How little we see

Dawkins doubts?

Just saw this interesting report from the UK: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9102164/Richard-Dawkins-6.9-out-of-seven-sure-that-God-does-not-exist.html

Of course its no big surprise that Dawkins says he cannot be certain that God does not exist - unless he or someone else has inspected every corner of visible and invisible reality.

Odd isn't it: atheism critiques theism as being dogmatic yet is itself dogmatic about the non-existence of God.

Religion for atheists – 2. Creating community

In Religion for Atheists Alain de Botton has a high ambition. He ... hopes to rescue some of what is beautiful, touching and wise from all that no longer seems true (p19). De Botton acknowledges that religions have bestowed many of these beautiful, touching and wise things on humanity in a way unmatched by the atheism he espouses. And thus his dilemma. He asserts the fundamental falsehood of religion yet wants to preserve and recover its helpful bestowments to help meet the yawning gaps in modern life.

First up he addresses the problem of loneliness and community.

In many ways people are closer than ever before. Many of us live in the near proximity of cities and the almost-daily digital discovery makes it easier to be in touch over the voids of space and time. But here’s the problem: we are closer together and further apart. Who talks to the person they share a bus seat with? Or the person of a different social group whom we see every day? We have become experts in the art of being ‘so near yet so far’ and few of us make friends once over 30 years of age.

De Botton both documents and laments this sad state. He speaks of a past sense of community that is now largely lost n the privatization and stratification of modern life. The pain is eloquently expressed in his words on love. Love is now mono-dimensionally romantic and we have lost … the expansive, universal brotherhood of mankind (p27). But even romantic love is an artefact of the loss of community, for we have  ... a maniacal quest for a single person with whom we hope to achieve a life-long and complete communion, one person in particular who will spare us any need for people in general (p29). How sad. Love has lost its open-hearted inclusiveness of the many and instead becomes a closed-door exclusiveness of the two.

From this perspective, De Botton takes a long look at the Roman Catholic Mass. He admits that it is not ... the ideal habitat for an atheist (p30) yet sees much of value in creating and maintaining a community. He sees value in its mixed composition, the stripping away of the distinctions that divide, the care for the poor and the attack on human pride.

In keeping with his programme of atheistic borrowing, de Botton wants to strip the Mass of its distinctly religious elements. He identifies its heart in such things as a discrete venue, rules to shape constructive human interactions and its origins in a love meal of the Christian community. By contrast much modern dining keeps people separated from outsiders to their group and does not foster meaningful contact between fellow-diners.

Next comes the atheistic reconstruction of the Mass in the form of an Agape Restaurant followed by a godless Day of Atonement and Feast of Fools.

Let’s look at the Agape Restaurant. Diners will enter an open door, pay a modest entrance fee, be scattered over tables of mixed composition and have conversation on prescribed topics according to a schedule laid out like a Catholic missal or a Jewish Haggadah. De Botton acknowledges that this will seem awkward at first, but expects it will be a learned behaviour in which our fear of strangers recedes and we humanize one another. As he remarks: Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and odd benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity (p43).

All this sounds wonderful and is an earthly echo of the Christian metaphor for heaven as being like a vast wedding dinner. But where is the centre of the secular love feast and what lifts eyes upwards to a higher aspiration in order that we may then look downward on one another with warmth?

The Roman Catholic Mass is derived from the Jewish Passover meal that Jesus celebrated with his followers and also turned into what we know as the last supper (Matt 26:26-29). It in turn became the eucharist, holy communion and the mass in later Christian tradition. This meal has a backward focus as Christians remember the great work of God to save his people through the death of Jesus. It also has a forward focus, for as Jesus himself said, he would not drink the fruit of the vine with his followers until he does so in his Father’s kingdom.

All this gives the Christian meal an upward lift and a transcendent centre. All who gather at the table are united in their sense of needing divine forgiveness, recognising their ability for self-help and in saying to their God ‘you must save and you alone’. Those who participate indeed participate in the one supper, eating from the one loaf and drinking from the one cup (1 Cor 10:16-17). In doing so they participate in the crucified and raised body of Christ and are the one body his church.

All this gives a strong point of unity at God’s love feast – strong enough to cross the human divides and create a remarkable community.  It’s hard to see how all this happens in De Botton’s secular Agape Restaurant. Where is its centre and what is the point of community?

