When I was about 1/3 as old as I am now, I’d play a counterfactual game: “What religion, if any, would you practice if you lacked any Christian convictions?”

It’s a hard game to play, because, as I said, it’s counterfactual. You’re trying to inhabit an imaginative universe you’ve barely glimpsed and certainly have never before inhabited (okay: there are occasional religious “reverts” as well as “converts;” I’m setting that possibility aside).

Since I was a conscientious objector, and it was the Vietnam era, and I liked Diamond Girl, my answer was “probably Bahai.” (That’s easier to say in America than in Iran.)

Some Christians tacitly answer “If I wasn’t a Christian, I’d be an atheist, which means I’d be doing all the dirty things I’d really love to do were I not terrified of God.” Thus do lots of terrified fundamentalist boys, under the influence of testosterone, become AUG (Atheist Until Graduation). Sin in haste, repent at leisure. Thus, too, do lots of Christians assume that atheists are immoral. It’s a kind of projection.

But you can’t dance to atheism. Humanity will keep popping up its head however mightily one strives to reduce humans to a chemistry set or a series of ones and zeros. Athesists must slip in myth and metaphor to even be able to say much, I’m told:

[A]theism can be just as theologically incorrect: today’s paper told me that: “our bodies are built and controlled by far fewer genes than scientists had expected“. The metaphors of “building” and “controlling” have here taken a concrete form that makes them palpably untrue. Genes don’t do either thing. It seems to me that a belief in tiny invisible all-controlling entities is precisely a belief in the supernatural, yet that is the form in which entirely naturalistic genetics is widely understood in our culture.

…

If I’m right, then liberal, individualistic atheism is impossible as an organising principle of society because any doctrine that actually works to hold society together is indistinguishable from a religion. It needs its rituals and it needs its myths. A philosophy will grow around it in due course. Now perhaps you can have, at least on a small scale, a society committed to the principles of rational and tolerant disagreement and the sovereignty of reason. But what you end up with then isn’t some rational Athens of the mind. It’s Glastonbury.

(Andrew Brown, You Can’t Dance to Atheism – Second hyperlink added)

Alain de Botton, a Swiss-born “cradle atheist,” had a crisis of disbelief in his twenties, and has since gone out to appropriate rituals and myths to begin a secular religion of sorts, in Brown’s terms, though de Botton would not call it that:

Ms. Tippett: Right. And then you’ve written that in your mid-20s, you had what you called a crisis of faithlessness [laugh]. Tell me about that.

Mr. de Botton: Well, as I say, I grew up with this idea that religion was not only wrong, but also stupid, silly, ridiculous, something for other people. Then as I left home and started making my way in the world, I started discovering — and this was slightly a worrying discovery — that there were lots of things tangentially associated with religion that were quite nice. I rather liked religious architecture, something very beautiful about religious music. Many great works of art were religious in tone and yet that didn’t seem to stop me getting a lot from them. So that’s where my, as I say, crisis of faithlessness came about. I began to realize that religion, for all its flaws and for all its faults and all its excesses, had some high points that were incredibly interesting, fascinating, beautiful, inspiring. It took me a while to square this with, you know, my atheism, the fact that I’m not a believer.

Ms. Tippett: So the very first line of Religion for Atheists, I think is a really important framing statement and an unusual statement in the West, even though it’s very simple that “the most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.”

Mr. de Botton: That’s right, you see, because it seems to me that most debates on religion currently center around the existence or nonexistence of God, and I’ve sat in on many of these debates. They are, frankly, boring not because they’re not touching on a very important issue. It is important. They’re boring because no one ever makes any headway because, you know, the atheists look at the religious and think that they’re stupid and the religious look at the atheist and think they’re damned and both sides are fiercely entrenched ….

(A School of Life for Atheists, On Being podcast for 9/6/12, from American Public Media)

The more interesting question for de Botton is what from religion is worth a disbeliever appropriating. First, the host(ess) sets the stage a bit:

Ms. Tippett: The idea that we are rational creatures or could become rational creatures living in a rationally run world was really a fundamental assumption that emerged in — well, certainly in the course of the 20th century. A lot of evidence to the contrary, but, you know, those of us I think who grew up in the latter part of the 20th century, there was this aspiration. I mean, that is kind of a bedrock of secular society as we inherited it.

Mr. de Botton:Yes, and I think along with that, what’s wrong with that? I think it’s simply too mature. It’s too reasonable. You know, we’re all a little bit crazier than that. I think it’s kind of cruel to deny this aspect. You find this a lot in education. You know, the modern secular education system is based on the idea that life is essentially a kind of fairly easy process to get through, so you need to teach people certain skills for the modern economy like accountancy and microbiology and all this sort of stuff. But what you don’t need to teach them is how to live because how to live is fairly obvious. All you need to do is, you know, separate yourself from your parents and bring up some children maybe and find a job you like, deal with mortality …

Ms. Tippett: All those really easy things [laugh].

Mr. de Botton: All those really easy things, and then confront your own death and it’s just really simple. You don’t need guidance.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. de Botton: So you’re supposed to know this stuff and my question is, how? I don’t know this stuff. And the fascinating starting point of religions, all religions, is they start from the idea that we don’t know how to live and so that’s why they need to teach us wisdom.

…

Mr. de Botton: … There’s a paradox that often people who don’t particularly believe will sometimes be drawn to ideas or emotions or activities and then they might say, oh, that seems a bit too religious and they might draw back from it. Particularly, for example, the teaching of ethics or a moral code or even certain kinds of ritual. These things can seem to people who don’t believe a little bit too religious. And then what’s fascinating is, if you look at the history of religions, religions, of course, hover up. They suck in all kinds of concepts and ideas …

Ms. Tippett: From the culture around them.

