Read Online Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Alain de Botton
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of such notions, whole subject areas which had never before been included in formal education began to enter the curricula of universities in Europe and the United States.Literature, previously dismissed as being worthy of study only by adolescent girls and convalescents, was recognized as a serious subject fit for analysis within Western universities during the second half of the nineteenth century. The newfound prestige of novels and poems was based on the realization that these forms, much like theGospels, could deliver complex moral messages embedded within emotionally charged narratives, and thereby prompt affective identification and self-examination. In his inaugural lecture at Oxford University in 1922,George Gordon, Merton Professor of Literature, emphasized the scale of the task that had fallen to his field: âEngland is sick, and â¦Â English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature now has a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.â
4.
Claims that culture could stand in for scripture â that
Middlemarch
could take up the responsibilities previously handled by thePsalms, or the essays of Schopenhauer satisfy needs once catered for bySt Augustineâs
City of God â
still have a way of sounding eccentric or insane in their combination of impiety and ambition.
Nevertheless, perhaps the proposition is not so much absurd as it is unfamiliar. The very qualities that the religious locate in their holy texts can often just as well be discovered in works of culture. Novels and historical narratives can adeptly impart moral instruction and edification. Great paintings do make suggestions about our requirements for happiness. Philosophy can usefully address our anxieties and offer consolations. Literature can change our lives. Equivalents to the ethical lessons of religion do lie scattered across the cultural canon.
Why, then, does the notion of replacing religion with culture, of living according to the lessons of literature and art as believers will according to the lessons of faith, continue to sound so peculiar to us? Why are atheists not able to draw on culture with the same spontaneity and rigour which the religious apply to their holy texts?
This acknowledgement of our inhibitions brings us back to the influence of that foremost upholder and propagator of culture in the modern world, the university. The methodologies which universities today employ in disseminating culture are fundamentally at odds with the intense, neo-religious ambitions once harboured by lapsed or sceptical Christians such as Arnold and Mill. While universities have achieved unparalleled expertise in imparting factual information about culture, they remain wholly uninterested in training students to use it as a repertoire of wisdom â this latter term referring to a kind of knowledge concerned with things which are not only true but also inwardly beneficial, a knowledge which can prove of solace to us when confronted by the infinite challenges of existence, from a tyrannical employer to a fatal lesion on our liver.
A student of medieval literature, Oxford University. ( illustration credit 4.4 )
We are by no means lacking in material which we might call into service to replace the holy texts; we are simply treating that material in the wrong way. We are unwilling to consider secular culture
religiously
enough, in other words, as a source of guidance. So opposed have many atheists been to the content of religious belief that they have omitted to appreciate its inspiring and still valid overall object: to provide us with well-structured advice on how to lead our lives.
5.
The differences between secular and religious approaches to education boil down to the question of what learning should be for.
It is a question which tends to vex those in charge of
4.
Claims that culture could stand in for scripture â that
Middlemarch
could take up the responsibilities previously handled by thePsalms, or the essays of Schopenhauer satisfy needs once catered for bySt Augustineâs
City of God â
still have a way of sounding eccentric or insane in their combination of impiety and ambition.
Nevertheless, perhaps the proposition is not so much absurd as it is unfamiliar. The very qualities that the religious locate in their holy texts can often just as well be discovered in works of culture. Novels and historical narratives can adeptly impart moral instruction and edification. Great paintings do make suggestions about our requirements for happiness. Philosophy can usefully address our anxieties and offer consolations. Literature can change our lives. Equivalents to the ethical lessons of religion do lie scattered across the cultural canon.
Why, then, does the notion of replacing religion with culture, of living according to the lessons of literature and art as believers will according to the lessons of faith, continue to sound so peculiar to us? Why are atheists not able to draw on culture with the same spontaneity and rigour which the religious apply to their holy texts?
This acknowledgement of our inhibitions brings us back to the influence of that foremost upholder and propagator of culture in the modern world, the university. The methodologies which universities today employ in disseminating culture are fundamentally at odds with the intense, neo-religious ambitions once harboured by lapsed or sceptical Christians such as Arnold and Mill. While universities have achieved unparalleled expertise in imparting factual information about culture, they remain wholly uninterested in training students to use it as a repertoire of wisdom â this latter term referring to a kind of knowledge concerned with things which are not only true but also inwardly beneficial, a knowledge which can prove of solace to us when confronted by the infinite challenges of existence, from a tyrannical employer to a fatal lesion on our liver.
A student of medieval literature, Oxford University. ( illustration credit 4.4 )
We are by no means lacking in material which we might call into service to replace the holy texts; we are simply treating that material in the wrong way. We are unwilling to consider secular culture
religiously
enough, in other words, as a source of guidance. So opposed have many atheists been to the content of religious belief that they have omitted to appreciate its inspiring and still valid overall object: to provide us with well-structured advice on how to lead our lives.
5.
The differences between secular and religious approaches to education boil down to the question of what learning should be for.
It is a question which tends to vex those in charge of
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