The Christian feast can create community because it is based on a Day of Atonement grounded in the historical acts of God to save through the Old Testament sacrifices and the New Testament sacrifice of Jesus. He is the one whose blood is the grace-given propitiation for sin that brings redemption. Against that De Botton’s secular and quarterly day of atonement seems just so much wishful thinking and his Feast of Fools empty escapism. The real human loneliness is loneliness with God and because of that we face loneliness with one another. Real community starts with connection to God through his Day of Atonement in Jesus and that alone creates lasting communion with one another that will be celebrated in heaven’s feast of faith.

This post is a response to chapter two of Religion for Atheists by Alain De Botton (Hamish Hamilton, 2012).

Religion for Atheists – 1

When I was a child I behaved in childish ways. My mother baked wonderful cakes and the house filled with their smell. However, my interest was all in the sweet seductiveness of the icing bowl. As my mother prepared the icing, I would linger in the hope of a spoonful or at least to lick the bowl when it was done. Sometimes mother indulged me, but generally she made me wait until the icing was on the cake.

That’s wisdom: no icing without the cake.

All that is by way of introduction to Religion for Atheists by Alain De Botton (Hamish Hamilton, 2012).

I have read several of De Botton’s books and find him a rarity among modern philosophers. He writes in an easily accessible form and with a great concern for practical life applications. His work is enjoyable and stimulating and I find it thought provoking and instructive.

De Botton speaks of being raised in a secular Jewish household where any form of religious belief was a decided ‘no no’. However, he found his faithlessness challenged by encounters with Christian and Buddhist inspired art forms. What was going on there?

In this book De Botton joins the new atheist debate but insists that writers such as Dawkins and Hitchens have it wrong. De Botton takes it as a given that ... of course no religions are true in any God-given sense (p11). Presumably the pun was intended. His concern is with what happens next. What does life look like once God is removed?

This is where the icing and the cake come in and the book gets interesting.

The basic argument of the book is stated in chapter one whose title indicates the agenda: Wisdom without doctrine. I think that the argument can be summarised in four steps:

1.     The truth claims of religions concerning God are false.

2.     However, religions help meet important human needs by providing valued things such as a sense of community and a means to cope with pain.

3.     Secular society is impoverished and incomplete by discarding these useful aspects of religions, along with their supporting dogmas.

4.     The challenge for atheists is to re-appropriate these good things that religions had once colonised and baptised from earlier non-religious sources.

The rest of the book takes up this agenda and will be commented in later blogs in this series. In overview: De Botton notes a contemporary problem, notes how religion has addressed it, removes the religious dogma and identifies the helpful features, and, finally, proposes an alternative that expresses the helpful feature in secular dress. It is an interesting read to see how he does this chapter by chapter.

All this reads like trying to have the icing without the cake. Some words from the end of chapter one illustrate the problem:

… religions merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition; for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have. They have managed to combine theories about ethics and metaphysics with a practical involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, hospitality, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture – a range of interests which puts to shame the scope of the greatest and most secular movements and individuals in history. For those interested in the spread and impact of ideas, it is hard not to be mesmerized by examples of the most successful educational and intellectual movements the planet has ever witnesses. (p18)

This is a significant admission in its recognition of how the ideas of religions have impacted the whole of life in the most practical and applied manner. But still he wants to strip the ideas away and just have their good effects. Can we not see how the effects are the fruit and the ideas the root? Take away the ideas and there is no fruit.

The icing needs the cake.

More on the idea of an atheist temple

Today's paper carries this piece: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/atheist-temple-an-aberration-not-divine-inspiration-20120203-1qxfa.html

Despite the efforts and premature obituaries of some, religion remains alive and well. Be it from the cultured despisrrs of religion in the west, or totalitarianisms of the left or right, religious belief and practice refuses to disappear.

Could it be that eternity really is in the heart of humanity and that we really are hard-wired to worship?

This is not the same as saying that all religions are the same (most certainly not). However, it is an assertion of the essentially spiritual nature of humanity and the universe.

One shudders at a temple of atheism that celebrates reason alone and worships humanity. There are too many examples of the horrors that soon follow. For example attempt to eliminate the old, the ill, the disabled and the different on grounds of cost-based economics or a chilling Darwinean attempt to enhance the human gene pool.