Anscombe was a woman actually and a Catholic. So her point was that secularism is no solid basis for morality. If moralizing has only mesmeric force, I suppose what she was saying, in effect, was that you need the full fairy-tale to support the mass hallucination. You need to believe there’s a God who threatens us all with eternal torment if we should fail to behave morally. Some such global, inescapable threat is what gives morality its force.

But because theism itself is a fantasy, the connection between theism and morality would be like that between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader — two pieces of a single fiction. What she was saying (only in effect, since she wouldn’t agree that theism is a fiction) is that if you lose one part of the story, the rest of the story no longer makes sense. That was Nietzsche’s point too, about the death of God.