My friend told me “That’s really not the point. It’s not about who knows him. It’s about being there.” He sent me a link to an essay on the Internet called ‘Always go to the funeral’. It’s an amazing essay and it changed my mind about a lot of things to do with religion.

Here’s a little snippet.

On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I’ve ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/8/

Among my circle of friends, we have adopted this rule and have a little ceremony when someone dies, that goes like this.

“Are you going to the funeral?”
“What’s the first rule of funerals?”
“Always go the funeral.”
“See you there!”

Now it’s my turn.

My Dad died last week and I am so very, very sad. We now have a big family debate about how to honour his passing. Dad fulfilled a long-standing dream to retire to Spain (actually, he always said Portugal, but Spain is right there next door) and, after decades away, my family is worried that there is no one left who remembers him to join us as we say goodbye. There’s also a bit of a debate as to whether a Christian memorial service is appropriate for a man who did not have a religious bone, vein or gristle in his body.

The Spaniards were very efficient with the cremation and there was no service. But now we want to do something with a bit more significance and the choices at hand are:

1. Scatter ashes in Footscray Meadows – the scene of many a childhood memory.  Dad taught me to fish there. My brother climbed a tree with me to show me eggs in a bird’s nest. Most of my early misdeeds were there. It’s the first place I ever tried to cycle across a river. I have very fond memories of Footscray Meadows.
2. Memorial service at the church in Rectory Lane. It’s the only church I really know well. My Dad was married there (the first time around) and I was christened there along with my brothers and sisters. My grandmother was buried there a couple of years back.

The nub of the debate is whether it is inappropriate — disrespectful, even — to a man who was not so much an atheist as a never-really-gave-religion-any-thought-eist to give him a memorial service in a church. Here’s my response.

I am the biggest atheist I know but I think the one thing that religions do well is a funeral. Secular funerals feel kind of empty to me — like they are missing the point. I think the best kind of funeral connects you with two thousand years of western tradition and then sends you to the pub where you drink Guinness and laugh about the awful couch that your parents had in the 1970s and the good times that you shared and then you cry about the loss that you all feel. That’s a funeral. Scattering ashes in a park is not quite the same for me.

My sister Carol researched our family tree a few years back. She traced our heritage back many generations – back into the 16th century – and discovered that no one in our family moved more than two or three miles from Footscray in all those centuries. But in a generation or two we have scattered to the four winds. I have cousins all over England and Northern Ireland and in France and Australia and the Clown Family made it all the way to California. My dad’s family was not from Footscray though. His family was from way, way north — about 4 or 5 miles north — in Eltham.

So, is it appropriate to give a decidedly non-Christian from Eltham a Christian memorial service in Footscray where all his children were born and christened? I can’t think of anything more appropriate.

My sister is a bit worried that it’ll be just us there in that church – four sad children remembering the life of a very special man and the very special lady who took care of him during his most vulnerable days. If it’s just us, it’ll be wonderful. But I’m willing to bet that there will be more than a handful of folks who remember us and are willing to fill the empty pews behind us. I hope you’ll read that essay and remember the edict: Always go to the funeral. I’ll buy you a Guinness if you come. You can buy me one too.

I’ll never forget the moment — at my nephews’ christening — where my sister and I had to renounce Satan and all his works and we snuck a glance at each other and my sister said something like “This is the bit where we get struck by lightning or arrested for perjury”.  But I feel very grateful for the privilege of being a godfather even if neither I nor my godsons believe in God. Religious ceremonies are not about religion, they are about ceremony and tradition and the Church of England does those particularly well.

That little church in Footscray is like a Tardis for me. Sitting in those pews transports me back through my memories and even further back into the memories of so many centuries past.

I shared some of these thoughts once before in Don’t Break the Chain. I imagine a chain of tradition and mythology stretching back for a thousand years and we shouldn’t be the ones to break it. It’s too precious.

The discussion led to all kinds of ideas and eventually a business plan for Kev and Jeff’s House of Death. A big part of the funeral experience comes, I think, from the comforting traditions. Traditions are always difficult things to get going of course but, if enough of us put our heads together, maybe we could come up with a few.

