this, that there is a physical difference between the
white and black races which I believe will forever forbid
the two races living together on terms of social and
political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live,
while they do remain together there must be the position
of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man
am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the
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white race.
Had Huxley and Lincoln been born and educated in our
they would have been the first to cringe with the rest of us at their own Victorian sentiments and unctuous tone. I quote them only to illustrate how the Zeitgeist moves on. If even Huxley, one of the great liberal minds of his age, and even Lincoln, who freed the slaves, could say such things, just think what the average Victorian must have thought. Going back to the eighteenth century it is, of course, well known that Washington, Jefferson and other men of the Enlightenment held slaves. The Zeitgeist moves on, so inexorably that we sometimes take it for granted and forget that the change is a real phenomenon in its own right.
There are numerous other examples. When the sailors first landed in Mauritius and saw the gentle dodos, it never occurred to them to do anything other than club them to death. They didn't even want to eat them (they were described as unpalatable). Presumably, hitting defenceless, tame, flightless birds over the head with a club was just something to do. Nowadays such behaviour would be unthinkable, and the extinction of a modern equivalent of the dodo, even by accident, let alone by deliberate human killing, is regarded as a tragedy.
time,
268 THE GOD DELUSION
Just such a tragedy, by the standards of today's cultural climate, was the more recent extinction of Thylacinus, the Tasmanian wolf. These now iconically lamented creatures had a bounty on their heads until as recently as 1909. In Victorian novels of Africa, 'elephant', 'lion' and 'antelope' (note the revealing singular) are 'game' and what you do to game, without a second thought, is shoot it. Not for food. Not for self-defence. For 'sport'. But now the Zeitgeist has changed. Admittedly, rich, sedentary 'sportsmen' may shoot wild African animals from the safety of a Land-Rover and take the stuffed heads back home. But they have to pay through the nose to do so, and are widely despised for it. Wildlife conservation and the conservation of the environment have become accepted values with the same moral status as was once accorded to keeping the sabbath and shunning graven images.
The swinging sixties are legendary for their liberal modernity. But at the beginning of that decade a prosecuting barrister, in the trial for obscenity of Lady Cbatterley's Lover, could still ask the jury: 'Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters - because girls can read as well as boys [can you believe he said that? ] - reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read? ' This last rhetorical question is a particularly stunning illustration of the speed with which the Zeitgeist changes.
The American invasion of Iraq is widely condemned for its civilian casualties, yet these casualty figures are orders of magnitude lower than comparable numbers for the Second World War. There seems to be a steadily shifting standard of what is morally acceptable. Donald Rumsfeld, who sounds so callous and odious today, would have sounded like a bleeding-heart liberal if he had said the same things during the Second World War. Something has shifted in the intervening decades. It has shifted in all of us, and the shift has no connection with religion. If anything, it happens in spite of religion, not because of it.
The shift is in a recognizably consistent direction, which most of us would judge as improvement. Even Adolf Hitler, widely regarded as pushing the envelope of evil into uncharted territory, would not have stood out in the time of Caligula or of Genghis Khan. Hitler
T H E ' G ( ) O I ) ' B O O K A N D T ! I ! M O R A I / /: / 7 ' ( 7 t I S 7 ' 269
no doubt killed more people than Genghis, but he had twentieth- century technology at his disposal. And did even Hitler gain his greatest pleasure, as Genghis avowedly did, from seeing his victims' 'near and dear bathed in tears'? We judge Hitler's degree of evil by the standards of today, and the moral Zeitgeist has moved on since Caligula's time, just as the technology has. Hitler seems especially evil only by the more benign standards of our time.
Within my lifetime, large numbers of people thoughtlessly bandied derogatory nicknames and national stereotypes: Frog, Wop, Dago, Hun, Yid, Coon, Nip, Wog. I won't claim that such words have disappeared, but they are now widely deplored in polite circles. The word 'negro', even though not intended to be insulting, can be used to date a piece of English prose. Prejudices are indeed revealing giveaways of the date of a piece of writing.
In his own time, a respected Cambridge theologian, A. C. Bouquet, was able to begin the chapter on Islam of his Comparative Religion with these words: 'The Semite is not a natural monotheist, as was supposed about the middle of the nineteenth century. He is an animist. ' The obsession with race (as opposed to culture) and the revealing use of the singular ('The Semite . . . He is an animist') to reduce an entire
plurality of people to one 'type' are not heinous by any standards. But they are another tiny indicator of the changing Zeitgeist. No Cambridge professor of theology or any other subject would today use those words. Such subtle hints of changing mores tell us that Bouquet was writing no later than the middle of the twentieth century. It was in fact 1941.
