God is dead! Can I have his stuff?
Absurdities from those who would rather not see the truth. I have been noting a rise in what could only be described as irrationalism from the so-called "New Atheist" movement and can only account for it by borrowing a paraphrase from Chesterton. "When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing... they believe in anything."
God is dead! Can I have his stuff?
Zac Alstin | 20 February 2012
Celebrated philosopher and author Alain de Botton expects to upset a great number of religious people and atheists alike with his proposal that: “it must be possible to remain a committed atheist and nevertheless to find religions sporadically useful, interesting and consoling.”
De Botton is in Australia to promote his new book: Religion for Atheists: A non-believers guide to the uses of religion; and if articles such as Why religion is too important to be left to the religious are anything to go by, de Botton’s thesis is guaranteed to attract attention.
De Botton demonstrates an equal-parts intriguing and infuriating audacity: baldly dismissing intelligent belief in a deity, whilst laying claim to all the benefits and “consolations” religion might provide. This is his great departure from the New Atheist movement, and from those who have excoriated religious practice and religious institutions as poisonous emanations from utterly false belief systems.
Instead, de Botton suggests we:
recognise that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: firstly, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply-rooted selfish and violent impulses; and secondly, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.
Lest he be accused of going soft on believers, de Botton never fails to remind the reader – in a cool, matter-of-fact tone – that he is preaching to the secular. “God may be dead, but the urgent issues which impelled us to make him up still stir”; “To my mind, of course, no part of religion is true in the sense of being God-given”; “I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist”.
What de Botton proposes is not a sympathetic regard for the believer, but a hostile take-over of religion by the secular world. He writes:
The challenge facing modern secular society is how to reverse the process of religious colonisation: how to separate ideas and rituals from the religious institutions which have laid claim to them but don't truly own them.
It is not clear how such a challenge will be met in practice. Earlier this month, de Botton’s plan to build a temple for atheists in the heart of London sparked a media stoush with atheist champion Richard “Atheists don't need temples” Dawkins; others seem to view the plan as a harmless but misguidedeccentricity, ultimately doomed to failure.
What suggests failure for de Botton’s grand project is the fact that people tend to do things for a reason, the greater the act, the more powerful the reason. But while de Botton may see no obstacle for an unbeliever to “dip into a number of faiths”, his reasons for even wanting to do so are incredibly abstract and thin. To the potentially irritated atheists among his readers, he argues that
religions merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition; for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have.
He further exhorts:
For those interested in the spread and impact of ideas, it is hard not to be mesmerised by examples of the most successful educational and intellectual movements the planet has ever witnessed.
Herein lies the tragedy of de Botton’s secular religiosity: its appeal is limited to those “interested in the spread and impact of ideas”. While religious believers are ideally motivated by such things as a yearning for enlightenment, the promise of heaven (or hell), and the love of God, it seems that de Botton’s coreligionists will be moved by the spirit of anthropological inquiry and social observation. That’s fine in principle; but how many of de Botton’s secular or atheist peers will find this sufficient reason to worship at the temple of atheism?
What this suggests is that de Botton’s secular religion will comprise primarily atheist European philosophers with an intellectual curiosity in the vestiges of religious practice – a group that does not quiteepitomise mainstream secular Western society. De Botton’s thesis is atypical in the current debate over religion and atheism, largely because de Botton himself is atypical. An English philosopher of European origin who excelled at writing popular works on travel, architecture, and the consolations of philosophy – he is an uncommon creature. Despite the reactions garnered by his provocative words, it is hard to imagine his uncommon approach gaining a greater following.
To those of us “interested in religion” it seems slightly incongruous to read de Botton’s effective denunciation of religious belief alongside his keen interest in religious practice. There is an unpleasant disjunction between admiring the “conceptual ambition” of religion and admitting the failures of secular society, all while calmly dismissing the very convictions that make religious practice meaningful and worth doing – the beliefs that make religion at all.
Without belief, the religious practice de Botton has in mind sounds dismally weak and uninspired:
One can be left cold by the doctrines of the Christian Trinity and the Buddhist Fivefold Path, and yet at the same time be interested in the ways in which religions deliver sermons, promote morality, engender a spirit of community, make use of art and architecture, inspire travels, train minds and encourage gratitude at the beauty of spring.
