Religion for atheists

Terry Eagleton reviews Alain de Botton's new book, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion. Some subscribe to the view that religion serves as a tool for maintaining social unity, and therefore serves a practical purpose. Those people include, it seems, the author, who makes a "banal and impudent argument" for its practicality:

God may be dead, but Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn't be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised. De Botton claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion "sporadically useful, interesting and consoling", which makes it sound rather like knocking up a bookcase when you are feeling a bit low. Since Christianity requires one, if need be, to lay down one's life for a stranger, he must have a strange idea of consolation. Like many an atheist, his theology is rather conservative and old-fashioned.

I would defer to the superior wisdom Bertrand Russell here, who, when asked if it is useful in some sense to be a Christian, remarked that there simply cannot be a practical reason for believing what isn't true. "If it is true, you should believe it, and if it isn't, you shouldn't." I understand that de Botton himself is an unbeliever, but his tenuous logic here is so obvious it almost need not be pointed out.

One of the primary cases made for religion appears to be that it provides people with a basis for morality. This is not so. Religion inherits its morality from humans, not the reverse; this is plainly obvious to anyone who understands that we all feel the same innate repulsion in hearing or reading about certain unforgivable crimes, like child abuse. "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him," Voltaire told us. But that's exactly the problem: he's merely an invention. We would do better if we were to emancipate ourselves form the childish view that we need desert tribe ethics to dictate our moral decisions. We're doing fine, thanks.

(Image: A controversial tablet displaying the Ten Commandments, located on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol (behind the capitol building) in Austin, Texas, USA.)