Go back another four decades, and the changing standards become unmistakeable. In a previous book I quoted H. G. Wells's Utopian New Republic, and I shall do so again because it is such a shocking illustration of the point I am making.
And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? . . . the yellow man? . . . the Jew? . . . those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty- white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go . . . And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic,
270
i H r c; o ! ) i) 1; i. u s i o x
the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity - beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds . . . And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness . . . is death . . . The men of the New Republic . . . will have an ideal that will make the killing worth the while.
That was written in 1902, and Wells was regarded as a progressive in his own time. In 1902 such sentiments, while not widely agreed, would have made for an acceptable dinner-party argument. Modern readers, by contrast, literally gasp with horror when they see the words. We are forced to realize that Hitler, appalling though he was, was not quite as far outside the Zeitgeist of his time as he seems from our vantage-point today. How swiftly the Zeitgeist changes - and it moves in parallel, on a broad front, throughout the educated world.
Where, then, have these concerted and steady changes in social consciousness come from? The onus is not on me to answer. For my purposes it is sufficient that they certainly have not come from religion. If forced to advance a theory, I would approach it along the following lines. We need to explain why the changing moral Zeitgeist is so widely synchronized across large numbers of people; and we need to explain its relatively consistent direction.
First, how is it synchronized across so many people? It spreads itself from mind to mind through conversations in bars and at dinner parties, through books and book reviews, through news- papers and broadcasting, and nowadays through the Internet. Changes in the moral climate are signalled in editorials, on radio talk shows, in political speeches, in the patter of stand-up comedians and the scripts of soap operas, in the votes of parlia- ments making laws and the decisions of judges interpreting them. One way to put it would be in terms of changing meme frequencies in the meme pool, but I shall not pursue that.
Some of us lag behind the advancing wave of the changing moral Zeitgeist and some of us are slightly ahead. But most of us in the
:
G O OI") ' B O O K A N D T 1 i I ,\! O R A I, '/I. I 7 <; l . I S i 2 7 1
twenty-first century are bunched together and way ahead of our counterparts in the Middle Ages, or in the time of Abraham, or even as recently as the 1920s. The whole wave keeps moving, and even the vanguard of an earlier century (T. H. Huxley is the obvious example) would find itself way behind the laggers of a later century. Of course, the advance is not a smooth incline but a meandering sawtooth. There are local and temporary setbacks such as the United States is suffering from its government in the early 2000s. But over the longer timescale, the progressive trend is unmistake- able and it will continue.
What impels it in its consistent direction? We mustn't neglect the driving role of individual leaders who, ahead of their time, stand up and persuade the rest of us to move on with them. In America, the ideals of racial equality were fostered by political leaders of the calibre of Martin Luther King, and entertainers, sportsmen and other public figures and role models such as Paul Robeson, Sidney Poitier, Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson. The emancipations of slaves and of women owed much to charismatic leaders. Some of these leaders were religious; some were not. Some who were religious did their good deeds because they were religious. In other cases their religion was incidental. Although Martin Luther King
was a Christian, he derived his philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience directly from Gandhi, who was not.
Then, too, there is improved education and, in particular, the increased understanding that each of us shares a common humanity with members of other races and with the other sex - both deeply unbiblical ideas that come from biological science, especially evolution. One reason black people and women and, in Nazi Germany, Jews and gypsies have been treated badly is that they were not perceived as fully human. The philosopher Peter Singer, in Animal Liberation, is the most eloquent advocate of the view that we should move to a post-speciesist condition in which humane treatment is meted out to all species that have the brain power to appreciate it. Perhaps this hints at the direction in which the moral Zeitgeist might move in future centuries. It would be a natural extrapolation of earlier reforms like the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women.
It is beyond my amateur psychology and sociology to go any
272 T H E G O D D E L U S I O N
further in explaining why the moral Zeitgeist moves in its broadly concerted way. For my purposes it is enough that, as a matter of observed fact, it does move, and it is not driven by religion - and certainly not by scripture. It is probably not a single force like gravity, but a complex interplay of disparate forces like the one that propels Moore's Law, describing the exponential increase in computer power. Whatever its cause, the manifest phenomenon of Zeitgeist progression is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good, or to decide what is good.
WHAT ABOUT HITLER AND STALIN? WEREN'T THEY ATHEISTS?