This is the intellectual curiosity of an unusual man. His proposal is so jarring because it advocates an entirely contrived and ultimately disingenuous approach to something either held sacred or contemned by the vast majority of human beings. One might as well seek romance while attesting that love is a delusion, study philosophy while asserting that truth is a fiction, or offer a fervent and heart-felt prayer to a God you do not believe in.
De Botton may raise important points about the intrinsic value of religious practices, and indeed about the emptiness of secular society. He is right to lament the destructive attitude of Dawkinsian atheism, and to call for a more constructive response from secularism. But his solution; his almost schizoid combination of implacable atheism and religious envy is not something I can believe in.
Zac Alstin works at the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute in Adelaide, South Australia.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Dave Gosse on -
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Permalink Reply by Dave Gosse on
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This, quite frankly, is an unfair attack on poor Richard, but it is also quite amusing given poor Richard's penchant for blaming all Christians for the pecadilloes of a few bad Christians. By his own standard of judging others there can be no question of his own culpability in the actions of his predecessors. Rocks? Glass houses? You be the judge.
Slaves at the root of the fortune that created Richard Dawkins' fam...
The ancestors of Richard Dawkins, the atheist campaigner against superstition, intolerance and suffering, built their fortune using slaves, it has been revealed.
By Adam Lusher
7:48AM GMT 19 Feb 2012
He has railed against the evils of religion, and lectured the world on the virtues of atheism.
Now Richard Dawkins, the secularist campaigner against "intolerance and suffering", must face an awkward revelation: he is descended from slave owners and his family estate was bought with a fortune partly created by forced labour.
[...]
One Dawkins family member was a member of the clergy. Many were MPs including two who became prominent opponents of the abolition of slavery, eventually achieved thanks to William Wilberforce, an evangelical Christian.
Professor Dawkins, the atheist evolutionary biologist and author of The Selfish Gene, claimed associating him with his slave-owning ancestors was "a smear tactic".
"One of the most disagreeable verses of the Bible – amid strong competition – says the sins of the father shall be visited on the children until the third or fourth generation," he said.
The family's association with Jamaica began when William Dawkins, a direct ancestor of the former Oxford University professor, arrived on the island. He began relatively humbly, as an overseer, probably supervising slaves, before receiving 1,775 acres of land between 1669 and 1682.
His son Richard became a leading member of Jamaican society, serving as a colonel in the local militia.
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He is now facing calls to apologise and make reparations for his family's past.
Esther Stanford-Xosei, of Lewisham, south London, the co-vice chairman of the Pan-African Reparations Coalition in Europe, said: "There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity.
"The words of the apology need to be backed by action. The most appropriate course would be for the family to fund an educational initiative telling the history of slavery and how it impacts on communities today, in terms of racism and fractured relationships."
The revelations come after a difficult few days for the campaigner.
On Tuesday 14 February, some critics branded him "an embarrassment to atheism" after what many listeners considered a humiliation in a Radio 4 debate with Giles Fraser, formerly Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, in which the professor boasted he could recite the full title of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species", then when challenged, dithered and said: "Oh God."
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Permalink Reply by James Robertson on -
CHRISTMAS BELLS
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Permalink Reply by Dave Gosse on
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A 'pragmatic' Gospel?
A society that persecutes Christ is heading for terrible trouble
Politicians in the West - and atheists - ignore at their peril the benefits and power of organised religion.
7:49PM BST 06 Apr 2012
This week before Easter, I chanced upon the following two quotations. The first says: “Not for 2,000 years has it been possible for society to exclude or eliminate Christ from its social or political life without a terrible social or political consequence.” The second says: “Religion taught by a prophet or by a preacher of the truth is the only foundation on which to build a great and powerful empire.”
The first is by Margaret Thatcher, opening her foreword to a book called Christianity and Conservatism, which appeared in 1990. The second appears in Tom Holland’s outstanding new book In the Shadow of the Sword (Little, Brown), which traces the rise of Islam from the ruins of the Roman and Persian empires. It comes from Ibn Khaldun, the great Muslim historian and political counsellor of the 14th century.
The grocer’s daughter from Grantham and the sage from Tunis seem, despite their differences of faith and time, to be saying something comparable. I found myself asking a simple question about both statements: are they, factually, right?
Note that neither is insisting – though they probably believe that it is – that what the religious leader preaches is necessarily true. Note, too, that neither is saying that a religion, let alone a religious organisation such as a church, should hold political power. But what they are saying is something like the message of the parable of the house built on rock and the house built on sand. They have seen a good bit of how the world works: they recommend building on rock.
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© 2012 Created by Norm Fisher.
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