Coincidently, Scott Adams is planning his funeral today, too. One of his readers suggested a sad clown for his funeral. Just sitting up front, moping, not saying anything. One idiot poster was surprised that an atheist would want a funeral at all as though atheists don’t believe in death or something. I had always hoped for one of those Tibetan jobbies with the long sticks and the vultures but Georgina is against it. Most likely I’ll end up with one of those gatherings where my best friends sit around and laugh and get drunk and tell stories like at the best funerals that I have attended.

Religious funerals have a built-in advantage over atheist funerals because they help explain the whole what-happens-next issue in a way that is comforting to children. I know what happens afterwards, but it would be nice to have a story to tell my five year old daughter – something that weaves in the Circle of Life with a generous helping of how extraordinarily lucky we are to experience life in the first place.

Julio, Fabienne and Morgane, our thoughts are with you.

Atheism got a big boost when the so-called Four Horsemen mounted their steeds and wrote the four books – God is Not Great, The God Delusion, The End of Faith and Breaking the Spell – that defined The New Atheism. It’s hard to recommend any of those books to someone who is not already pretty secure in their disbelief though and, of the four, only Richard Dawkins is neither shouty nor weird. They are all polemics of one kind or another.

A polemic is a variety of argument or controversy made against one opinion, doctrine, or person. […] The word is derived from the Greek polemikos, meaning “warlike, hostile”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemic

The most interesting writings about atheism are personal stories – like Russell’s – that answer the question, “Why Don’t you believe in God?” Here are three of my favourite stories.

Ricky Gervais has a masterpiece in the genre in the Wall Street Journal today. Ricky has his eight-year-old self figuring out the answer.

But anyway, there I was happily drawing my hero when my big brother Bob asked,”Why do you believe in God?” Just a simple question. But my mum panicked. “Bob,” she said in a tone that I knew meant, “Shut up.” Why was that a bad thing to ask? If there was a God and my faith was strong it didn’t matter what people said.

Oh, hang on. There is no God. He knows it, and she knows it deep down. It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it and asking more questions, and within an hour, I was an atheist.

Wow. No God. If mum had lied to me about God, had she also lied to me about Santa? Yes, of course, but who cares? The gifts kept coming. And so did the gifts of my new found atheism. The gifts of truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world. I learned of evolution – a theory so simple that only England’s greatest genius could have come up with it. Evolution of plants, animals and us – with imagination, free will, love, humor. I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer and pizza are all good enough reasons for living.

Julia Sweeney turned her story into a monologue – Letting Go of God – that she performs on stage. Here’s the first act, performed at Ted.

You can watch a full performance of Letting Go of God on YouTube but be forewarned: in between the laughter, there will be tears. Keep a box of tissues handy.

The last story that I like to recommend is Bart Ehrman’s essay that forms the introduction of his book Misquoting Jesus.

When I was in seminary, I was taking a class devoted to the interpretation of the Gospel of Mark. At that time, I would have called myself a strong evangelical Christian. I thought the Bible had no mistakes. The first time I realized it did was Mark, Chapter Two. The disciples are walking through a grain field with Jesus, and the pharisees object to them eating grain because it’s the Sabbath. Jesus asks them if they haven’t read the passage in scripture when David went into the temple of God and ate show bread that wasn’t supposed to eaten. He says it happened when Abiathar was the high priest.

For the term paper, I decided to write on this passage; it contains a famous historical problem. The Book of Samuel says that Abiathar was not the high priest at that time; it was his father, Ahimelech. I wrote a 35-page paper explaining why this can’t be a mistake. It was based on the interpretation of the Greek words. The grammar is tricky in the passage. My professor was a very devout Christian, who I respected very much. He gave me an A on the paper but at the end he wrote “Maybe Mark just made a mistake.”

Even though it was a tiny little detail, it exploded the whole thing for me. Once I realized there could be a mistake in the Bible, I started finding them all over the place. The first thing it did was made me realize the Bible is not an inerrant revelation from God. It’s a human book with errors. I stopped being evangelical and became a liberal Christian. I eventually became an agnostic. There’s no way I would have leaped from fundamentalist to agnostic. It required a lot of transition. And the first thing to go was the inerrancy of the Bible.

Professor Ehrman is a little more scholarly than Ricky Gervais and his book is not a light read by any means. It’s a good read though, and examines the history of some famous bible passages – like the story of the woman accused of adultery – and when they were added to the bible.

Ever in search of new experiences, I went to church on my own for the first time ever.