The Zeitgeist may move, and move in a generally progressive direc- tion, but as I have said it is a sawtooth not a smooth improvement, and there have been some appalling reversals. Outstanding rever- sals, deep and terrible ones, are provided by the dictators of the twentieth century. It is important to separate the evil intentions of men like Hitler and Stalin from the vast power that they wielded in achieving them. I have already observed that Hitler's ideas and intentions were not self-evidently more evil than those of Caligula - or some of the Ottoman sultans, whose staggering feats of nasti- ness are described in Noel Barber's Lords of the Golden Horn. Hitler had twentieth-century weapons, and twentieth-century com- munications technology at his disposal. Nevertheless, Hitler and Stalin were, by any standards, spectacularly evil men.
'Hitler and Stalin were atheists. What have you got to say about that? ' The question comes up after just about every public lecture that I ever give on the subject of religion, and in most of my radio interviews as well. It is put in a truculent way, indignantly freighted with two assumptions: not only (1) were Stalin and Hitler atheists, but (2) they did their terrible deeds because they were atheists. Assumption (1) is true for Stalin and dubious for Hitler. But assumption (1) is irrelevant anyway, because assumption (2) is false. It is certainly illogical if it is thought to follow from (1). Even
T H E ' G O O D " B O O K A N D T H E M O R A L Z E / f G ? / S 7 273
if we accept that Hitler and Stalin shared atheism in common, they both also had moustaches, as does Saddam Hussein. So what? The interesting question is not whether evil (or good) individual human beings were religious or were atheists. We are not in the business of counting evil heads and compiling two rival roll calls of iniquity. The fact that Nazi belt buckles were inscribed with 'Gott mit uns' doesn't prove anything, at least not without a lot more discussion.
What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does.
There seems no doubt that, as a matter of fact, Stalin was an atheist. He received his education at an Orthodox seminary, and his mother never lost her disappointment that he had not entered the priesthood as she intended - a fact that, according to Alan Bullock,
106
caused Stalin much amusement. Perhaps because of his training
for the priesthood, the mature Stalin was scathing about the Russian Orthodox Church, and about Christianity and religion in general. But there is no evidence that his atheism motivated his brutality. His earlier religious training probably didn't either, unless it was through teaching him to revere absolutist faith, strong authority and a belief that ends justify means.
The legend that Hitler was an atheist has been assiduously cultivated, so much so that a great many people believe it without question, and it is regularly and defiantly trotted out by religious apologists. The truth of the matter is far from clear. Hitler was born into a Catholic family, and went to Catholic schools and churches as a child. Obviously that is not significant in itself: he could easily have given it up, as Stalin gave up his Russian Orthodoxy after leaving the Tiflis Theological Seminary. But Hitler never formally renounced his Catholicism, and there are indications throughout his life that he remained religious. If not Catholic, he seems to have retained a belief in some sort of divine providence. For example he stated in Mein Kampf that, when he heard the news of the declar- ation of the First World War, 'I sank down on my knees and thanked Heaven out of the fullness of my heart for the favour of
107
having been permitted to live in such a time. '
when he was still only twenty-five. Perhaps he changed after that?
But that was 1914, In 1920, when Hitler was thirty-one, his close associate Rudolf
2 7 4 T i l h (", O D D E L U S I O N
Hess, later to be deputy Fu? hrer, wrote in a letter to the Prime Minister of Bavaria, 'I know Herr Hitler very well personally and am quite close to him. He has an unusually honourable character, full of
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profound kindness, is religious, a good Catholic. '
could be said that, since Hess got the 'honourable character' and the 'profound kindness' so crashingly wrong, maybe he got the 'good Catholic' wrong too! Hitler could scarcely be described as a 'good' anything, which reminds me of the most comically audacious argument I have heard in favour of the proposition that Hitler must have been an atheist. Paraphrasing from many sources, Hitler was a bad man, Christianity teaches goodness, therefore Hitler can't have been a Christian! Goering's remark about Hitler, 'Only a Catholic could unite Germany,' might, I suppose, have meant somebody brought up Catholic rather than a believing Catholic.
In a speech of 1933 in Berlin, Hitler said, 'We were convinced
that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore
undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not
merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it
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out. '
'believed in belief. But as late as 1941 he told his adjutant, General Gerhard Engel, 'I shall remain a Catholic for ever. '
Even if he didn't remain a sincerely believing Christian, Hitler would have to have been positively unusual not to have been in- fluenced by the long Christian tradition of blaming Jews as Christ-killers. In a speech in Munich in 1923, Hitler said, 'The first thing to do is to rescue [Germany] from the Jew who is ruining our country . . . We want to prevent our Germany from suffering, as
110
Another did, the death upon the Cross. '
Definitive Biography, John Toland wrote of Hitler's religious position at the time of the 'final solution':
Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of god. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god - so long as it was done impersonally, with- out cruelty.
