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Book: Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
Quotes of Book: Religion for Atheists: A
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  1. Alain de Botton _ Religion for Atheists: A

    Mary in Christianity, Isis in ancient Egypt, Demeter in Greece, Venus in Rome and Guan Yin in China have all functioned as conduits to recollections of early tenderness. Their statues often stand in darkened, womb-like spaces, their faces are compassionate and supportive, they enable us to sit, talk and cry with them. The similarities between them are too great to be coincidental. We are dealing here with figures that have evolved not out of shared cultural origins but in response to the universal needs of the human psyche.
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  2. Alain de Botton _ Religion for Atheists: A

    An atheist may, of course, also feel clean after taking a bath and dirty without one, but the mikveh ritual, associating outer hygiene with the recovery of a particular kind of inner purity, like so many other symbolic practices promoted by religions, manages to use a physical activity to support a spiritual lesson.
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  3. Alain de Botton _ Religion for Atheists: A

    We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful.
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  4. Alain de Botton _ Religion for Atheists: A

    If there are so many references in the Mass to poverty, sadness, failure and loss, it is because the Church views the ill, the frail of mind, the desperate and the elderly as representing aspects of humanity and {even more meaningfully} of ourselves which we are tempted to deny, but which bring us, when we can acknowledge them, closer to our need for one another. In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride – or superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulation – takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we dare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The Mass encourages this sloughing off of pride. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert – all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition. We have no reason left to dissemble or lie in a building dedicated to honouring the terror and weakness of a man who was nothing like the usual heroes of antiquity, nothing like the fierce soldiers of Rome's army or the plutocrats of its Senate, and yet who was nevertheless worthy of being crowned the highest of men, the king of kings.
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  5. Alain de Botton _ Religion for Atheists: A

    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, hostelry, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture – a range of interests which puts to shame the scope of the achievements of even the greatest and most influential 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 witnessed.
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  6. Alain de Botton _ Religion for Atheists: A

    We have almost all had the experience of gazing at the full moon. But those of us who are neither astronomers nor astronauts are unlikely to have scheduled moongazing appointments. For Zen Buddhists in Japan, however, every year, on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the traditional Japanese lunisolar calendar, followers gather at nightfall around specially constructed cone-shaped viewing platforms, where for several hours prayers are read aloud which use the moon as a springboard for reflections on Zen ideas of impermanence, a ritual known as tsukimi. Candles are lit and white rice dumplings {tsukimi dango} are prepared and shared out among strangers in an atmosphere at once companionable and serene, a feeling thereby supported by a ceremony, by architecture, by good company and by food.
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  7. Alain de Botton _ Religion for Atheists: A

    In a world beset by fundamentalists of both believing and secular varieties, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.
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  8. Alain de Botton _ Religion for Atheists: A

    عشق رمانتیک چیزی است که ما را دیوانه‌وار به جست‌وجو می‌کشد تا شریک زندگی خود را پیدا کنیم، همان یک نفر که دیگر نیاز تمامی ارتباط‌های اجتماعی را برای ما برآورده می‌کند و کافی است!!!
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  9. Alain de Botton _ Religion for Atheists: A

    Our inner lives must be lent a structure and our best thoughts reinforced to counter the continuous pull of distraction and disintegration. Religions have been wise enough to establish elaborate calendars and schedules. How free secular society leaves us by contrast. Secular life is not, of course, unacquainted with calendars and schedules. We know them well in relation to work, and accept the virtues of reminders of lunch meetings, cash-flow projections and tax deadlines. But it expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. It privileges discovery, presenting us with an incessant stream of new information – and therefore it prompts us to forget everything. We are enticed to go to the cinema to see a newly released film, which ends up moving us to an exquisite pitch of sensitivity, sorrow and excitement. We leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire existence in light of the values shown on screen, and to purge ourselves of our decadence and haste. And yet by the following evening, after a day of meetings and aggravations, our cinematic experience is well on its way towards obliteration. We honour the power of culture but rarely admit with what scandalous ease we forget its individual monuments. We somehow feel, however, that it would be a violation of our spontaneity to be presented with rotas for rereading Walt Whitman.
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  10. Alain de Botton _ Religion for Atheists: A

    In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride-or superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulation-takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we fare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert-all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition.
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  11. Alain de Botton _ Religion for Atheists: A

    Religions understand this: they know that to sustain goodness, it helps to have an audience. The faiths hence provide us with a gallery of witnesses at the ceremonial beginnings of our marriages and thereafter they entrust a vigilant role to their deities."
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  12. Alain de Botton _ Religion for Atheists: A

    The secular are at this moment in history a great deal more optimistic than the religious – something of an irony, given the frequency with which the latter have been derided by the former for their apparent naivety and credulousness. It is the secular whose longing for perfection has grown so intense as to lead them to imagine that paradise might be realized on this earth after just a few more years of financial growth and medical research. With no evident awareness of the contradiction they may, in the same breath, gruffly dismiss a belief in angels while sincerely trusting that the combined powers of the IMF, the medical research establishment, Silicon Valley and democratic politics could together cure the ills of mankind.... It is telling that the secular world is not well versed in the art of gratitude: we no longer offer up thanks for harvests, meals, bees or clement weather. On a superficial level, we might suppose that this is because there is no one to say 'Thank you' to. But at base it seems more a matter of ambition and expectation. Many of those blessings for which our pious and pessimistic ancestors offered thanks, we now pride ourselves on having worked hard enough to take for granted.
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