Reading | Alain De Botton's "To the Atheist"

Alain DeBotten, a talented British writer, was born in 1969 and graduated from Cambridge University and lives in London. He is fluent in English, French, German, Spanish and other languages, and has deeply grasped the essence of european humanistic traditions. He is the author of the novels "Notes on Love", "Love Romance", "Kissing and Telling", and prose works such as "Embracing the Lost Years", "The Consolation of Philosophy", "The Art of Travel", "The Anxiety of Identity", "The Charm of Boredom", "The Architecture of Happiness" and so on.

In The Atheist, Alain de Botton argues that one can be a staunch atheist, but one can also find that religion is sometimes useful, interesting, and soothing. Even after the abandonment of the core teachings of religion, many of the specific contents of religion are still useful, and we should draw nourishment from them without shame to enrich secular life outside the sect.

In De Botton's view, under the prevalence of secularism, human nature has not changed in essence, individual hearts still need redemption, and human group life is still facing challenges. He believes that interesting parts such as education and art can be drawn from religious models. The book is a gentle discussion between believers and non-believers.

Excerpt from Alain De Botton's "To the Atheist":

1.

People in the desert will give a warm welcome to strangers passing by. However, for the contemporaries who live in the city, although he is equally kind and hospitable, in order to maintain a minimum of inner peace, he must show a blind eye to the same kind of people around him, even if these millions of people are eating and drinking Lasa a few centimeters away from you, sleeping and making love, quarreling, living and dying.

2.

While we may have been isolated, we clearly haven't given up all hope of building relationships with others. In the lonely canyons of modern cities, no feeling is more respected than "love".

However, this is not the love of religion, not the kind of universal human love, but a jealous, object-limited, and ultimately more stingy love.

This romantic love drives us to frantically pursue a single person with whom we hope to have a lifelong bond, and that this particular person will make us no longer need to face other people all over the world.

3.

Judaism has a special Day of Yom Kippur, recalling the past year when it has misrepresented and offended those who have hurt them.

People gather in synagogues and must repeat "We sin, we treacherous; we plunder, we slander; we pervert, we act evil; we are wanton, we weave lies." "Then apologize to those who have hurt.

4.

Although religions tell us to be polite to others, to respect each other, to be honest with each other, and to be calm and restrained, they also know that if we are not allowed to make small mistakes from time to time, our bodies and minds will be destroyed.

Religion is fully aware that love, faithfulness, and sweetness depend precisely on their opposites, and such insight is where the most enlightened wisdom of religion lies.

5.

Few things have been so popular with secular societies as education, which since the Enlightenment (from elementary school all the way to university) has been described as the most effective means of curing many of the worst social ills and of creating a civilized, prosperous, rational group of citizens.

But most of the people trained by universities are narrow-minded professionals, such as lawyers, doctors, engineers, and a few humanities graduates, while culturally knowledgeable, are very vague in ethics, and are constantly worried about how to turn knowledge into rice food in the rest of their lives.

Secular university education assumes that we can have a certain conscience and peace, and use this as the starting point of its teaching theory, but in fact, how can our nature be more than a thousand miles away from this supposed state?

Christianity, by contrast, is concerned with our confused inner world from the outset, declaring that none of us can be born with the question of how to live. We are inherently fragile, moody, lacking compassion and understanding, and trapped in fantasies of omnipotence.

6.

Christianity and Judaism do not regard marriage as a state of union motivated and operated purely by subjective enthusiasm, but more low-keyly as a mechanism by which the individual can assume the responsibilities of an adult in society and thus, with the help of a close friend and with divine guidance, begin to nurture and educate the next generation.

These relatively low expectations generally help to get rid of the kind of misgivings that are common in secular marriages. In a secular marriage, both partners always think that in addition to the marriage, there may be a stronger, purer, less contradictory union.

In religious ideals, friction, quarrel, and boredom do not mean that there has been a mistake; they are merely normal manifestations of the step-by-step progress of life.