Introduction

I was originally asked to talk on a subject such as my career as an economic journalist. I would be delighted to respond in discussion to these and any other matters. But as I have so many opportunities to pontificate on economic topics - indeed I was doing so last night - that I thought it better to use this as a rare occasion to say something more personal. But please do not feel even tempted to break the prohibition against writing on the Sabbath evening. A fuller version of what I have to say is on my web site, whose name is easy to remember: www.samuelbrittan.co.uk. But if any of you want any prompting, I have some personal cards with me.

Some Recollections

One of my earliest childhood enthusiasms was for the detailed observance of the ceremonies of the Jewish religion. My parents and many of their friends were mildly-observant orthodox. Perhaps I should explain that orthodox Judaism of the kind in which I grew up required very little theological commitment. A person could be a good Jew who doubted the afterlife. (No one ever came back to talk about it my father would say.) A devout Jew could be a logical positivist - it just showed that he was reading philosophical books. But if he did not carry out a bare minimum of observances he was beyond the pale.

As soon as I learned about the vast number of practices that were theoretically required, I became very dissatisfied with my parents minimalism. Either these observances were the commands of God - in which case they should be observed - or they were not. There was some self- seeking here. For although I would not switch on the electric light on the Sabbath, I stood around waiting for other people to do so, rationalising this by saying that they were going to do so in any case.

This zealotry worried adults, even adults who were themselves observant, but who feared that I could easily go to the other extreme. Surely enough I did. For, within weeks, the concerns of my elders switched from worries that I was opening the synagogue to how to cope with a precocious child that kept saying I do not believe in religion.

There was however another aspect which was much less characteristic than my naive either-or-logic. This was an attraction for aspects of ceremony - religious and otherwise - which has never really left me (ceremony rather than ritual, because ritual can be very cruel in the demands it makes on many unfortunate individuals.)

But to come back to my potted and partial autobiography: I was enchanted by the service of the Jewish High Holidays, the singing of familiar prayers to exciting new tunes and with insertions. There were other aspects which caught my fancy: how an otherwise unimportant old man became the key to proceedings when he told the blower of the Shofar (rams horn) on New Year and at the end of the Day of atonement which notes to play.

Indeed I witnessed something similar when I happened to be in Venice on Yom Kippur last year. I went to the old Synagogue. Unfortunately there was no cantor and no choir; and thus the proceedings took on the moaning and groaning form which puts me off so much. But there was one similarity which struck me from my early youth. In the congregation there were local personalities who did not know too much about what to do, but who were called up to the Reading of the Law because of their position.

There was a man in a beard and trilby, who made sure that everyone came up to the platform on time and helped them through their blessings by pointing to each word as it came up. At other times he found every excuse for walking all round the synagogue. I could not help reflecting that this man was probably of no consequence during most of the year - probably much less important than the ignoramuses whom he helped through the proceedings. Here however was his moment of glory. The position maketh the man.

To go back to my youth. In my teens I was no longer a believer, but I would go to the synagogue on the New Year and Yom Kippur to avoid upsetting my father. The part of the whole-day service which I made a point of attending was in the early afternoon when other worshippers took a break and had a walk. I was impressed by the account of the Temple service when the high priest would sacrifice a goat, throwing it down from a rock after which it took on the sins of the congregation. There is indeed much to ponder about the roots of the word scapegoat; but I never go round to looking it up in James Frazer's Golden Bough.

The fascination with the ceremonial-musical side continued in later life. Truth to tell I often prefer a classical or post-classical setting of the Latin mass - in which the same words are set in ever differing ways - to the twists and turns of the operas which are much more fashionable to discuss. Indeed I attended the last Christmas midnight mass at the Brompton Oratory before services changed to the vernacular. This change was an example of superficial reform by supposedly modernising Popes who nevertheless obstinately stood by the rules which caused so much real misery, eg. birth control, divorce and the celibacy of the clergy.

I would have returned more often in later life to the Jewish synagogue services except for the embarrassment of people saying What are you doing here? But I read that the conductor Otto Klemperer, who had undergone a superficial conversion to Catholicism, did make a return visit to the synagogue at least once before the end of his life. And quite recently I learned that the composer Igor Stravinsky remarked that the ceremonies, so far from being superficial, were the essential part of religion.

