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

considerable sangfroid that all of us, without exception, are appallingly flawed creations. ‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me,’ thunders the Old Testament (Psalm 51), a message echoed in the New: ‘As by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned’ (Romans 5:12).
    However, the recognition of this darkness is not the end point which modern pessimism so often assumes it must be. That we are tempted to deceive, steal, insult, egotistically ignore others and be unfaithful is accepted without surprise. The question is not whether we experience shocking temptations but whether we are able once in a while to rise above them.
    The doctrine ofOriginal Sin encourages us to inch towards moral improvement by understanding that the faults we despise in ourselves are inevitable features of the species. We can therefore admit to them candidly and attempt to rectify them in the light of day. The doctrine knows that shame is not a helpful emotion for us to be weighed down with as we work towards having a little less to be ashamed about.Enlightenment thinkers believed that they were doing us a favour by declaring man to be originallyand naturally good. However, being repeatedly informed of our native decency can cause us to become paralysed with remorse over our failure to measure up to impossible standards of integrity. Confessions of universal sinfulness turn out to be a better starting point from which to take our first modest steps towards virtue.
    An emphasis on Original Sin further serves to answer any doubts as to who can have the right to dispense moral advice in a democratic age. To the incensed query, ‘And who are you to tell me how to live?’, a believer need only push back with the disarming response, ‘A fellow sinner’. We are all descended from a single ancestor, the fallen Adam, and are therefore beset by identical anxieties, temptations towards iniquity, cravings for love and occasional aspirations to purity.
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We will never discover cast-iron rules of good conduct which will answer every question that might arise about how human beings can live peacefully and well together. However, a lack of absolute agreement on the good life should not in itself be enough to disqualify us from investigating and promoting the theoretical notion of such a life.
    The priority of moral instruction must be general, even if the list of virtues and vices to guide any one of us has to be specific, given that we all incline in astonishingly personal ways to idiocy and spite.
    The one generalization we might venture to draw from the Judaeo-Christian approach to good behaviour is that we would be advised to focus our attention on relatively small-scale, undramatic kinds of misconduct.Pride, a superficially unobtrusiveattitude of mind, was deemed worthy of notice by Christianity, just as Judaism saw nothing frivolous in making recommendations about how often married couples should have sex.
    Consider, by contrast, how belatedly and how bluntly the modern state enters into our lives with its injunctions. It intervenes when it is already far too late, after we have picked up the gun, stolen the money, lied to the children or pushed our spouse out of the window. It does not study the debt that largecrimes owe to subtle abuses. The achievement of Judaeo-Christian ethics was to encompass more than just the great and obvious vices of mankind. Its recommendations addressed a range of faint cruelties and ill-treatments of the sort which disfigure daily life and form the crucible for cataclysmic crimes. It knew that rudeness and emotional humiliation may be just as corrosive to a well-functioning society as robbery and murder.
    TheTen Commandments were a first attempt at reining in man’s aggression towards his fellow man. In the edicts of theTalmud and medieval Christian rosters of virtues and vices, we