Church-going folk always seem delighted to welcome non-church-going folk. That pleasing fact makes me smile down deep inside. I sat discreetly in the most out-of-the-way spot I could find and was all alone until an older lady came and sat in the same pew. You tend to stand out when you don’t know the whole stand-up/sit-down ritual and my pew companion noticed the newcomer right away and tried to make me welcome.

She went and found me a copy of the missal so I could follow along with the reading and she made sure I always found the right hymn number. She nodded knowingly when I didn’t go up to receive communion but politely excused herself so that she could. More touching still, a friend, who I know only casually and rarely, spotted me and trekked the whole length of the church to exchange peace-be-with-yous.

My favourite bit of going to church is usually the bish’s sermon. The bish at the chapel we attended in New York put on a remarkably fine performance week after week and I always enjoyed his sermons immensely. But last night’s was poor. Even the readings seemed starkly shorn of significance given how important Maundy Thursday is to the Christian calendar. But what the occasion lacked in it profundity, it made up in ceremony.

I got to witness the foot-washing thing – another first for me. Perhaps because of the Judas and Mary song, I found the whole ceremony strangely intimate which, I guess, is the point. Even the unfamiliar parts of the ceremony are oddly familiar – like walking down Fifth Avenue for the first time and realizing you have been there a thousand times before. The only bit that seemed distinctly odd was the lap of the church that we did at the end. Not sure what that was about.

I have now been to the Catholic Church many, many more times than I have been to the church of my childhood but the Book of Common Prayer still seems familiar and the catholic liturgy foreign. I can now predict when they will “Bring forth the Holy Condiments” or whatever is in those little bottles but I still don’t know all the call-and-response bits or when I am supposed to be standing or sitting.

Ethical dilemmas abound. How can I be true to my own beliefs without causing offence? Which parts of the ceremony signify 2000 years of tradition and which signify a sacred vow that I’d rather not take lightly?

Singing hymns? Easy! I love hymns. I love singing. I sing.

I skip the spectacles-testicles-watch-and-wallet stuff because it seems to have more meaning than I want to convey. Neither do I bow to the altar when I cross the aisle.

The Lord’s Prayer is trickier. It comes from a favourite passage in Matthew and transports me instantly back to assembly at Sidcup Hill Primary School but it says more than I want to say out loud in church. Not to mention that the Roman Catholic version misses out the best lines.

I would’ve liked the rest of the Clown family to come with me. Mrs Clown was going to come but changed her mind (leaving me with no money for the collection plate )  luckily there was no collection for some reason).

The smallest Clown child loves ceremony (she made us celebrate our anniversary this year) but was doing something more important and I didn’t want to push it. Other child thinks it violates the Laws of Reason for an atheist to go to church – a not uncommon reaction, sadly.

So why did I go? Why did I suddenly choose to go yesterday? It may have been a reaction to a just published study showing an abrupt  increase in the number of non-believers – up 10% in two decades.

Europe seems to be doing a better job of transitioning from fervent belief to ceremonial deism. In Sweden, a large majority of the population is atheist but a similar number are members of the Church of Sweden. The proportions are probably not so different in England, Spain, France and Italy, all nominally religious countries but far more secular than America in practice. Europeans stopped believing but continued following the traditions and teaching the mythology. That’s a good place to be.  Even myths have meaning.

In America, however, the gulf between belief and disbelief is too wide to straddle and once you cross that gulf you leave the other side behind. You either got faith or you got unbelief and there ain’t no neutral ground.

In the neutral ground of Europe, my kids would take part in nativity plays in school and sing songs of the risen Christ. Over here, if you want to expose your kids to religion, you have to hand them over to True Believers like the dudes teaching bible class at my littlest’s school; telling the story of Moses in the Bulrushes as though it were true and making it clear to them the horrible consequences of any doubts they might harbour. Their literal belief seems to blind them to the true meaning of their mythology.

I see myself as a tiny, weak link in a chain stretching back to the beginnings of western civilization. The chain is stretched taut in America. Five years ago, I feared the revivalist fervour flooding out of the South but, with hindsight, I now see that period as a last ditch attempt to hold back the tide of secularism. Europe has found a way to make the transition gracefully. If America does not, the chain will break.

STOP PRESS

By a pleasant coincidence Judith Warner in the Times has a This I Believe article describing a similar experience with her family’s Passover experience.

