Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton Read Free Book Online Page A

easier.
    6.
Libertarians may concede that we would theoretically benefit from guidance, but they still complain that it would be impossible to deliver it, for the simple reason that at heart no one any longer knows what is good and bad. And we don’t know, as it is often pointed out in a seductive and dramatic aphorism, because God is dead.
    Much of modern moral thought has been transfixed by the idea that a collapse in belief must have irreparably damaged our capacity to build a convincing ethical framework for ourselves. But this argument, while apparently atheistic in nature, owes a strange, unwarranted debt to a religious mindset – for only if we truly believed at some level that God
had
once existed, and that the foundations of morality were therefore in their essence supernatural, would the recognition of his present
non-
existence have any power to shake our moral principles.
    However, if we assume from the start that we of course made God up, then the argument rapidly breaks down into a tautology – for why would we bother to feel burdened by ethical doubt if we knew that the many rules ascribed to supernatural beings were actually only the work of our all-too-human ancestors?
    It seems clear that the origins of religious ethics lay in the pragmatic need of the earliest communities to control their members’ tendencies towards violence, and to foster in them contrary habits of harmony andforgiveness. Religious codes began as cautionary precepts, which were then projected into the sky and reflected back to earth in disembodied and majestic forms. Injunctions to be sympathetic or patient stemmed from an awareness that thesewere the qualities which could draw societies back from fragmentation and self-destruction. So vital were these rules to our survival that for thousands of years we did not dare to admit that we ourselves had formulated them, lest this expose them to critical scrutiny and irreverent handling. We had to pretend that morality came from the heavens in order to insulate it from our own prevarications and frailties.
    But if we can now own up to spiritualizing our ethical laws, we have no cause to do away with the laws themselves. We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat ofhell or the promise ofparadise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves – that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) – who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments.
    7.
Of course, our readiness to accept guidance rather depends on the tone in which it is offered. Among religions’ more unpalatable features is the tendency of their clergies to speak to people as if they, and they alone, were in possession of maturity and moral authority. And yet Christianity never sounds more beguiling than when it denies this child–adult dichotomy and acknowledges that we are all in the end rather infantile, incomplete, unfinished, easily tempted and sinful. We are readier to absorb lessons about virtues and vices if they are delivered by characters who already seem fully acquainted with both categories. Hence the ongoing charm and utility of the idea of Original Sin.
    We had to invent ways to frighten ourselves into doing what, deep down, we already knew was right:
The Torments ofHell
, French illuminated manuscript,
c
. 1454. ( illustration credit 3.3 )
    The Judaeo-Christian tradition has intermittently appreciated that what can stop us from reforming ourselves is a lonely, guilty sense of how unusually bad and beyond saving we already are. These religions have therefore proclaimed with