THE idea that people could do good things without religion is a child’s fairy story, Christians have claimed.

Leading clerics have dismissed atheist philosopher AC Grayling’s ‘secular bible’ as a ‘cheap con trick designed to keep people scared by telling them they are instinctively co-operative’.

Grayling’s The Good Book explains why human beings are capable of being nice to each other even without the guidance of divisive, self-serving organisations that preach a moral doctrine riddled with obvious contradictions.

But the Right Reverend Julian Cook, the Anglican Bishop of Hatfield, said: “It suggests that a man who doesn’t believe in the resurrection could help a neighbour or give money to charity. It just doesn’t make any sense.

“In one chapter we are told that an ordinary person could volunteer at a homeless shelter when there is no evidence whatsoever that this person believes Jesus turned water into wine or healed a leper with his special finger.”

Monsignor Stephen Malley, a leading Catholic theologian, added: “So this person just woke up one day and miraculously decided to do something for someone else?

“I’m sorry Professor Grayling, you may convince some people with this voodoo hocus pocus, but I will stick with the empirical logic of transubstantiation, thank you very much indeed.”

Tom Logan, a practicing non-believer from Finsbury Park, said: “Yesterday I gave twenty quid to the Japanese Red Cross and then wiped my backside with St Paul’s Third Letter to the Kardashians.

“I think that’s one of the ones where he encourages the ritual slaughter of homosexuals.

“Nice man.”