Ethnic Religion

There was something else that occurred, which in retrospect is highly disturbing. The main reaction that greeted my childhood renunciation of religion - not I hasten to say from my parents, but from neighbours and friends - was to say accusingly Then you are not a Jew.

I did not then have the resources of linguistic analysis to give a proper response, but unconvincingly replied I am a zionist. This was not so much untruthful as feeble. I did not have the strength of mind to put everything into the melting pot at the same time and have been ashamed of my lack of robustness ever since.

The identification of religion with ethnic self-consciousness was perhaps understandable on account of mid-20th century history. Nevertheless retrospection has given me a peculiar horror of the union of religion and nationalism which has become such a curse in the new millennium. Most people here will appreciate what I mean by the briefest of references to Bosnia or the militant Iranian clergy or the call of some fundamentalist Moslems for a Holy War against Israel. But we should be honest enough to see that there are traces of the same thing among Jews both outside and inside Israel. Surely one myth that it is time to jettison is that of the chosen people.

The Harm done By Religion

The typical response of many non-religious people to religion is to say either It would be wonderful if it were true or The trouble is that religious people do not practice what they preach. This is far too easy. Most of the religions I know would be far from wonderful if they were true. And on the whole more harm is done by those who do practice what they preach than those who approach religion in a more opportunistic way.

I cannot help noticing how in the operas of Verdi the religious characters are nearly always the most punitive and vengeful. When even Aidas rival Amneris pleads for mercy it is the pagan priests who insist on continuing the death by suffocation. And in Don Carlos, when the Flemish deputies are arrested by the royal officers, it is the lay population who plead for mercy while the Christian priests insist on death. Not to speak of the Grand Inquisitor who insists on King Philip being prepared to condemn his own son to death on pain of otherwise having to face the Inquisition himself.

And in case any of you think that I am in danger of taking operetta libretti too seriously, the last execution in Spain for heresy was as late as 1826 when a schoolmaster was hanged for saying another prayer in place of the Ave Maria. In 1766 at the height of the Enlightenment, when Gibbon and David Hume and Voltaire were already writing and Haydn and Mozart were composing and Gainsborough and Fragonard were painting, a young French aristocrat, the Chevalier de la Barre was sentenced to have his hands amputated, his tongue torn out and then to be burned alive. His crime? Not to doff his hat to a Capuchin religious procession because it was raining.

Do not for one moment suppose that the Protestants were much more merciful than the Catholics. Both Luther and Calvin were enthusiastic supporters of the burning of witches. In Calvinistic Scotland some 4,500 supposed witches were killed in a one hundred year period. The Paisley Seven were executed for witchcraft as late as 1697, after the Glorious Revolution and when John Locke was already preaching toleration in England. In Northern Ireland today most pupils still attend either Catholic or Protestant schools, both funded by the state. We can only guess how much this division has contributed to the worsening of tribal warfare in that province.

It would be fascinating to have an attempt by one of the American school of quantitative historians to balance the good done by sects such as the Quakers and the early Franciscans or Rabbi Gryn, in our own century, against the savagery of the heresy hunts and crusades or those who killed an Israeli prime minister for betraying the Faith. But in the absence of such attempts we must all rely on more subjective assessments.

These episodes cannot be wiped out with the glib saying Christianity has never been tried. Surely it has been tested to destruction. Today, perhaps because it is in retreat, Christianity seems a good deal gentler than Moslem fundamentalism. But it was not ever thus. In medieval Spain the Caliphs were a model of tolerance and civilisation under which many cultures and religions flourished, while the Christians who reconquered Spain put to the sword those who would not accept their religion.

Even today not all Christians are so gentle. Who is it who threatens to take the British government to the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights, not for the ill-treatment of children, but on the contrary for banning beating in schools and thus going against the so called convictions of so called Christians? And who was it who held a meeting in a large hall in London to instruct parents how to punish their children more severely - to such an extent that secular human rights organisations tried to get the meeting stopped as a breach of the law? Of course a group of fundamentalist Christians.

