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A great interview with Alain de Botton who I think brings a really interesting philosophy to Atheism that contrasts with those of the New Atheists, and this was a great interview that really laid out his main ideas succinctly and efficiently. To be honest, I'm really not surprised his parents were Atheists. I think many of the modern Atheists who are ex-theists have a real and very understandable desire to reject old oppressive thought systems they used to live under, but in my experience people born into Atheism often have a very different relationship to religion than the ex-theists. I'm willing to bet thinking like his will become more widespread as time goes on and more atheists are born into families without religion, especially in the more secular parts of the world where they don't grow up feeling like a repressed religious minority (Western Europe, Canada etc., rather then regions like the Bible Belt or Arab world).
Agreed about "new atheists" who really are somewhat strident. Some of us managed to dump fundamentalist upbringing without blaming all religion for the mindset we experienced.
I suppose this fits in with The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. What is it with these atheists of French ancestry anyway ;-)
I don't really disagree with his basic thesis but feel that it lacks a certain suspicion of religious thought and sentiment that doesn't account for the human tendency to fool oneself with things like inferring agency where it doesn't exist. I tend to distrust personal subjective experience and emotion as sources of real insight. And I tend to distrust black and white ethics and morality and similar trappings I normally associate with religion -- anything that makes a person fidgety about saying "I don't know" or "it depends" when appropriate. Still ... I lean more his way than to the likes of Dawkins and other strident, anti-religious atheists. I don't like defining myself in terms of what I'm against.
I'm inclined to agree, mordant. While he makes a lot of sense and is dealing with a strategy that atheism, if it is going to become a public sector of significance, is going to have to consider, My alarm bells are going off.
The disagreement I have is more a semantic one. Rather than take from religion those things it does well and which atheism does not - or not at all - and adopt it, we should consider those things in a non -religious context. That sounds exactly the same thing, but it avoids the appalling prospect of atheism becoming a religion and indicates a rational and rationalist approach to these things that seem to give benefits.
While religious festivals and the monastic silence and the therapeutic benefits of prayer and the joy of community hymn - singing are social and mental benefits that atheism doesn't do, the danger in de Bottom's line is not thinking about what they are, why they work and how to use them without turning the participant's reasoning circuit off and just grabbing them wholesale with all the religious crud still adhering to it.
I think in the end, he hasn't thought it through - if indeed he wants to. It sounds a bit like someone still half in love with religion but can't rationally believe it anymore. The danger there is that it is too easy to slip back into delusion again by the sheer need for it - like the atheist blogger who went back to Catholicism through the doolally reasoning that Morality had to be a separately existent entity.
I'd advocate trying to understand the physical mental and evolutionary reason why these things work. Like medicine, that a thing works is not enough; we have to know how it works and why, because if you still think in terms of The Humours rather than blood circulation, your medical treatment can go badly wrong.
So we do need to do this thing that de Botton suggests and do it urgently, but we need to do it right.
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