I am Jewish. But for nine years, from age 5 to 13, I attended an Episcopal school, went to chapel, sang in the choir. To this day, in good moods, my mind fills with hymns, and on a certain kind of spring day, a day that’s full of promise and hope, I see sunshine streaming in through stained glass windows, graceful specks suspended in the light over highly polished wood pews.

I would never call myself a Christian. But if you begin the Lord’s Prayer, I will join in, with feeling.

I enjoyed Judith’s story even more than I enjoyed writing my own.

I promise to serve my God, the Queen, the Commonwealth and the Sea Cadet Corp and to obey the orders of my superior officers. I will proud of my uniform and smart and seaman-like in wearing it. I will always do my duty.

It was a long time ago now but I remember it clearly.

Paul, Peter, Matthew and I were all dressed up for the first time in our new, smartly-pressed sailor uniforms standing before the Commanding Officer and the whole ship’s company of TS Caprice to speak the Promise that would launch an amazing three-year adventure in the Sea Cadet Corps followed by six years in the Royal Navy.

For the first four weeks after joining the Sea Cadets, we had stood at the back of the hall during Colours and Sunset wearing the civvies that marked us as new entries not yet entitled to wear the navy blue uniform that our more seasoned shipmates wore. For a long month, we learned how to take care of that uniform, enduring lessons on where, exactly, to put the seven creases, how to tie a lanyard and how to wear a beret without looking like you had a blue pancake on your head. After that month, we knew what all the badges meant and how to tie a reef knot and a bowline and who to salute and we all knew which brush to use first when we shined our shoes and we could march (after a fashion). Only then were we issued our uniforms and ready to make our promises.

One minute to Colours, sir!
Ship’s Company, turning aft, right and left TURN!
Colours, sir!
Pipe the Still!

On the Tuesday before our Big Day, we rummaged through musty sacks of hand-me-down uniforms searching for that special pair of bell bottoms that were only slightly enormous and the lanyard that wasn’t too frayed and when we got home that night, most of us had our first encounter with an ironing board. Getting those seven creases sharp and evenly spaced but not shiny turned out to be quite a palaver. Several damp tea towels and a jug of water later, I had merely created a cloud of steam while the heavy blue serge conspired with gravity to guarantee that my attempts at getting my uniform smart and seaman-like ended in failure.

After much practice, I was able to look like a proper sailor and I was proud of my uniform as the last part of The Promise required.

I will be proud of my uniform and smart and seaman-like in wearing it.

The first part of the promise was a bit trickier.

I promise to serve my God…

Like most English kids of that era, I always put Church of England in the religion box that appeared on every official form. Need to refill your prescription? What religion are you? Need a new passport? What religion are you?

I stopped believing in God on September 5th, 1973 but I didn’t start writing atheist on the forms until I arrived at BRNC Dartmouth, the college for Naval officers in 1988. When I first joined the Navy, my ID tags said C of E. By the time I left, they said ATH.

As far as I know, very few of my school friends believed in God but we were taught to write C of E on those forms anyway and to make promises that we had no intention of keeping. I found this harder to do as the years went by and by the time my own kids were old enough to make promises of their own, I found it impossible to let them make promises that were false.

American readers may remember the case of the gay Eagle Scout who was thrown out of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) because he was gay. But he was not actually thrown out because he was gay but because he was an atheist and he did not agree to the scout’s principle of Duty to God (though he was gay too and they did not like that at all).

As a result of the controversy, the Boy Scouts of America changed their policy to allow gays to join. They later decided to admit girls too and, even later, trans kids. Still no atheists allowed though.

The Boy Scouts of America maintains that no member can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing an obligation to a God. The first part of the Scout Oath declares,

“On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law.”

The Scout’s policy statement clarifies that you don’t have to be an actual Christian or even believe in God as such. Buddhists and Native Americans are welcome as well as a long list of other religions. Boy Scouts of America recognizes around 35 faith groups including Islam, Judaism, Bahá?í Faith, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Sikhism and 28 varieties of Christianity. No atheists or agnostics are allowed though.

When my Little Clown was a lad, two of my friends ran the local scout troop while I coached the soccer team for all three of our boys. My friends suggested that Little Clown should join the scouts.

“On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law.”

When I expressed my doubts about making a promise that I knew to be false, they thought I was stickling unnecessarily. They said that no one really cared whether you believed in that stuff. It was just some words that you had to say to get in the door.

