Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

by Jonathan Sacks

Since Socrates, philosophers have asked: Why be moral? Plato thought it was knowledge. People do wrong only through ignorance. Aristotle thought this implausible. We often suffer from akrasia, weakness of will. So we become good people the way we become good tennis players or violinists, through practice until the behaviour we aspire to becomes natural and instinctive. Being moral means acquiring the habits of the heart we call virtue. In

Violence exists because we are social animals. We live and find our identity in groups. And groups conflict. They fight over the same resources: food, territory, other scarce goods. That is our nature and it leads to all that is best and worst about us: our altruism towards other members of our group, and our suspicion and aggression towards members of other groups. Religion plays a part in this only because it is the most powerful source of group identity the world has yet known.