In good faith

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God is dead,but the human problems that He was invented to palliate live on — the pain of loss,the ubiquity of violence,the hopelessness of adversity. Philosophically,there are the anxieties of being a moral creature in an amoral creation,of forging a purpose for human life in an uncaring universe.

So are atheists wasting their time trashing faith when they should mine religions for strategies tested by millennia,and import them into the secular realm? That is the fundamental question posed by Alain de Botton,the Swiss-British author and TV personality who earns praise and blame even-handedly for making philosophy and high culture more accessible to laypersons.

In Religion for Atheists,Botton’s thesis is persuasive.

Religion organised society and supported ethics with some success but we regard modern civilisation as a product of the death of faith. Religion incubated the sciences which killed its gods because the priesthood found time,after reflection and ritual,to investigate the phenomenal world.

It is intellectually painful to watch skeptics blazing away at faith,which has never claimed to be rational,with weapons-grade rationality. On the contrary,faith places the irrational over reason and prizes it as revelation. This irrationally enrages rationalists and makes them vicious.

However,in a book which hopes to make atheists a little less antagonistic to religion,one would have expected to find mention of religious institutions that atheists hate the most,and very reasonably so. But words like ‘Inquisition’,‘heresy’ and ‘fatwa’ have not found utterance here. By eliding them,the book ignores the principal reason for the retreat of religion — normative,didactic,one size fits all theology doesn’t sit easily with the new gods of individualism and free choice.

Even laymen will find a few errors of judgement here and there. For instance,the Christian Trinity and the Buddhist Eightfold Path are spoken of in the same breath,though they are as different as chalk and cheese. The former is a Catholic dogma derived from a global pagan obsession with the number three,presumably incorporated to make conversion easier. In fact,the Church jumped through intellectual hoops because it only had a Father and a Son. One plus one is not three,so a Holy Ghost had to be,er,incorporated to make it all add up.

On the contrary,the Eightfold Path is an ethical cheat sheet for the journey through a secular life. It is post-religious — the original flavour of Buddhism was atheistic. The Buddha did not need God to order his world any more than Laplace needed Him to keep Jupiter and Saturn in their orbits.

However,perhaps I am pursuing reason as unreasonably as the dastardly atheists,expecting order from a discursive,exploratory book. Its reportage on complex philosophical issues in everyday life is lucid and illuminating. As a theorist,Botton wanders into delightfully speculatively realms,such as museum design conceived as the child of religious architecture. And his basic thesis remains true: religion has much to offer secular life. For instance,in the cacophonic echo chamber of the information society,it’s easy to understand why monasteries were made. And to wonder if we should not build some more,before we all go shrieking mad.

pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com