I’ve not yet read the full book that Alain de Botton has been promoting recently, but I’ve read a number of interviews and heard him speak, and browsed his website: religionforatheists.com and I wanted to post a couple of first-thoughts about his thesis.

Firstly, he’s being unashamed to say that he is ‘picking and mixing’ from different religions. As he puts here, ‘even if religion isn’t true, can’t we enjoy the best bits?’

It seems that there is a twin move here. Atheists like de Botton are moving towards religion, to try to colonise the secular space which still values ritual, and many religious people are moving towards an atheist reading of their faith… both agree that ‘God is dead’… but what to do with the carcass?

It seems to me that de Botton and others want to pick over the beautiful, to grab rituals and art and the ‘awe-some.’ One of de Botton’s earlier books, which I like a lot, is The Consolations of Philosophy, and I wonder now if this is simply an upgrade: religion as no more than consolation. We feel lonely, we suffer, we don’t earn enough…so here’s a smash and grab on some religious ideas that seem to have helped console people in the past.

I don’t think this is enough. I think religion as consolation is little more than religion as emotional crutch. It’s low challenge, middle-class angst with stained glass windows, and intellectually and psychologically impoverished.

The religious who are turning to an atheist reading of their faith are doing something different. God is dead, but that means that we have to take up the challenges of that absence… and that’s perhaps a more demanding road. I can’t speak from anything more than a Christian perspective on this, but it seems to me that this is not so much gaining ‘ahhh’ moments from beautiful buildings, but taking a long hard look at the scorched earth once those buildings have been torched, and wondering what is left.

Because an atheist reading of Christianity is not about polite rituals and ‘big society’ moments of collective goo. It is not about human beings rejecting God and becoming atheists. It is about God rejecting God and becoming an atheist himself. The core of Christianity is as radical as that. Jesus beat de Botton to ‘religion for atheists’ by about 2000 years; the problem is, the path he set out was so challenging that it has been almost totally rejected. Why? Because the move from religion to an atheist reading of religion is not about experiencing the sacred in the remains of religious beauty, but about experiencing the abandonment and desolation, the responsibility to the rest of humanity, when we realise the sacred is not found in the stain glass, but in the slum outside the church.

God’s life created fissures within society between the believers and unbelievers. It seems God’s death will be no less divisive… but this time I wonder if the polite ‘crutch’ accusation will be made the other way.

Great piece in The Guardian today about trying to get God out of a funeral… and finding that ‘He’ (sic) turns up nonetheless.

She may not have wanted Him at her funeral, but she needed Him. My sister, born in England in 1949, a singer of hymns in her primary school, grew up with Him. She knew that He elevates. God is the man for the big occasion…We are not a religiously observant nation – except when it really counts.

It made me wonder (very quickly) about the place we leave for ‘God’ and whether the following was too broad a generalisation: ‘higher’ churches have emphasised God in the grand and the luminous, while ‘lower’ churches have tended to preach about God in the mundane – the everyday boring stuff of our lives some way below the great rites of passage.

In other words, in its attempt to be ‘relevant’ evangelicalism has reduced God to tinkering with the small things: whether I find a parking space, or what a particular verse might mean. In talking of a personal relationship with God it has become all cuddly, and in doing so it has abandoned something more serious.

Whilst doing some sessions at St John’s College in Durham recently, the question of what community is was raised. There’s a whole lot of talk about ‘living in community’ and ‘faith communities’ and going out to plant ‘missional communities’ – but whilst a lot is written about what faith and mission may be, there seems to be a tacit understanding of community, and the word is often used without much thought – something I’ll admit I’m guilty of too.

Community is, at its most basic, people sharing something in common. This ‘life together’ might be geographical – sharing the same place – or tied to some other interest, like a local club or society. The strength of community is proportional to the importance of the thing held in common.

