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.

Was kindly invited by my publishers to have dinner with Dallas Willard last night with a few others. Dallas has a new book out called Personal Religion, Public Reality?: Towards a Knowledge of Faith which he talked a little about, leading to a very interesting roundtable discussion about what exactly knowledge was or could be.

The book’s blurb goes something like this:

At a time when many people think that it is irrational to believe in God, renowned philosopher Dallas Willard challenges the idea that spiritual wisdom is somehow distinct from the realm of knowledge.

I’ve not read the book, so don’t want to preempt any of its claims, but one of the issues we touched on in discussion was the link that knowledge has to power, and power has to financial muscle. This took us into the realm of politics: all parties now know that they need financial clout and the support of a powerful media in order to convince the public of their claims to knowledge.

The book blurb goes on:

PERSONAL RELIGION, PUBLIC REALITY? seeks to redress the balance, making a powerful case for the contribution that Christian knowledge can make in the global marketplace of ideas.

What I think is interesting about this is how Christian thought ought to act in this ‘global marketplace of ideas.’ The early church had little financial muscle, and no power at all, and yet made great claims to knowledge. One of my concerns is that when a rich and powerful church moves to disseminate knowledge, it often does so in a way that comes across as neither spiritually wise nor particularly knowledgeable:  ‘Be quiet, Jesus said this, and that’s the end of it.’

What I’d be interested in seeing is a church rooted in poverty and powerlessness – one that had a radical critique of the capitalist mantra of Tesco Ergo Sum – and exploring what ‘public square’ knowledge would look like in that context.

Great story circulating at the moment about one Chris Jarvis ‘the Southend Jedi knight who refused to dehood in his jobcentre and has now received an apology from the manager for the lack of respect given to his “religion or beliefs”.‘

Jarvis says: “I am a Star Wars follower. It means following the Way of the Jedi … The main reason is I want to wear my hood up and I have got a religion which allows me to do that.”

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has got involved too, denying Jedi-ism the status of a religion because it is not ‘heartfelt’ or ‘worthy of respect.’ They state:

A belief need not include faith or worship of a god or gods, but must affect how a person lives their life or perceives the world.

Unfortunately, Facebook appears to be caught by this definition, as it certainly affects how people live their lives, and how we perceive the world. So is that a ‘belief’ that should be given rights? What about being a Man United fan? Should I be able to where a football shirt to work because of my beliefs?

So what exactly is a religion, and to what extent should we extend rights to those whose beliefs are different to ours? If someone truly believes in public animal sacrifice, should we allow it? And if someone really does convince us that they follow the way of the Jedi – even though it was invented by a screen-writer – should we allow them their hoods?

I’ve been at the Re-Emergence conference in Belfast over the past couple of days – it’s been brilliant – and one of the things that has been discussed is the way in which we might best help people to understand changes within the long history of Christian faith. Some friends from the US last night were saying how intolerant so many churches are – burning Bibles that are not of the correct translation and ostracising people who were gay or just ‘different’.

So should we be tolerant of those who want to be Jedis, or mockingly intolerant of their idiocy? There are plenty who consider my faith to be little more than Jedi fiction too, it just happens to be that there are quite a lot of us, and we’ve got some history. So what exactly should constitute a religion that is taken seriously? Does someone have to die first? And does Obi Wan count?

[ Lock In [1] ]  [ Lock In [2] ] [ Lock In [3] ]

Our interaction with technologies does have an effect on our personhood. While we may not be gadgets, our tool-use is actually an important part of our personhood. It is one of the things that makes us human.

The danger that Jaron Lanier identifies in his book is actually one of lock-in: because we are tool-users, any tool manufacturer who writes the code that becomes dominant (iTunes / iPod / HTML / MIDI) is going to exert excessive leverage on us as people, and potentially restrict the human part of tool use: being creative. If Apple make a piano that only plays half the octave, that changes the sort of music we produce.

Lanier notes:

The future of religion will be determined by the quirks of the software that gets locked in during the coming decades, just like the futures of musical notes and personhood.

I think this is really interesting, but Lanier doesn’t actually mine the point he’s beginning. Religion – the bindings that we commit to – is an example of lock-in too. It is a codification of life, a set of boundaries, and as such it must, like all technologies, continue to submit to examination: is this increasing our humanity, our potential as created/creative people?

Take preaching as an example. I’ve heard plenty of people preach about preaching, expound theologically on why preaching is the right thing to do. For me, it’s lock in. It’s a set of railway tracks that most churches simply don’t know how to get away from. One of the things that I remember being told repeatedly in classes for my engineering degree was this:

If the people who built the railroads in the US were really interested in transporting people, they’d now own the airlines. But they don’t.

Why not? Because they got locked in. It became about the vehicle, not the journey. The future of the church, and of religion in general, will be dependent on those who are prepared to see the lock ins, and break out of them. Why? Because that’s where humanity lies: beyond the ripped curtain, past the stone door, outside the Temple courts and into the margins.

