An amazing Book for open minder truth seekers.

Yet another case where a person with expertise in one field, thereby feels entitled to propound his ill-formed opinions on a wide range of matters.

This series of essays are based on the typical liberal fallacy - the assumption that everyone really wants everyone to be happy, and all conflict and cruelty arise out of misconceptions, which 'enlightened' thinking should be able to straighten out.

A brief look at the last century should demonstrate the foolhardiness of this assumption - there are always a small minority of ruthless individuals whose aim is to achieve the optimum situation for themselves, and are quite content to achieve this at the expense of everyone else. And the more this "everyone really wants to get along" argument is promulgated, the more successful the psychopaths are - because they are assumed not to exist.

Starting from a faulty premise drastically reduces the value of this book; but it is not terribly well-reasoned either. I spotted several factual inaccuracies, apparently arising from the former Bishop's assumption that America is the pattern on which the rest of the world is modelled.

This is not theology, and as philosophy it is shoddy work. It is another manifestation of our celebrity culture, which enables a man given authority in one field to abrogate it to give spurious validity to the airing of his personal prejudices in another.

Godless Morality is one of my all-time favorite theological/philosophical pieces. Holloway's differentiation between morals and ethics is classic. He is one of the most deeply empathetic religious leaders of our time.

Thought-provoking. Wide-ranging discussions of several moral topics, including homosexuality, drugs, abortion and cloning, with the overall position that "command morality" no longer works. Instead, the author offers the metaphor of an improvised jazz composition as the modern approach to defining morality.

Most persuasive case I've yet read for why we ought to decouple moral judgments from religious holy books. Written by a former bishop, no less.

I think I bought this book because it was 99p in a Kindle sale... it didn't really tell me anything new, although it was refreshing to see common sense and wisdom coming out of a former Bishop, and I have no doubt it will be a revelation to some readers, which is a very good thing indeed. Sadly though, the crazies who really need to learn from this book will probably never read it, so its positive effect will be limited to those who already have a brain.

A great philosophy book with a great insight to different philosophical views involving god and religious believes. I shan’t talk about it here as religion and philosophy in general can be a sensitive topic especially morality. But other philosophical books I read in the future may get more insight in my reviews.

richard Holloway seems like a super cool dude. what a compassionate book

It may be 20 years old now, but it’s still relevant. I thought it was really clearly written and I like the emphasis on improvisatory, consent-based morality. I appreciate also that the issues discussed (including drugs, abortion, and reproductive science) are treated without a hardline black or white judgment.

Interesting concept, but after 35 pages and two chapters, I had no idea what the author actually wanted to say, or even what he had said. There was no scaffolding to hold up the argument, which in itself faint like an indistinct echo of an idea.

As a practicing atheist I found this book enlighting. Behaviour is a terrirory of doubt and search, not of dogmatic certainty.

Holloway, the Bishop of Edinburgh, is not renouncing god in this book. Rather, he is arguing that the Bible does not make a very good authority in matters of modern morality. Written at the end of the 1990s, during a rising tide of fundamentalism in the English speaking world, Holloway argues why the fundamentalists are wrong and that a better option for dealing with contemporary issues is a moderate relativistic utilitarianism (though he does not use the word utilitarianism), informed by but not strictly adherent to religious ideals. The structure of the book goes thus: The introduction and chapter 1 set what one might call the theoretical concerns of the book. This is the part that corresponds most closely to the title. In these chapters, Holloway lays out why scripture and church doctrine do not work as guides for modern ethics. Basically, the argument here is that those "laws" were made by people at particular times in particular cultural circumstances in which they made some kind of sense. However, time moves on, and when these laws no longer make sense, insistence upon strict conformity to those laws causes more harm than good. Chapters 2-6 take up specific ethical hot issues of the late 1990s: feminism, sexuality, drug legalization, abortion, informed suicide, and reproductive technologies. By the end of chapter 2, one becomes aware that Holloway's target audience is not fundamentalists, or the nonreligious, but rather the Scottish Episcopal Church in which he serves. Even so, his discussion of the various issues usually takes the same trajectory - explain why religion has little useful to say about the matter, and then advocate for a liberal-minded piecemeal approach to resolving the issues. The arguments on these issues, pro and con, may strike a contemporary (2024) reader as ground already built upon, nothing really all that new. The one point where the book is still part of the controversy (since none of these issues has yet left us) is his continued statements that religion has little relevant to say on these matters, and that those who look upon them through strict religious ideology view these matters incorrectly. It is an eminently readable book, a quick review of major social controversies, and a refreshing statement of purpose from a perspective that too often remains silent on these issues: the liberal church perspective.