Compassion starts at home, your ex-holiness

piers paul read on a former bishop’s slap-dash efforts to define a morality without God

If you want to see a post-Christian fish flapping and gasping after it has jumped out of the water of the Christian faith onto dry land, then read Between the Monster and the Saint. The author, Richard Holloway, was once the Episcopalian Bishop of Edinburgh. He then lost his faith. He still preaches, but not from the pulpit: he writes books instead. In this, his 27th, he attempts to define a morality without a God or a Devil.

Holloway has a mellifluous style, but no elegance of expression can wholly cover up his ignorance of history, devious polemic and slap-dash thinking.

He equates evil with brute force - not just of the rapist but also of the state (this from Simone Weil). But coercion is not always evil. There are things that must be rendered unto Caesar and it makes a big difference whether that Caesar is a Nero or a Constantine, a Phillip IV or a St Louis, a Frederic II or a

Charles V.

Holloway wants us all to be compassionate but shows no charity towards the church to which he once belonged. It has "rarely attempted to follow Jesus" and "it is heavy with the pride of office and dignity of person". Like Richard Dawkins, he asks us to believe that "religion has been a potent force for cruelty and violence, both in the past and in recent experience". If, instead of reading the feminist authors he cites as influences (Andrea Dworkin, Virginia Woolf) he had read, say, Jonathan Riley-Smith on the crusades or Henry Kamen on the Inquisition, he would not make such glib and erroneous historical judgments.

Holloway also follows Dawkins in suggesting that all orthodox Christians are Bible-belt Creationists who see heaven as "a lovely garden in Californian weather" - a paradise that is "bound to pall in time; time being, of course, what we would have a horrifyingly endless supply of". This from a former Professor of Divinity! His philosophising is homespun - we read about the death of