Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton
Authors: Alain de Botton
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sympathies with it; it is a mechanism for bringing to life ideas about which participants already have a good intellectual grasp and yet continue to need encouragement to abide by.
To take a comparable example from another faith, Jewish texts make repeated mention of the importance of atonement and the possibilities for renewal through the admission of sin. But within the religion, such ideas are not merely imparted through books, they are made vibrant through a bodily experience: a ritualized version of having a bath. Since the Babylonian exile, Judaism has advised its communities to construct
mikvot â
sacred baths each containing exactly 575 litres of clean spring water â in which Jews are to immerse themselves after confessing to spiritually doubtful acts, in order to recover their purity and their connection to God. TheTorah recommends a full immersion in a
mikveh
every Friday afternoon, before the New Year and following every seminal emission.
The institution of the
mikveh
relies on a sense of renewal which secular bathers already know a little about, but lends it greater depth, structure and solemnity. An atheist may, of course, also feel clean after taking a bath and dirty without one, but the
mikveh
ritual, associating outer hygiene with the recovery of a particular kind of inner purity, like so many other symbolic practices promoted by religions, manages to use a physical activity to support a spiritual lesson.
A lesson about the meaning of life threaded into a tea party. ( illustration credit 4.14 )
2.
Religions understand the value of training our minds with a rigour that we are accustomed to applying only to the training of our bodies. They present us with an array of spiritual exercises designed to strengthen our inclination towards virtuous thoughts and patterns of behaviour: they sit us down in unfamiliar spaces, adjust our posture, regulate what we eat, give us scripts detailing what we should say to one another and minutely monitor the thoughts that cross our consciousness. They do all this not in order to deny us freedom but to quell our anxieties and flex our moral capacities.
This double insight â that we should train our minds just as we train our bodies, and that we should do so partly
through
those bodies â has led to the founding, by all the major faiths, of religious retreats where adherents may for a limited time abscond from their ordinary lives and find inner restoration through spiritual exercise.
The secular world offers no true parallels. Our closest equivalents are countryhotels andspas, though the comparison serves only to reveal our shallowness. The brochures for such establishments tend to promise us opportunities to rediscover what is most essential to us, they show us images of couples in plush dressing gowns, they vaunt the quality of their mattresses and toiletries or boast of their twenty-four-hour provision of room service. But the emphasis is always on physical satiation and mental diversion rather than on any real fulfilment of the needs of our souls. These places have no way of helping us when the incompatibilities in our relationships reach a new nadir, when reading the Sunday newspapers provokes panic about our careers or when we wake up in terror just before dawn, paralysed by the thought of how short a span of life remains to us. Otherwise solicitous concierges, brimful of ideas about where we might partake of horse riding or mini-golf, will fall suddenly silent when questioned about strategies for coping with guilt, wayward longings or self-loathing.
Using a bath to support an idea: a Jewish
mikveh
in Willesden, north-west London. ( illustration credit 4.15 )
Religious retreats are, fortunately, somewhat more rounded in their attentions. St Bernard, the founder of the first Cistercian monasteries (organizations which in his day functioned as both retreats for the laity and permanent residences for monks), suggested that all human beings were divided
To take a comparable example from another faith, Jewish texts make repeated mention of the importance of atonement and the possibilities for renewal through the admission of sin. But within the religion, such ideas are not merely imparted through books, they are made vibrant through a bodily experience: a ritualized version of having a bath. Since the Babylonian exile, Judaism has advised its communities to construct
mikvot â
sacred baths each containing exactly 575 litres of clean spring water â in which Jews are to immerse themselves after confessing to spiritually doubtful acts, in order to recover their purity and their connection to God. TheTorah recommends a full immersion in a
mikveh
every Friday afternoon, before the New Year and following every seminal emission.
The institution of the
mikveh
relies on a sense of renewal which secular bathers already know a little about, but lends it greater depth, structure and solemnity. An atheist may, of course, also feel clean after taking a bath and dirty without one, but the
mikveh
ritual, associating outer hygiene with the recovery of a particular kind of inner purity, like so many other symbolic practices promoted by religions, manages to use a physical activity to support a spiritual lesson.
A lesson about the meaning of life threaded into a tea party. ( illustration credit 4.14 )
2.
Religions understand the value of training our minds with a rigour that we are accustomed to applying only to the training of our bodies. They present us with an array of spiritual exercises designed to strengthen our inclination towards virtuous thoughts and patterns of behaviour: they sit us down in unfamiliar spaces, adjust our posture, regulate what we eat, give us scripts detailing what we should say to one another and minutely monitor the thoughts that cross our consciousness. They do all this not in order to deny us freedom but to quell our anxieties and flex our moral capacities.
This double insight â that we should train our minds just as we train our bodies, and that we should do so partly
through
those bodies â has led to the founding, by all the major faiths, of religious retreats where adherents may for a limited time abscond from their ordinary lives and find inner restoration through spiritual exercise.
The secular world offers no true parallels. Our closest equivalents are countryhotels andspas, though the comparison serves only to reveal our shallowness. The brochures for such establishments tend to promise us opportunities to rediscover what is most essential to us, they show us images of couples in plush dressing gowns, they vaunt the quality of their mattresses and toiletries or boast of their twenty-four-hour provision of room service. But the emphasis is always on physical satiation and mental diversion rather than on any real fulfilment of the needs of our souls. These places have no way of helping us when the incompatibilities in our relationships reach a new nadir, when reading the Sunday newspapers provokes panic about our careers or when we wake up in terror just before dawn, paralysed by the thought of how short a span of life remains to us. Otherwise solicitous concierges, brimful of ideas about where we might partake of horse riding or mini-golf, will fall suddenly silent when questioned about strategies for coping with guilt, wayward longings or self-loathing.
Using a bath to support an idea: a Jewish
mikveh
in Willesden, north-west London. ( illustration credit 4.15 )
Religious retreats are, fortunately, somewhat more rounded in their attentions. St Bernard, the founder of the first Cistercian monasteries (organizations which in his day functioned as both retreats for the laity and permanent residences for monks), suggested that all human beings were divided
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