And who was it, who at the time of the Profumo case, thundered against the private morals of a fellow minister and his own sin of having sat in the same cabinet? The Christian Lord Halsham. And who was it who strained Cabinet unity by responding about toleration? None other than the pretty irreligious Reginald Maulding.

Are not at least Christian moral teachings worthy of observance? Here one must remember that the Devil can quote scripture for his purposes. In St Matthew he is quoted as saying: The Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives but to save them. But in another verse he says I come not to send peace but a sword. In St Luke he endorses the commandment Honour thy father and thy mother, but he also says If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

The God of the Old Testament

Judaism seems less tarnished, it is probably because it has had so little power for the last 2000 years. Even so, Do I need to remind you that it is the religious parties in the Israeli cabinet who have the most hawkish attitudes to peace negotiations with the Arabs: an attitude more than reciprocated by all too many Moslem fundamentalists.

To go a little further, there is no better source than the Old Testament. To refresh my memory I looked at the chapter on it in Ludovic Kennedy's book All In The Mind, a Farewell to God (Hodder and Stoughton, 1999).

He reminds us that there are three kinds of passage in the Old Testament. There are places, full of A Begat B or intricate details of sacrifices, where one finds the eyes glazing over, the head nodding on the chest. Secondly, there are passages of striking imagery or beauty, such as By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept (which Verdi nearly made into the Italian national anthem).

Thirdly, there is a darker side: tales of treachery and betrayal, killings on a massive scale which crowd one another with thickening regularity. Elijah, having witnessed the triumph of his God, ordered 450 priests of Baal to be killed. Or Now go and smite the Amlekites and utterly destroy all they have and spare them not; both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. If that is not genocide, I do not know what is.

I did not want to be completely dependent on Kennedy. So I tried to check for myself by putting in five or six markers distributed at random throughout my copy of the Old Testament. My first marking was Numbers, 15. At first it looked like one of the boring passages dealing with sacrifices. Further on, the chapter appeared like a model of enlightenment, which should stand over the Home Office door: One ordinance shall be both for you of the congregation and also for the stranger that sojourneth with you. But by the end there is a story of a man brought to Moses for gathering sticks on the Sabbath. The Lords instruction was that he should be stoned by all the congregation; and stoned he was.

Next I came to the beginning of the first chapter of the Book of Joshua. This is mostly instructions about conquering (or reconquering) the land of Israel. But it ends with the sinister warning that he that doth rebel against thy [Joshua's] commandments should be put to death.

After that I came to the Second Book of Chronicles, Chapter Two, which was about the building of the Temple. Solomon set to work 70,000 people to be bearers of burdens and 80,000 to be hewers in the mountain. Some 3,600 were overseers. It puts the Greenwich Dome quite into the shade.

Then I came to Psalm 72. This is one of the beautiful passages: The mountain shall bring peace to the people, and the little hills by righteousness. He shall judge the poor of the people, he shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor. (More like Old Labour squeezing the rich until the pips squeak than nice business-friendly Tony Blair).

The next passage was Jeremiah, chapter 13. This is one of the more poetic books of the Bible with the passage about the leopard n ot being able to change his spots. Nevertheless God is made to say that the people of Israel, who had sinned, would be dashed one against the other, even the fathers and the sons together: I will not pity or spare nor have mercy, but destroy them.

Finally I came to the fourth chapter of the Book of Daniel. This is about the three Jewish officials appointed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. Because they would not worship an image of gold they were cast into the burning fiery furnace. When they walked out without a hair of their heads being singed, the king went to the other extreme and blessed the God of Israel and made a decree that anyone who spoke anything against these three Jewish officials should be cut in pieces and their houses made a dunghill. The Old Testament God does nothing by halves!

Paganism and Fanaticism

One affectation which was very fashionable in literary and artistic circles between the Wars (e.g. Norman Douglas) was to say that they were literally pagan. This again wont do. By all means study the Greek and Roman mythologies especially on a warm Mediterranean beach. But do not let us deceive ourselves: Pagan actions were at least as bloody as those of the Christians.

