Book: Religion for AtheistsAlain de BottonHamish Hamilton (Penguin) 320 pagesRs599

Late into his book Religion For Atheists Alain de Botton claims that “there is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.” On reading the writer’s latest thesis — an academic doggedness makes the book seem like one sometimes — you are first struck by the significance of his idea.

Atheists, argues de Botton, should have the intellectual capacity and expansiveness to find religions helpful, consoling, and at times, even instructive. Not exactly the kind of reading which could threaten to interrupt your Sunday afternoon snooze. But to de Botton’s credit, he eases your nervous reluctance by almost always being lucid in his arguments and proclamations. And serious though as the book’s content might be, there are points when you are convinced that the aspiring Matthew Arnold of our times is being devilish simply because his project’s breadth allows him to be provocatively outrageous.

De Botton, who could perhaps best be described as a literary New Age philosopher, chooses to refer to his book as a ‘Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion’. Or as he goes on to paraphrase himself, “It [RFA] tries … to examine aspects of religious life which contain concepts that could fruitfully be applied to the problems of secular society.” Superficially, of course, the religious lives that de Botton speaks of and the problematic secular society he so carefully dissects are both Western in essence. A few references to Buddhist practices apart, the book borrows most of its redemptive ideas for a confused and predominantly atheistic society from Christianity and Judaism. That, however, doesn’t stop the book from being relevant for an India where the gods are far from dead and where secularism is still an ideal.

The problems of modern day living, which have seemingly compelled de Botton to write an entire book, are only too common to not be identifiable. According to him, we are so atomised as a people now that having a conversation with a stranger has come to seem like an extraordinary experience. Once we are past the age of thirty, he says, it is even surprising to have made a new friend. Home, for us, has become an anonymous dormitory, and even our much-prized romantic love is “jealous, restricted and ultimately [of a] meaner variety.”

Making matters worse is de Botton’s judgement of human beings. Unabashedly deterministic, he turns to Pascal for theoretical confirmation. The French philosopher had once said that ‘man’s greatness comes from knowing he is wretched’, and de Botton furthers the argument with a suggestion that the difference between religions and secular societies is that while the former recognises man’s inherently flawed nature and gives us the options of community, empathy and compassionate art, the latter loses much by abandoning the sufferer to a private closet where he is expected to counter his demons in a straight jacket.

The tension in RFA is, in a sense, age-old. De Botton again pits religion’s imagination of humanity as a whole with capitalism’s cult of the individual. The writer contends that without rituals, idols, grand architecture, and even prayer, members of a post-religious society have lost the potential to be content and integrated. “Religions,” de Botton writes, “bring scale, consistency and outer-directed force to what might otherwise always remain small, random, private moments. They give substance to our inner dimensions.” It is clear that it this ‘substance’ which de Botton, a modern day Prometheus of sorts, a crusader for virtue, values and the importance of ceremonies like the Bar Mitzvah, wants to bring back to the people of a brave new world. He wants to finally give them a temple without the gods.

In RFA, de Botton does a little more than just cherry pick pertinent values for atheists to live by. He also draws a curriculum, a manifesto for a religion that atheists could abide by. In parts, the book also serves as a very practical guide. For instance, it suggests that we must rescue the Feast of Fools from the depths of medieval Christianity and for a stipulated time in the year, be allowed to be unfaithful and talk gibberish. It speaks of a university that would ask its students to understand the tensions of marriage in texts like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, rather than focus on trends in nineteenth-century fiction. It is only when de Botton suggests that lecturers should start to emulate African-American preachers and wail ‘do you hear me brethren’ in an effort to energise comatose audiences, do you start to wonder about the category RFA might fall under – the radical or the ridiculous?

The book may be filled with a few dozen pictures for visual relief, but that still does little to blunt a monotone of repetitiveness that sets in the book’s text towards its end. The ideas start to seem formulaic, rushing to the last line of an equation that had already been determined at the very outset. Religious values = Good. Atheistic society = Not so much. We must confess that we have undoubtedly failed ourselves, but as the author of terribly readable books such as The Consolations Of Philosophy and How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton could have perhaps been more successful in his persuasion.