The Sea Cadets have recently updated their handbook to clarify that the promise made to God can refer to any god or none at all. As long as you promise.

The Sea Cadet Promise: I promise to serve my God, my Queen, my country, and, the Sea Cadet Corps and to obey the orders of my superior officers.

Note: My God refers to an individual’s own faith and is intended to apply equally to those from all faiths or none. (Sea Cadets’ Ethos, 2019, p4)

I’m glad they straightened that out.

In the 21st Century, teenagers in the UK are overwhelmingly non-religious. I wonder how many have been excluded from wholesome organisations because of their non-belief and I wonder how many were forced to make a promise that they did not believe.

However, if you found a pocket watch at the end of your garden, you would not suppose that it resulted from natural causes. You would assume that the watch’s intricate design could only have been produced by a designer (Paley, 1803).

This is the argument from design advanced by William Paley in 1803. It can be summarised like this:

Evidence of design is evidence of a designer.

Looking around the natural world, we see evidence of design everywhere. We see design in a baby’s smile, in the intricacy of the human eye and in the beauty of a peacock’s tale. For Paley, the evidence of design in nature convinced him that nature has a designer and that designer is God. It’s a very persuasive argument.

Charles Darwin, in The Origin of the Species (Darwin, 1859), showed that much of the apparent design in nature can be explained by evolution. For example, Darwin showed how a primitive eye can evolve into a complex eye, no designer required. But more modern arguments from design offer examples of complexity in nature that evolutionary scientists have not yet explained.

For example, Stephen Meyer claims that complex molecules like DNA cannot be explained by evolution because evolution requires DNA to work its magic (Meyer, 2009). DNA itself requires a different explanation. Michael Behe says that some features of our anatomy — such as the flagella of bacteria or the blood clotting systems of mammals — are irreducibly complex and could not have evolved because there was no useful precursor to evolve from (Behe, 1996). According to Behe and Meyer, these features are evidence of design and must have had a designer.

Whether you are persuaded by the argument from design will depend on many factors but, whether you are finally persuaded or not, the argument is compelling.

Other arguments for God are less compelling. For example, St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (1033-1109) offered an argument that goes like this:

God is a being greater than which none can be imagined.
God exists as an idea in the mind.
A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.
If God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God.
But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God.
Therefore, God exists.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Anselm’s argument is famously hard to refute and I won’t attempt to refute it here but my question is this: What’s the point?

Is there anyone in the history of Christianity who contemplated Anselm’s Proof and said ‘Oh, yeah. I wasn’t sure before but now I am. God exists and Anselm has proved it.’

Who is the proof for?

William Lane Craig offers an updated version of another ancient proof for God. This argument comes from Islamic theology and, in its updated form, goes like this:

Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.

(Craig, 1979)

So far, so good but then Craig adds another premise and a dramatic conclusion.

If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists who sans (without) the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.

Therefore, an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.

(Craig, 1979)

Again, I have no desire to refute Craig’s argument but I feel obliged to ask why he finds this proof useful and who he thinks will be persuaded by it.

Christian friends of mine have told me that they believe in God because they have experienced evidence of God. Quite right. I would believe in God too, if I experienced evidence of God. But then, if I did experience evidence of God, I would not need Craig’s or Anselm’s arguments. Again, I wonder, who are those arguments for?

Are there people who have not experienced evidence of God but who are persuaded that a personal Creator of the universe exists because everything that exists has a cause and that personal creator is ‘timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful’?

I also struggle with the concept of Christian doubt.

Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, said he sometimes has doubts about his belief in God. In an interview with the BBC, Welby said he doubted in “lots of different ways” (BBC, 2014).

There are moments, sure, when you think, ‘Is there a God?’ ‘Where is God?’

(Welby, 2014)

Doubt is a common theme in Christianity. The Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church acknowledges that doubt is a possibility.

Voluntary doubt about the faith disregards or refuses to hold as true what God has revealed and the Church proposes for belief.

Involuntary doubt refers to hesitation in believing, difficulty in overcoming objections connected with the faith, or also anxiety aroused by its obscurity. If deliberately cultivated doubt can lead to spiritual blindness.

Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2088)

Many Christian apologists say that doubt is a natural part of faith.

