Religion for Everyone
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from Alain de Botton’s upcoming book “Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion.” If this snippet is representative of the whole it should be an interesting read, particularly for those of us who are not atheists.
Botton recognizes the valuable contribution of religion to society and even acknowledges that secular attempts to replace it have fallen far short—all the while heading down a dead end in an attempt at such a replacement. Seeing the good that comes from some of the trappings of faith—such as a real sense of community and the breaking down of economic and racial divisions—he nevertheless makes the classic atheist mistake of confusing causation and correlation. The societal benefit of “religion” isn’t a result of shared ritual, important and valuable though that may be. It comes from the underlying acknowledgment of a power greater than we, to which we are commonly accountable and without which the ritual is meaningless.
Sadly, he misses the reason secular humanism has failed to replace faith. You can’t replace a personal relationship with God by community meals or any other human construct. The purpose of the Eucharist and Passover is not to create a sense of community, but to remind each of us what God has done for us. Botton’s “Agape Restaurant” tries to reproduce a side effect of the ritual while removing its very core ingredient. Without that direct connection the ritual he so admires is merely a sort of collective psychological masturbation. There may be some pleasure in it, but its benefit is entirely transitory and fleeting. It can never be a substitute for the real thing.