Christian community is, however, called to be something different. Where community draws people into commonality around a shared place or interest, Christianity draws people around…an absence. At the centre is an ascended, transformed, disappeared figure.

Let’s be clear about this: as Christians we do not gather around Christ. Though we may metaphorically talk about Christ being present with us, this is not physically true. Remember: it could have been. Jesus appeaered in flesh and blood after the resurrection, and shared life with his followers for a short period of time. There is no reason why this could not have continued, but it didn’t: Jesus left.

The Zizekian understanding of this – which I think fails to deal with the post-resurrection appearances properly – is that on the cross God really did die: we are left to take responsibility for our actions in the absence of a Big Other, and this draws us into community.

I’d want to modify that in the light of the resurrection: God has not died, but has chosen to be paradoxically present-absent, and thus chosen to leave us to gather around an absence. Why? Because it is only by gathering around absence that we begin to care for the other.

Communities that form around a present commons tend to work to protect and enclose that commons. This is the history of priestly religion: we gather in the holy temple because this is where our special common grail is. What is distinctive about Christian community is that it gathers around this paradoxically present absence. The resurrection thus entitles us to hope, to faith in the Big Other, but denies us the opportunity to collapse this into an enclosed religion that simply serves those on the inside. It is the absence – the divine ‘black hole’ as it were – that creates the gravity around which we gather, but with nothing at the centre we cannot enclose it, and are thus urged on by the present/absent spirit of Christ to serving those who are other.

To be honest, I think this is something that has been very rarely modelled as it is too challenging. It requires us to be the true atheists – to live as if there were no God – and thus to be the god that the other requires.

How does one begin to unpack this? First of all, this is a serious organisation. They really believe that:

a) the Rapture will mean that Christians (well, the good sort, anyway) will be rushed away to paradise, where there will be a sign saying ‘no dogs.’ Presumably guide dogs won’t be an exception.

b) this Rapture will leave behind a world in complete turmoil, but one with intact communications systems that will allow the left-behind atheists to roll-out their programme of finding, rescueing and looking after the pets left behind by the thoughtless Christians who’ve just gone on permanent vacation.

To be honest, I’d be more interested in ‘After The Rapture: Who’s Looking After Your Ferrari’, and I’m sure some unscrupulous atheists are already eyeing an quick rapture to bag the great-looking non-believing partner of their Christian friends…

Yes, it is easy to mock. And I could go on doing so for hours. But actually there are some interesting questions around this. What sort of religious mindset believes that this is a good eschatology? The service is based on soothing the worries of Christians who might find themselves anxious about their pets when in heaven. If they were anxious, it is surely not a perfect place. And if it takes a group of atheists to perfect The Heaven Experience™ by looking after their pets, we have some serious conflicts of interest.

But, more worryingly, what sort of culture have we created where some people seem more concerned with the welfare of their pets in the case of a rapture than they are with the fate of the billion people in the world today who will go without clean drinking water?

In 2007, Americans spent some $41 billion on their pets, and Brits around $480 million. Is this a wise use of money? If people are serious about rapture, should they not be trying to convert people, rather than leave them uncoverted in order to work some kind of salvation for their dog? (Or rabbit, to be fair. Couldn’t write a post like this without flagging up the classic book written by a friend-not-to-be-named’s mum ‘Will My Rabbit Go To Heaven‘)

But the final question I’m left with is this: if the rapture leaves all the pets behind, I’m guessing the ‘grand banquet’ isn’t going to be me feasting on lobster and steak. Damn it, I might have to stay down here for the chaos and bag me a Ferrari…

The people who brought you the ‘there’s probably no God, so just relax and get on with life’ have created a new campaign aimed at parents. They want to encourage parents to give their children freedom of choice. The campaign urges parents not to label children with their beliefs.

The key problem here is, of course, that it’s simply biased. Humanist parents are going to try to encourage their children to see the world in the ‘right’ way that they see it, just as religious parents are too.

