Instead, he is calling on secular institutions to adopt religion’s pedagogy, to mimic the rituals, habits and teaching techniques that churches, mosques and synagogues perfected over centuries. For example, religious people were smart enough to combine spirituality and eating, aware that while dining in a group, people tend to be in a convivial, welcoming mood. De Botton believes that secular people should create communal restaurants that mimic the Passover Seder. Atheists would sit at big, communal tables. They would find guidebooks in front of them, reminiscent of the Jewish Haggadah or the Catholic missal. The rituals of the meal would direct diners to speak with one another, asking questions of their neighbors like “Whom can you not forgive?” or “What do you fear?”

Among de Botton’s proposals, I particularly like the idea of a museum organized by theme instead of by historical epoch. He suggests there could be a Gallery of Compassion, a Gallery of Fear and so on. And colleges should definitely teach courses on such practical issues as how to pick a marriage partner, bringing together the resources of literature, psychology and neuroscience on such questions.

However, many of his ideas seem silly. I’m a little skeptical that college lectures should be like Southern Baptist church services, with students shouting out responses after each sentence of a philosophy lecture. It seems highly unlikely that people will behave much better if there are “Forgiveness” billboards plastered all over town. I’m not sure an atheist society could really pull off a quarterly “Day of Atonement” when everybody pauses to confess sins to no one in particular.

De Botton’s book is provocative when it comes to diagnosing the current cultural ills. But it makes atheism seem kind of boring, a spiritual handicap, the opiate of the shallow masses.

Let’s say you were a young person looking to have a rich inner life. You could pull off the shelves the story of a believer’s spiritual education, like C. S. Lewis’s “Surprised by Joy” or Augustine’s “Confessions.” In these books you’d find complex adventure stories, describing people whose early lives were riven by turmoil, pride and self-love. You’d find a dramatic education process involving intricate, unexpected stages of resistance, surrender, loathing God, loving God, leaps of faith and the most rigorous intellectual scrutiny.

These writers don’t coolly shop for personal growth experiences like someone at the spiritual mall. They find themselves enmeshed in paradoxes of a richness unimaginable before they became entangled in them — that understanding comes after love, that one achieves fullness by surrendering self, that as you approach wisdom you are swept by a sensation that you have been suppressing all along, and all you need do is release. Augustine’s great biographer Peter Brown writes, “The healing process by which love and knowledge are reintegrated is made possible by an inseparable connection between growing self-determination and dependence on a source of life that always escapes ­self-determination.”