That might indicate only that, like many others, Hitler
Of course, it
In his Adolf Hitler: The
T III ' (, () O D ' H O () K A X D ']' 1 i H M O R A t. 7. r. I f (, I: / . V 7 275
Christian hatred of Jews is not just a Catholic tradition. Martin Luther was a virulent anti-Semite. At the Diet of Worms he said that 'All Jews should be driven from Germany. ' And he wrote a whole book, On the Jews and their Lies, which probably influenced Hitler. Luther described the Jews as a 'brood of vipers', and the same phrase was used by Hitler in a remarkable speech of 1922, in which he several times repeated that he was a Christian:
My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian 1 have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice . . . And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also
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It is hard to know whether Hitler picked up the phrase 'brood of vipers' from Luther, or whether he got it directly from Matthew 3: 7, as Luther presumably did. As for the theme of Jewish persecution as part of God's will, Hitler returned to it in Mein Kampf: 'Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the
Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. " That was 1925. He said it again in a speech in the Reichstag in 1938, and he said similar things throughout his career.
Quotations like those have to be balanced by others from his
a duty to my own people.
276 THE C;OU DELUSIGN
Table Talk, in which Hitler expressed virulently anti-Christian views, as recorded by his secretary. The following all date from 1941:
The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity . . .
The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.
When all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards should free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let's be the only people who are immunised against the disease.
Hitler's Table Talk contains more quotations like those, equating Christianity with Bolshevism, sometimes drawing an analogy between Karl Marx and St Paul and never forgetting that both were Jews (though Hitler, oddly, was always adamant that Jesus himself was not a Jew). It is possible that Hitler had by 1941 experienced some kind of deconversion or disillusionment with Christianity. Or is the resolution of the contradictions simply that he was an opportunistic liar whose words cannot be trusted, in either direction?
It could be argued that, despite his own words and those of his associates, Hitler was not really religious but just cynically exploit- ing the religiosity of his audience. He may have agreed with Napoleon, who said, 'Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet,' and with Seneca the Younger: 'Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. ' Nobody could deny that Hitler was capable of such insincerity. If this was his real motive for pretending to be religious, it serves to remind us that Hitler didn't carry out his atrocities single-handed. The terrible deeds themselves were carried out by soldiers and their officers, most of whom were surely Christian. Indeed, the Christianity of the German people underlies
often
T H H ' G O ( ) D ' B O O K A N D T I I I- M O R A L Z E / T G /:. ' / S T 277
the very hypothesis we are discussing - a hypothesis to explain the supposed insincerity of Hitler's religious professings! Or, perhaps Hitler felt that he had to display some token sympathy for Christianity, otherwise his regime would not have received the support it did from the Church. This support showed itself in various ways, including Pope Pius XIIs persistent refusal to take a stand against the Nazis - a subject of considerable embarrassment to the modern Church. Either Hitler's professions of Christianity were sincere, or he faked his Christianity in order to win - success- fully - co-operation from German Christians and the Catholic Church. In either case, the evils of Hitler's regime can hardly be
held up as flowing from atheism.
Even when he was railing against Christianity, Hitler never
ceased using the language of Providence: a mysterious agency which, he believed, had singled him out for a divine mission to lead Germany. He sometimes called it Providence, at other times God. After the Anschluss, when Hitler returned in triumph to Vienna in 1938, his exultant speech mentioned God in this providential guise: 'I believe it was God's will to send a boy from here into the Reich, to let him grow up and to raise him to be the leader of the nation
112 so that he could lead back his homeland into the Reich. '
When he narrowly escaped assassination in Munich in
November 1939, Hitler credited Providence with intervening to
save his life by causing him to alter his schedule: 'Now I am com-
pletely content. The fact that I left the Biirgerbraukeller earlier than
usual is a corroboration of Providence's intention to let me reach
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my goal. ' After this failed assassination the Archbishop of
Munich, Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, ordered that a Te Deum should be said in his cathedral, 'To thank Divine Providence in the name of the archdiocese for the Fiihrer's fortunate escape. ' Some of Hitler's followers, with the support of Goebbels, made no bones about building Nazism into a religion in its own right. The follow- ing, by the chief of the united trade unions, has the feel of a prayer, and even has the cadences of the Christian Lord's Prayer ('Our Father') or the Creed:
Adolf Hitler! We are united with you alone!