Doubt is natural. But, all too often, we think of this as a bad thing for a Christian. Rather than run from it, use it to your advantage. Bring your doubts to God and seek answers to your doubts.

Christianity.com

I can’t imagine what it is like to doubt the existence of God after experiencing evidence of God. I can’t think of another area of my life where I experience a thing and then doubt whether I experienced the thing. I might misremember aspects of, say, a vacation — Did we go to Tenerife this year or last year? — but I don’t doubt the fact of going to Tenerife. If I met Joe Biden, I can’t imagine later doubting whether Joe Biden exists and I’m sure that if I experienced God, I’d remember it.

The canonical example of a Christian with doubt is St. Thomas who doubted the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Now Thomas, called the Twin, one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said to him, “We have seen the Lord.”

So he said to them, “Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.”

And after eight days His disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, “Peace to you!” Then He said to Thomas, “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.”

And Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!”

John 20:24-28

Even St. Thomas required evidence before he believed in the risen Christ. I’m willing to bet that Thomas did not doubt again after poking the risen Christ’s wounds. I started out by wondering who the proofs of God are meant to persuade. I suspect that they would not have persuaded St. Thomas and, after he was persuaded by evidence, the proofs became unnecessary.

It’s not my intention with this essay to encourage anyone to doubt their belief in God. If you have seen evidence of God, you should certainly believe in Him. But if you *have* seen evidence, you should not doubt.

De Botton’s big idea is that the least interesting thing about religion is whether its claims about God are true. We should be more interested in the fact that religions have had a couple of thousand years of experience of understanding and guiding human nature through art, ceremony, and moral codes and through the social interactions that come from sitting together for a couple of hours every Sunday. Religions also make a big deal of celebrating life’s important events and the passage of the seasons.

It’s true that we don’t actually need religion for any of those things. Secular art can be beautiful; we can get our social interactions at a football match on a Saturday afternoon or at quiz night at the pub every Tuesday and there are plenty of non-religious ways to celebrate the seasons. The trouble is: we don’t though. Not really.

Secular artists broke free of the shackles of religion in the 19th century but when was the last time you were truly inspired by a painting? Was it painted in the last 50 years? I didn’t think so. In theory, there is plenty of secular inspiration to be had—De Botton cites Jane Austin and Shakespeare—but they don’t really bring us together the way the Bible or the Ramayana used to.

Earlier this month, I stumbled across an interview with Alain de Botton on Krista Tippet’s On Being podcast where he expands on some of these ideas.

De Botton observes that much of what we think of as typically Christian was originally pilfered from pagan culture—not just Christmas trees and Saturnalia; philosophy and ethics too—and it’s about time we took some of it back.

From Religion for Atheists:

I suppose what I’m arguing for is a kind of reverse colonization. In the same way that Christianity colonized the pagan world absorbing its best elements, so I’m arguing that non-believers today can do a little bit of this with religion just as religion did it with them, because, you know, a lot of what we find in Christianity comes, of course, from Greek philosophy. Even the concept of monasticism was taken from the Epicurean philosophical communities that existed in the Mediterranean world. So an awful lot that seems to us intrinsically religious is not; it’s part of the treasury of mankind. These religions at their highest points, at their most complex and subtle moments, are far too interesting to be abandoned merely to those who believe in them.

Alain de Botton founded The School of Life to lead this recolonisation effort.

The School of Life is devoted to developing emotional intelligence through the help of culture. We address such issues as how to find fulfilling work, how to master the art of relationships, how to understand one’s past, how to achieve calm, and how better to understand and, where necessary change, the world.

From On Being.

I think a lot of what’s attractive in religion is that it puts us in a wider perspective both in time and in place because most of our lives are lived right up against the present moment. We get so stressed. We got so confused. We get so overwhelmed by the kind of people around us, what’s in our diaries, what’s going on right now. And then once a week or more or less, you can go to a religious institution, be it a mosque, a synagogue or church, and you can step outside of the ordinary and you can be brought into contact with very, very old things or very vast things, things that are much greater, deeper, more mysterious than ordinary life. Suddenly that brings a kind of calm to our inner lives because it’s nice to be made to feel small against the backdrop of a vast universe.

At The School of Life’s non-church, they hear sermons, sing hymns and enjoy a nice cup of tea afterwards.

