Being Good Without God

"Religion usurps for itself a product of human development that has occurred without any need of divine intervention, it is the ultimate confidence trick, selling us what we already own."


There is a widely held conviction that being good is linked to religious belief. So is it possible to be good without God? To be good requires first having a moral blueprint by which actions can be judged to be good or bad and for the believer this blueprint is derived from God.

Most people would agree with the following assertion; that you should treat others the same way you want them to treat you, this notion relies on reciprocity and is intuitive when your own self interest is evenly balanced with that of another. However there are many circumstances when you cannot rely on a matched response so why should someone behave in an altruistic or generous way when there is no guarantee that their behaviour will be reciprocated?

For many species, like most fish for example, after fertilisation of the eggs the parents take no further part in the development of their offspring. Other species like most birds have a different method. As neither the skeletal wings or the feathers necessary for flight can develop fully within the confines of a shell, the hatchling bird requires weeks of nurture and protection to enable this development and therefore cannot fend for itself for a considerable time.

Both these methods of reproduction have been highly successful as the ubiquity of fish and birds species testify. For the bird however reproduction has an additional responsibility, namely parenting. For the hatchling, survival is a race against time; the longer that it stays in the nest the more vulnerable it is to predators. Rapid growth requires a constant supply of food. For a typical brood of five or six chicks the demands on the parent birds are enormous. During this period adult birds may be near to starvation themselves as they devote all their energy to feeding their offspring. And in addition they will invariably put themselves at risk to defend their brood when it is threatened by a predator.

The bird’s behaviour is obviously altruistic as no reciprocation is likely but does this mean that it is good? It is obviously good for their offspring as their survival is dependent upon it, but can it be good in the general sense without having a moral dimension? If a bird is compelled by instinct to behave in an altruistic manner then can we regard this behaviour as morally good?

Even though their lifespan if usually greater, most mammals devote a proportionally much longer period to parenting, than birds do. And amongst the most devoted are we humans, spending around twenty percent of our lifespan rearing our own children. In common with all other species who are involved in parenting, we really have no choice as our species would not survive if we did not expend a huge amount of our resources in rearing our offspring.

Even in our changing society the majority of us are still reared by loving parents or at least parent. Almost every mother establishes a bond with her child soon after birth as do the majority of fathers. The human family is the crucible where altruistic behaviour is forged, not out of a desire to please a distant god but out of biological necessity. The human family is the base unit of human society; its structure is echoed in almost all human organisations, whether social, legal, political, sporting or religious. Within the family is the archetype of all human relationships.

Whilst parental altruism is inevitable this cannot be said of our offspring. As soon as it is able an infant will take what it wants at the expense of anyone else. Usually this behaviour is challenged by parents, particularly if other siblings are involved, bad behaviour is chastised whilst good is rewarded. It is within this transfer of the biologically motivated behaviour of parents to the culturally acquired behaviour of their offspring that the notion of morality can be said to emerge. Good that is inevitable becomes good that is preferable.

The notion of good (and therefore of bad) has become a cultural meme, it has evolved and spread into all human activity. It has resulted in the concept of fairness and justness and a system of law based on the concept of natural justice, natural because we know it to be true.

So do you need God to be good?

Religion, in most of its theistic invocations, usurps for itself a product of human development that has occurred without any need of divine intervention, it is the ultimate confidence trick, selling us what we already own. Yes we would have been good without god! So how has it got away with this fraud for so long?

Religion offers its adherents a simple deal. It trades the promise of a life after death for obedience and deference in life before death. In order to buttress this compliance religion has sticks as well as carrots, and foremost of those sticks is the prospect of hell for miscreants or at the very least the absence of heaven.

In common with other tyrannies religion has policies to maintain its grip, it embroils the young before they a capable of independent thought, it requires tithes and regular worship of its particular God but foremost it has a set of rules that must be obeyed. Many of these rules are hostile to competing religions and some require punishment and even the abuse of infants as in the practice of circumcision; but smuggled in amongst these abhorrent “laws” are many that anyone will intuitively accept, you should not steal, you should not kill, you shall not bear false witness etc. This seduces the believer into accepting the entire package and convinces them that they cannot be good without it. It is no surprise that the notion that you should treat others the same way you want them to treat you is a precept of nearly all religions as well as secular, naturalistic doctrines, reciprocal altruism is simply common sense.

In many countries, like the USA and Iran for example, morality based on religious belief has been conjoined with political dogma in order to undermine or drive out the secular alternative, to the extent that many ordinary people genuinely think that, in the absence of their religion, they would behave like savages. The usurpation of humanist notion of good and the claim that it emanates from god is a disgraceful sham. The truth is that we humans are programmed to be good.

Thought for the Day

Today I have renewed my complaint to the BBC regarding Thought for the Day. Following is the letter. I will post their response, but don't hold your breath!

