No cannibals in this defanging of religion

• by: Miriam Cosic
• From:The Australian
• February 18, 201212

Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists is unlikely to offend either the devout or the unbelievers. Picture: Russell Shakespeare Source: The Australian

ALAIN de Botton has made his name - and presumably a second fortune (the lucky man inherited wealth) - writing bestselling books of popular philosophy, such as How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy.

Good on him. He seems like a nice guy. His stated motives, to increase the spread of happiness and beauty, are fine ones.
The problem is the books. In bringing philosophy to a wider public than professional philosophers generally do, de Botton manages to strip the usefulness right out of seriously useful concepts. He reduces the urgent search for meaning to squidgy homilies. In sum, he unerringly misses the point. If he were a carpenter, his nails would be bent, his shelves unassembled and his thumbs a bloody pulp.
In his latest book, Religion for Atheists, de Botton loses a bob each way. He wrings religion of its historical and metaphysical significance, and bleaches it of its dramatic intensity. He also patronises atheists, his fellow-travellers, by suggesting they learn from the leached-out leavings he displays.

The book is lovely to look at and to handle, and is organised under alluring chapter headings such as Community, Kindness, Perspective and Art. In each, the author uses aspects of Catholicism, Judaism or Buddhism to teach us how we - he assumes his readers are atheists - might become better people.
The rituals of the Day of Atonement, for example, show us how we might get over such appalling incidents as a missing invitation, an unkind remark or a forgotten birthday. He writes lyrically of the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar and the poetic legality of the Kol Nidrei, with its stern injunctions, and then turns them to tame such slights. No mention of the big ones - infidelity, fraud, murder - that really test our moral strength.
Elsewhere he gives a gloss on the Catholic Mass which might surprise the faithful. He recognises that Mass commemorates the Last Supper, though he doesn't go into the horror of the crucifixion the following day, or that Christ died that way for our sins.
He explains that Christians, like Jews with the Sabbath meal, "understood that it is when we satiate our bodily hunger that we are often readiest to direct our minds to the needs of others".
Tell that to fasting Catholics whose stomachs used to rumble right through Mass. And the Last Supper was hardly a feast, what with the disciples' poverty and Jesus making all his bleak predictions. De Botton also doesn't mention that while Anglicans believe that Communion is symbolic, Catholics, with their doctrine of transubstantiation, believe that, in the moment, the wafer and the wine are changed into the actual body and blood of their Saviour. Cannibalism, as an atheist might view it, may be a step too far for de Botton's friendly message.
He goes on to recommend a secular version of the Mass and the Passover meal at an "agape restaurant". There, unlike in the sterile environs of modern-day eating places, people will pay a modest fee to enter an "attractively designed interior", where they will be split from their friends to sit with strangers, who they will ask prescribed questions, such as "What do you regret?" or "Whom can you not forgive?" instead of the usual introductory banalities about work or children. Tell me he's joking.
Full review at The Australian.