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.

Most of the people he seemed to help were suffering depression, or from ME. The film followed him ‘helping’ one woman who had chronic fatigue and ‘couldn’t go on’, though half way through the first attempt she started buttering a bagel, and announced her house-mate was due back any minute. This sent the guy packing quick-sharp: what he is doing is clearly illegal, and this was taken up in the film as the FBI chased him for extradition to Ireland to face charges of assisting a woman in Dublin to commit suicide.

It is possible to see Exoo as a very prolific serial killer akin to Harold Shipman – a British doctor who ended the lives of perhaps 215 people, most of whom were nearing the end of their lives too. Certainly, it seemed he got some sort of thrill out of ‘fulfilling his calling’ – which is precisely how Exoo saw things.

One thing he would do for all his clients (‘because’, as he said many times in almost Pythonesque comic style, ‘you’ve not done this before’) is give them a copy of ‘Life After Life‘ – a video detailing the near-death experiences of a bunch of characters (some of whose stories didn’t quite seem to hold up).

Exoo’s reasoning is that ‘death is a great adventure to a wonderful place’. And this is where things get interesting. Because if, as Christians or otherwise, we really believe in some after-life, then should we be critical of Exoo, or of euthenasia at all? (He claims that Jesus practised some sort of suicide, which Stanley Hauerwas refuted, before being able to come up with any proof text to show God didn’t approve of suicide.)

I was watching the programme with someone I am close to, who trained as a nurse. She mentioned that in practice, in hospices and elsewhere, euthanasia is pretty common.

She then revealed that as she had watched her father lie dying of cancer in the 60′s, his GP had passed her a suitable amount of morphine and told her to ‘stop his pain.’ She thought about it for a very long time, and then did gradually increase his dose to relieve his pain, knowing that this would kill him.

I personally think this was an incredibly brave and humane thing to do. I don’t think it excuses Exoo, or his associate who does the same for a $7000 fee (Exoo takes no money) but I do think if we are to state that we believe in an after life, we need to do so in an active sense, by which I mean making sure that we fully value this life, and don’t simply cheapen it as a blip before the ‘real’ version begins, while permitting people the option to humanely end life at an appropriate moment in a dignified manner.

Reading material for the train/ferry/bus etc. on the way up/down was this month’s Prospect, which contained an article from some old Blairites challenging Brown to move away from top-down centralised governance to a more liberal bottom-up approach:

Labour politicians too often see a social problem—obesity, children at risk on the internet or declining interest in high culture—and make two assumptions: first, that the problem is amenable to a policy solution; and second, that this solution ought to involve the establishment of a council, commission or task force. But many of the issues facing modern society are too complex and too cultural for such a wooden approach.

Coming back I’ve just received an email from an organization struggling from within over whether they should be taking one or the other approach, and many of the discussions we had on Iona related to the same issue.

In other words, the debate continues to rage, and usually follows the same line: those in power want to preserve power structures because, from their perspective, it’s the only way to get things done, while those outside those structures see the world very differently and realise things aren’t working as well as those in power think they are.

I’ve been into this in detail in the book, but, to summarise: power and leadership are about facilitating communication or, in the governance situation, creating environments within which the best possible outcomes for people are likely to emerge. You can’t legislate for decency, but you can create the kinds of frameworks within which people are more likely to be decent to one another.

I think this is the tricky situation which both our Labour government and certain wings of the church find themselves: they feel so threatened by some external power (terrorism / biblical liberalism) that they panic and want to legislate hard in an attempt to protect us. I currently feel that I’d rather enjoy freedom and decent human rights / civil liberties and be blown up a free man, than be safely cocooned in a tight-assed, Orwellian world.

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Thanks so much to Shane and his people for sending me a copy of his new book, written with Chris Haw, Jesus for President. It’s gorgeous to look at and hold, fabulously designed, and perfectly balanced between seriousness and playfulness… starting with the title. Why can’t every Christian book be like this? I just hope people get it, and read it thoroughly as they think about the coming US elections.

Worst case scenario: Shane gets asked to be Obama’s advisor on something. As Campolo is quoted in the book: “Mixing the church and state is like mixing ice cream and cow manure . It may not do much to the manure, but it sure messes up the ice cream.” Stay pure and creamy Shane!

Check http://www.jesusforpresident.org for details / reviews / news.

Technorati: Claiborne | Don Carson | Jesus for President | Politics | Poverty | Power | puppy

There’s also an honest confession from a secular materialist, admitting that, when it comes to love, ‘Chrisitans have all the great tunes’.

Well worth a listen. And if you like what you hear, go buy Pete Rollin’s stuff. He might be Irish, but he’s right there when it comes to interpreting this for our time.

Ch