Dear Sir

I registered a formal complaint to the BBC on 1/12/06 regarding “Thought for the Day” and it has still not been addressed satisfactorily, for this reason I am now addressing this complaint to the BBC Trust.

The “Thought for the Day” feature broadcast during the Radio 4, Today programme offers a few minutes of contemplation and reflection on current events set in a moral and ethical context.

A summary of the complaint is this:

“Thought for the Day” explicitly excludes contributions from those who profess no faith; this is extremely insulting to agnostics and atheists who probably account for the majority of the UK population. For all the issues that are examined on “Thought for the Day” there is a distinctive non-religious moral perspective.

One concludes that the BBC endorses the assertion that morality is inevitably linked to religious belief and that faith confers additional authority to the speaker. In a secular society such as ours, this is an unacceptable policy. I therefore ask the BBC Trust to ensure that in future “Thought for the Day” will allow contributions from outside religious groups.


In my various correspondences with the BBC it has been stated that the “Thought for the Day” feature is produced by the Religious Affairs Dept, therein lies the problem; again there is an assumption that a moral perspective is the exclusive domain of the religious.

Enc email correspondence

Yours sincerely


Graham Davis

Application to establish a new religion

Dear Sir

I hope you will look favourably at my application to start a new religion. I am sure you will be pleased to hear that like all religions mine has a deity, a prophet, a holy book and a set of guiding principles; they are:

• The right to distribute a deadly disease by denial of the use of contraceptive devices
  
• The right to mutilate the genitalia of all male offspring
  
• The right to kill animals for food by letting them bleed to death
  
• The right to deny our wives and daughters the opportunity to take part in any activities that we deem improper
  
• The right for us to deal sympathetically with our shamans that have been involved in sexual activities with children
  
• The right to advance the truth revealed in the holy book that our deity made the earth in a few days and that any so called science that refutes this is blasphemous and cannot be tolerated.
  
• The right to severely discipline our own believers if they contradict the teaching of our prophet
  
• The right to encourage the terminally ill and severely disabled to visit any of our conveniently situated shrines in order that they may be miraculously cured. And that our success rates will not need to be published in our annual accounts as this could produce a misleading impression.
  
• The right to wear our traditional costume even when it contravenes regulations that non-believers are required to obey

Once my application has been approved I understand that my new religion will receive the following advantages:

• The right to nominate our top shamans for automatic entry to the legislative chamber known as the House of Lords, so we may influence policies that may be in conflict with our own belief system.
  
• The right to exploit all the advantages received when the head of state also becomes head of our religion
  
• The right to receive tax breaks and charitable status.
  
• The right to insist on a daily act of worship in all state schools
  

I know that you will appreciate that if my new religion is ridiculed by non believers that grave offence will have been suffered and that this incitement to religious hatred will be subject to full rigor of the criminal law.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sivad Maharg

“You never ask questions when God’s on your side”

When Bob Dylan penned these words in 1963, we were in the midst of the cold war, now forty years on we are told that we are engaged in another war, the “war on terror”. Bush and Blair have characterised “our” opponents as evil, a word heavy with religious connotation. They have both claimed guidance from the “almighty”, an unfortunate irony as so do “our” opponents, the suicide bombers and beheaders.

We all know the origins of 9/11; it is the US support of Israel. When the PLO instigated their terror campaign against Israel in the 1970’s, there we no references to “jihad” or even to Islam. They saw themselves as freedom fighters struggling against political oppression, just as the Israelis did in their earlier conflict with the British.

The Islamification of the conflict can be directly paralleled with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity in the USA. The unfortunate use of the word Crusade by George Bush at the beginning of the conflict reinforced the notion held by Moslems that they are under threat from Christian/Western domination.

Religion always puts faith at the top of the list for true believers and faith is incompatible with reason. Faith is impervious to the notion that all human acts should be subjected to rational scrutiny in order to assess their validity.

In the UK even the timid Anglicans are becoming emboldened by demonstrations of their co-religionists Islamic and Sikh muscle. The UK population has always had a healthy scepticism, particularly of politicians, our problem is that the creeping desecularisation of our society may proceed unnoticed and unchallenged; the spread of faith schools is just one example.

In the US the problem is far worse. A majority of the population profess to be Christian, for a politician to acknowledge their atheism it is tantamount to an admission of eating babies, so even those “social” Christian politicians are loath to oppose the religiously motivated policies for fear of being outed. There are signs of a modest intellectual backlash but what is really needed is a respected public figure to declare their atheism and kick start a debate. Previously held prejudices can sometimes be overturned, as attitudes towards blacks, women and gays demonstrate.

Dylan got it about right, though I doubt that even he could have foreseen where we are now, forty years on