MS. TIPPETT: So, you know, I’ve read a journalist account of coming to “The School of Life” and it’s really interesting. They described it as a place of play and whimsy and big talk, that it’s warm and stylish and serious. I mean, I have to say, I watched a bit online and I watched a sermon that you gave — and that is a word you use, that some of these talks are called sermons. The video I watched, there were a lot of people there that looked like people of all ages and a lot of young people and they were singing “Jerusalem,” this great classic hymn which is at once deeply Christian and deeply British.

MR. DE BOTTON: We could say what on earth is going on?
MS. TIPPETT: Exactly.
MR. DE BOTTON: But, of course, you know, when you talk to people who don’t believe, one of the things they often say is, “Such a pity because the music’s fantastic and the singing is great and I love to have a cup of tea at the end and, you know, chat to neighbors and all the rest of it.”

I have to confess that Jerusalem is one of my favourite songs and I can barely make it through the third verse because I get choked up at the bit about bows of burning gold and arrows of desire. It’s an amazing song.

I think it’s important to sing the original words to sacred hymns like Jerusalem and to not bowdlerise away the religious bits. How profound to wonder, as Blake did, “Was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures seen?”. And how inspiring to pledge to build a new Jerusalem in England’s green & pleasant land?  Would Odysseus’s adventure be as compelling without the mythical creatures? Would Frodo’s tale be so memorable without the immortality of the Elves? Christian mythology has some great stories too. Let’s keep them and learn from them.

The Odyssey and The Lord of the Rings are both moral tales but we don’t really talk about morality in public any more and the hole left by the absence of morality has been filled by commercialism. De Botton would have us reclaim that space too.

So, you know, we don’t live in the kind of completely neutral public space that’s often fantasized about by secular defenders of a kind of neutral liberalism. We are actually assaulted by commercial messages. So religions want to assault us with other messages, messages to be kind and to be good and to forgive and all these things, and they know that having a feeling of being observed, having a public space that is colored by moral atmosphere, all of this can help.

For de Botton, morality is about how we interact with other people and how we deal with the difficult challenges that life confronts us with. We should make more of an effort to learn about life’s lessons together.

MR. DE BOTTON: You know, the modern secular education system is based on the idea that life is essentially a kind of fairly easy process to get through, so you need to teach people certain skills for the modern economy like accountancy and microbiology and all this sort of stuff. But what you don’t need to teach them is how to live because how to live is fairly obvious. All you need to do is, you know, separate yourself from your parents and bring up some children, maybe, and find a job you like, deal with mortality …

MS. TIPPETT: All those really easy things [laugh].

MR. DE BOTTON: All those really easy things, and then confront your own death and it’s just really simple. You don’t need guidance.

So you’re supposed to know this stuff and my question is, how? I don’t know this stuff. And the fascinating starting point of religions, all religions, is they start from the idea that we don’t know how to live and so that’s why they need to teach us wisdom.

Much of the dissonance between religion and secular life comes about because religion has hijacked many of the words that we use to talk about morality and meaning. Words like soul, spirit and sin are rarely used in a secular setting. But the words are important and should still be significant even if we put aside their supernatural meanings.

MS. TIPPETT: So I often make a statement which I think is somewhat controversial that atheists have spiritual lives too. Then it ends up depending on how you’re defining spiritual, but would you say it that way, do atheists have spiritual lives?
MR. DE BOTTON: Of course, I mean …
MS. TIPPETT: Do you have a spiritual life?
MR. DE BOTTON: Yes. I mean, if you — it’s like the word soul, you know. Do atheists have souls? In the strict religious sense, no, but in the loose sense, yes. You’ll know what we mean. If you meet somebody and you say, you know, that person he was quite interesting but he seemed to lack soul or she doesn’t seem to have much soul.
MS. TIPPETT: Right. We have secular ways of using this word.
MR. DE BOTTON: Right. But I think when we use it that way, we’re onto something rather useful. It means an illusion to the deeper sides of a human being, the side that’s going to confront death, the side that’s there at moments of love, the side that is interested in questions of kind of ultimate meaning and direction, the serious stuff, the side of us that kind of we confront at 3:00 a.m. when we’re awoken and suddenly the world seems a challenging place to deal with the in the way that sometimes we might not notice in the kind of busyness of the day. I think that’s the soul bit and, of course, it exists in nonbelievers as much as in believers. Similarly, atheists have amazing moments under the stars as well when atheists look up and see the galaxies and contemplate the sheer nothingness, puniness of humans in the cosmos. It’s just how we choose to interpret it. We don’t leap to a supernatural conclusion. So when I look at the cosmos, I’m not forced to then make the next step, which is to say there must be something out there. Look, there’s so much more in common between believers and nonbelievers than we’re sometimes encouraged to think. At the very last moment under the stars, we may differ about, you know, what’s going on, but we can still have a very nice time together for a long, long part of this journey.