Among the Aztecs a huge image of a corn God was set up, made of dough and the blood of infants, which was supposed to become a God himself and was eaten. At the annual feast to celebrate another God, a victim was killed and his arms and legs eaten by the principal chiefs.

One of my colleagues, on being told the theme of my remarks, said that surely the evil was not religion but fanaticism. To which I can only comment: to some extent. The difference between political fanaticism and the religious variety is that the religious claim to have God on their side. This justifies everything. And even among the political sects it is those like old style Communism, that have so many of the characteristics of a religion, that have butchered most human beings.

The Religious Instinct

One of the lessons which I drew from Kennedy's book which I do not think was intended, was quite how deep seated the religious instinct is among human beings. Indeed he gives the game away by citing ceremonial incantations used by unbelievers, which read like parodies of standard prayers.

Even Kennedy is unwilling to do entirely without the consolations of religion and joins those who, like Wordsworth or the Bloomsbury writers, look to nature or works of art to provide substitute spiritual nourishment. But I am afraid this is a cop out. There is no way in which works of art, however great, can provide the bogus feelings of certainty about how the universe works or how we ought to behave that the great religions claim to provide.

As Kennedy points out, the killing fields of Christianity are mainly in the past, while the legacy of the great cathedrals and renaissance paintings remain. Of course we should enjoy this legacy. But if we could move the clock back who could suppose that any cathedral is worth the massacre of innocent people or the barbarities of the Crusades?

True, we cannot hope to gain a full understanding of the Jewish cantor, the Latin mass, or the Passions of J S Bach, without some knowledge of and feeling for the religious background. Nor can we fully understand medieval renaissance or baroque painting. Indeed I myself would get more out of visits to galleries if I were better acquainted both with the New Testament and with Greek mythology.

I willingly confess to having some religious instincts myself. My two favourite vocal pieces are Mahler's Resurrection Symphony and Beethoven's Choral Symphony. The title of the first speaks for itself, with the opening words of the final chorus Auferstehen (rise again). And Schiller's Ode to Joy is full of vague but strong theistic references.

But there is all the difference in the world between enjoying a quasi-religious wallow and treating any particular religion as the guide either to truth or to morals..

Morality

Finally, let us rid ourselves once for all with the belief that without religion there is no basis for moral behaviour. I have found this most clearly stated by the Oxford philosopher R M Hare - himself a lay preacher - who explained that the concept of morality involved a choice and that it was no more moral to behave well for fear of God than it was for fear of the policeman.

I doubt if it is even psychologically necessary. Modern biological writers have suggested that, even in the world of the selfish gene, natural selection works in favour of at least some kind of altruism, such as kinship altruism or tit for tat. But we are only at the beginning of a scientific understanding of human nature, let alone of how to improve it.

Only last year the Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, published a book attacking the whole notion that we have to be religious to be moral and to believe in God to be good. (Godless Morality, Canongate, 1999). He believes it is better to leave God out of the moral debate and find good human reasons for supporting the system or approach we advocate.

The Bishop is especially interesting on the appeal to tradition which occupies such a prominent place in Jewish pleas to observe religious rituals (Fiddler on the Roof). By the time we start appealing to tradition, in order to preserve some custom or practice, its days are clearly numbered, because traditions really only work when they are legitimated by widespread consent. Once we start appealing merely to the past, we have removed it from the circumstances that gave it logic and integrity. Traditions work by unconscious acceptance. While they are reflectively and unreflectively fulfilling their role, they continue to have one. Once they have to be appealed to as a clincher in an argument, we can be certain that they have lost their role or are in the process of losing it.

Conclusion

In my view the best way to treat religion is as a cultural legacy. It can help to establish feelings of community much more genuinely than the appalling rhetoric of the Third Way. But even here let us avoid the trap of using it to strengthen solidarity among those in the group at the expense of hatred or indifference to those outside. It is this kind of exclusive group morality which is the curse of the human race. We do not yet know how to cope with this in-group, out-group dichotomy, but religion can make it worse.