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Alain de Botton has been enjoying some good media buzz for months now. He courted controversy in arguing for a temple for atheist worship, and now he has written a book in which he advocates that secular people need to adopt some of the practices of religion, albeit without the supersition and supernaturalism, without God. As David Brooks explains in his book review:
De Botton is not calling for a religious revival. He finds it impossible to take faith in God seriously. He assumes that none of his educated readers could possibly believe in spooky ghosts in the sky.
Instead, he is calling on secular institutions to adopt religion’s pedagogy, to mimic the rituals, habits and teaching techniques that churches, mosques and synagogues perfected over centuries. For example, religious people were smart enough to combine spirituality and eating, aware that while dining in a group, people tend to be in a convivial, welcoming mood. De Botton believes that secular people should create communal restaurants that mimic the Passover Seder. Atheists would sit at big, communal tables. They would find guidebooks in front of them, reminiscent of the Jewish Haggadah or the Catholic missal. The rituals of the meal would direct diners to speak with one another, asking questions of their neighbors like “Whom can you not forgive?” or “What do you fear?”
Brooks is on the side of the believers, and he believes that this secular mimickry of religion is too tepid and hollow to give true spiritual food to the earnest seekers of divine transcendence. I do not know if there is a real divine transcendence to be had, but I am inclined to agree with Brooks. One definintely hungers for something beyond this world, if only because we can scarcely tolerate this earthbound existence, and there is this sense that only something outside of this known world can actually heal the pain and make us whole.
(Source: David Brooks, "Without Gods" in The New York Times)
De Botton is not calling for a religious revival. He finds it impossible to take faith in God seriously. He assumes that none of his educated readers could possibly believe in spooky ghosts in the sky.
Instead, he is calling on secular institutions to adopt religion’s pedagogy, to mimic the rituals, habits and teaching techniques that churches, mosques and synagogues perfected over centuries. For example, religious people were smart enough to combine spirituality and eating, aware that while dining in a group, people tend to be in a convivial, welcoming mood. De Botton believes that secular people should create communal restaurants that mimic the Passover Seder. Atheists would sit at big, communal tables. They would find guidebooks in front of them, reminiscent of the Jewish Haggadah or the Catholic missal. The rituals of the meal would direct diners to speak with one another, asking questions of their neighbors like “Whom can you not forgive?” or “What do you fear?”
Brooks is on the side of the believers, and he believes that this secular mimickry of religion is too tepid and hollow to give true spiritual food to the earnest seekers of divine transcendence. I do not know if there is a real divine transcendence to be had, but I am inclined to agree with Brooks. One definintely hungers for something beyond this world, if only because we can scarcely tolerate this earthbound existence, and there is this sense that only something outside of this known world can actually heal the pain and make us whole.
(Source: David Brooks, "Without Gods" in The New York Times)