But beyond that, I also believe it’s a highly irresponsible model of parenting that they are suggesting. Parents do not and should not see their children as blank canvases that they should not make any mark on. If they did there would be no education. It is the responsibility of every parent – and every society – to do its best to pass on the history and story of the family or culture they have come from – as long as this is then followed by an invitation to freedom beyond it.

In fact, this invitation to freedom has long been a part of religious and cultural traditions. The Amish’s rumspringa is a time when their young people are required to leave the community. It is if they choose to come back that they become full members. We have traditionally sent children ‘up’ to university – the language is important because it suggests the time on the mountain where we think about the ministry we are going to have when we ‘come down.’

Humanist, Christian, Muslim parents all have this equal challenge: to bring children up who are informed but free. Labels are not helpful; boundaries and a secure sense of self and history are.

Interesting article from last year by Alain de Botton on the possibility of a ‘Religion for Atheists.’ De Botton is clear:

‘by getting rid of God, one would also be dispensing with a whole raft of very useful, if often peculiar and sometimes retrograde, notions that had held societies together since the beginning of time.’

So if God was got rid of, what sort of atheist religion could take its place? Interestingly, the problem he identifies is the lack of transcendence that our pretty much atheist society has:

We are the only society in history to have nothing transcendent at our centre, nothing which is greater than ourselves. In so far as we feel awe, we do so in relation to supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its denizens the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be inconsequent next to the spectacle of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left to wrestle with feelings of envy, anxiety and arrogance that follow from having no more compelling repository of our veneration than our brilliant and morally troubling fellow human beings…

He goes on to argue that this transcendence would be restored ‘through works of art, landscape gardening and architecture.’

Imagine a network of secular churches, vast high spaces in which to escape from the hubbub of modern society and in which to focus on all that is beyond us…

What is beyond, he argues, is the universe, is the sky and stars that make us feel so small. The piece actually made me feel rather sad, as if a lament for this God who has died – a longing to have something that replaced him, without actually wanting Him back. I wonder if other atheists agree, or if there are more who are more ‘low church’ about their unbelief, more materialist and earthy?

If, even in unbelief, we still long for transcendence, what are we transcending into? Transcending the self we have community, transcending that, humanity, and transcending that… our selfish genes? Gaia? It seems that at each level there is a natural drive to seek ‘the other’ beyond. And without that, as de Botton rightly notes, we get rather stuck in mundanity.

An interesting thread developing on Twitter with philosophybites – Nigel Warburton under the covers – around ideas of atheism and agnosticism. It’s building towards a telephone discussion on BBC Radio Five Live tonight from 1am (one for the podcast) about whether we should all just say we’re agnostics.

Nigel notes today that there is ‘no problem being an atheist who recognizes limits to human knowledge.‘ And that ‘we should still go for the best explanation available.‘

I think there is possibly a contradiction here. If we are prepared to accept that there are limits to human knowledge – and I think it’s pretty well established that we should – then to decide upon either decision beyond that has, by definition, to be a matter of faith.

If we are going for the ‘best explanation available’ then that is evidence that is part of the canon of human knowledge. The trouble is, it is the stuff beyond the possibility explanation that is under negotiation. This is not to go for a ‘God of the gaps’ position, but to appreciate that both science and religion have had to come to tough conclusions that there are things that we simply cannot know. Hypothesise, yes. But know – no.

Which I think then leaves us with atheism as an untenable position. As untenable as faith. We cannot hold these positions in our hands. They are un-tenable, irrational. We have to sense them, be tantalised by them, pick up sugggestions of them. But let’s not fool ourselves – atheists or people of faith, that we can unproblematically decide and then damn the rest.

[Image 'White Awaken From the Unknowing'  Afrocityblog]

Spotted at my local bookshop. Someone’s been hard at work. One would have thought that a single disproof would suffice for the average rationalist. But here we have six. All improved too! Got to love fundamentalists, haven’t you?