Mr. de Botton: That’s right, from the culture around them, and religions have always done this. And so I suppose what I’m arguing for is a kind of reverse colonization ….

One of de Botton’s concerns is that if you’re not intentional about what you appropriate, you’ll appropriated something toxic:

Mr. de Botton: … [W]hat religions do which is rather interesting is they recognize that we need to have constant public reminders of all this stuff about being good and kind that all of us probably sign up to in theory, but forget about in practice. This is a real contrast to the secular world, which basically says public space must be neutral and there must be no messages reaching people because that might be an infringement of freedom, to which I say, OK, that’s all very well, but the point is, firstly, public space is not neutral because it’s dominated …

Ms. Tippett: There are all kinds of messages reaching us all the time.

Mr. de Botton: Right, most of which are commercial messages. So, you know, we don’t live in the kind of completely neutral public space that’s often fantasized about by secular defenders of a kind of neutral liberalism. We are actually assaulted by commercial messages. So religions want to assault us with other messages, messages to be kind and to be good and to forgive and all these things, and they know that having a feeling of being observed, having a public space that is colored by moral atmosphere, all of this can help. I don’t know. This intrigues and attracts me.

So de Botton, a bit of a prodigy, decided to set up a school of life for atheists:

Ms. Tippett: So, interestingly, you have created an organization, a community, I think you would say, this School of Life?

Mr. de Botton: That’s right.

Ms. Tippett: Right. Where you are actually putting some of this into effect. I don’t know that much about how it works. I mean, I’ve looked at the website, so I’d like to hear about what happens there. Who comes and how does it function?

Mr. de Botton: Well, this thing called The School of Life does pick up on a number of ideas that I had. First of all, it picks up on the idea that we need guidance, that learning how to live is not something we just do spontaneously. Where do we turn to? There are actually surprisingly not that many places. So the idea came to me to start an institution. It’s very little, but it’s having some strangely big impact even though it’s quite tiny.

They even sing some Christian hymns and listen to secular sermons.

Ms. Tippett: So I remember a conversation I had years ago with a — an amazing — one of the greatest 20th-century religious historians, Yaroslav Pelikan at Yale. In his 80s, he completed his last project, which was a survey of Christian creeds across time, across the world. He believed very strongly — I’ll just say it, you know, the way he — the blunt way he said was that the only alternative to tradition is bad tradition. And he pointed out that when people reject the creeds, but want to believe something and do believe something, that they still end up then ultimately creating new creeds and that’s always something that’s going to happen. I mean, do you think about this? If you had The School of Life long enough, would you eventually end up with something like doctrines and creeds?

Mr. de Botton: Look, I think doctrines are evolving all the time. We almost don’t see it, but these things are changing and being enriched. Yeah, they’re subject to evolution and I do believe that the Earth is still young. Humanity is still very, very young. We sort of think sometimes, oh, we’ve been around for ages, we’ve tried everything, we’re at the end of time. No, we’re still very much at the beginning. We’re still working out how to live. We’ve only taken our first steps almost. I think we’re at a particular point in history where we can see that a lot more is going to come in the future. I fervently believe that, in the next 100, 200 years, we will start to evolve ways of living a life where we don’t believe, a nonbelieving life that is much more sophisticated than the nonbelieving life we currently have on offer at the moment. At the moment, we’re offering people either the choice of, look, either you sign up to one of these religions with all their doctrines and all their sometimes rather arduous demands on us or you’re outside, you know, and outside is really outside. It takes something like dying and marrying. In a secular world, we’re having great difficulty knowing how to be married and how to die outside of religions. When people get married or die, they overwhelmingly flock back to religion because these religions know how to do it.

I have by no means exhausted all the intriguing insights, twists and turns in the program, which I commend to you – or the transcript, if you prefer. The juxtaposition of encountering that podcast roughly an hour after the “You can’t dance to atheism” blog was just too, er, providential to pass up.

So what do I make of all this? A numbered list would suggest that I’m a far “quicker study” than I really am, so I’ll use bullet points.

• That mankind, even rejecting any idea of God, is not as bad as he could possibly be. That misunderstanding of “total depravity” can only survive with blinders on.
• That perhaps Mr. de Botton, without naming it, has stumbled upon The Tragedy of Dogma, though he seems to think dogma more boring than tragic – which, in a sense, it is. The fence is more boring than the vast pasture. Falling over the precipice beyond the fence is tragic.
• That Mr. de Botton’s experiment, if he sticks to it, is likely to lead him to unexpected and unintended places (as he seems to glimpse). Maybe it will lead him around to that boring question about whether his ersatz rituals teach Something True. It ought at least to lead him (and may already have led him to something that I’m too insensible to see or hear in the program) to an appreciation that man is homo adorans. (Lex orandi, lex credendi)
• That Mr. de Botton’ experience of religion is colored by Western moralistic therapeutic deism. The idea that “Christ didn’t come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live” appears to be lost on him (but perhaps his appreciation is capacious enough to take that into account as “community building” or something).
• That Evangelicalism, consciously rejecting Christian tradition, is at great risk of picking up commercialism and and other “bad traditions” by osmosis.
• That Episcopalianism (strayed almost all the way to rock bottom doctrinally and in terms of upholding universal Christian morality) and even Unitarian Universalism, become a bit more understandable as communal expressions of homo adorans. They’re just not too sure who or what to adore.
• I’m glad de Botton is syncretistically “colonizing” religion, but syncretism should be a one-way street. Orthodox Christianity has nothing to learn appropriate from atheism – either the philosophical kind or the consumerist crypto-atheist kind. Because you can’t dance to it, and if some day you’ll be able to, it will be because of its immigrant ideas, not it’s native stock.

* * * * *

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.