Meet the Author
Alain de Botton is the founder and chairman of the School of Life and creative director of Living Architecture. He is the author of numerous essays on a variety of topics as well as multiple best-selling books, including The Architecture of Happiness (2006) and How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997). (I recently blogged about his TED talk on Atheism 2.0, which focuses on the theme of his latest book: Religion for Atheists.)
Book Basics
Alaine de Botton’s latest book could have been titled Learning from Religion: How Atheists and Agnostics Can Incorporate the Best Practices of Religion in a Secular Society. Rather than suggesting that non-religious people become religious, de Botton proposes that such persons adopt a pragmatic approach to living life well that includes incorporating enriching components that have typically been restricted to the religious. To ensure the wisdom is well suited for secular living, he strips away the supernatural and removes the overtly religious.
de Botton attempts to “read the faiths, primarily Christianity and to a lesser extent Judaism and Buddhism, in the hope of gleaning insights that might be of use within secular life” in support of his “underlying thesis” that while secularism is the ideal path “we have too often secularized badly” (p.17). He provides chapter length explorations of nine areas for consideration: community, kindness, education, tenderness, pessimism, perspective, art, architecture, and institutions. While the development of the topics is uneven (education receives the greatest attention) and the proposals for implementation are idealistic, the work succeeds in providing a better way forward for the non-religious and insight for religious about what one non-religious person finds valuable within the religious domain.
So What?
Here is one example from the chapter on community
- Secular Problem: In modern cities “we tend to be imprisoned within tribal ghettos based on education, class and profession and may come to view the rest of humanity as an enemy rather than as a sympathetic collection we would aspire to join” (p.23).
- Religious Norm: Religions, especially in their worship gatherings, bring together a variety of demographic groups and encourage inter-group socialization.
- Secular Possibility: Establish secular Agape Restaurants based on the ideas of the ancient Christian agape feasts. Diners would be seated with those they would otherwise not encounter directly in daily life and be provided a guidebook to assist in directing their conversation.
Questions to consider:
- What is your initial response to the idea of a new form of non-belief that borrows liberally from religion to create/recreate a better secular world?
- Do you believe that the borrowed practices and principles would prove effective when stripped of their religious context? Why or why not?
Alain de Botton. Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion (Pantheon Books, 2012). ISBN: 9780307379108.