1. Old man with a beard who hears our prayers, created the earth and intervenes in our daily affairs and performs miracles. Someone a lot like the gods who are described in the Old Testament, Greek mythology and the Norse sagas. Let’s call him Pop God.
2. Mysterious force that exists outside of the universe and outside of our comprehension. There cannot possibly be any evidence of this god because it does not interact with our universe in any way that is detectable by humans. This is the god of advanced theologians and eastern orthodox mystics. Let’s call it Mystical God.
3. Future humans or alien civilizations with very advanced technology who are able to to do things that seem miraculous to us. Let’s call them Not Gods.

It’s helpful to pin down which definition of god you are discussing to avoid arguments like this:

Clearly Pop God does not exist but if you atheists would only read more advanced theology you would understand that sophisticated believers believe in a Mystical God who is outside our universe and incomprehensible to our puny minds. There is no evidence for this god and that’s the whole point. You can’t prove that this god does not exist, therefore I am justified in believing in him and, in fact, I am off to pray for my Aunt Jessie right now.

Or this one:

Clearly Pop God does not exist but it’s possible that there is an advanced alien civilization which has a technology sufficiently advanced that it is indistinguishable from magic. It’s possible that Not Gods exist, therefore your statement that there are no gods is founded on an unreasonable faith that is entirely equivalent to belief in Pop God.

This argument is sometimes stated more succinctly as:

Since it’s possible that there are Not Gods, clearly there are gods. Your previous statements about being certain that there are no gods and your claims to be an atheist are therefore invalid.

Let me restate my beliefs addressing each category in turn to avoid confusion.

1. There is no evidence for Pop God. Never has been. All the stories about such a god were made up by men. No such god exists or has even existed. I am certain of it. With regard to Pop God, I am atheist.
2. There is no evidence for Mystical God. Never has been and, according to its adherents, never will be. This god will never interact with my world in any meaningful way and for all practical purposes is indistinguishable from no god at all. With regard to Mystical God I am somewhere between atheist and whatever. I am certainly not agnostic on the topic of Mystical God.
3. There is no evidence for Not Gods. Never has been. There might be one day, but I strongly doubt that I will encounter one in my lifetime. I am certain that none of the gods worshiped by past or existing religions were Not Gods. It’s possible that Not Gods exist but there is no evidence of them. Regarding Not Gods, I am an agnostic. At the very first piece of evidence, I will shed my agnosticism and become a believer.

To summarize:

There are no Gods (pop or mystical). I am certain of it. It’s possible that there are Not Gods though.

Here’s what I believe as an Enlightenist. Atheism is not a driving concern, since belief in God is of little consequence. After all, if there is an interventionist God then there would be continuing demonstrable evidence of such, which there most certainly is not, and if there is a creator God who is non-interventionist then he neither requires nor merits worship, and if there is no God at all then so be it. Therefore you could happily suspect that there might be a non-interventionist God of sorts that could eventually be discovered scientifically and still be an Enlightenist. Since no action needs to be taken until such an unlikely discovery, it doesn’t matter. Now let’s move on.

Practical stuff. Now, having coined a term, she writes a manifesto to go with it.

Enlightenists believe in the awe-inspiring, wonder, beauty and complexity of the universe, and aspire to unpick its mysteries by reason, constant questioning, observation, experiment, and analysis of evidence. The bedrock of our morality is empathy, from which logically springs love, forgiveness, tolerance and a profound desire to make a just, egalitarian society and reduce suffering. The more knowledge a person has, the more they question and understand the real world, and the more they are required to analyse what is true then the greater the increase in empathy. Enlightenists care and wish to do good not because a vengeful God tells them to, but because intelligence suggests it is the only and the right thing to do.

Now she thinks that she is entitled to charter schools too (in the UK, public schools can hook up with a religion and exclude people not of that religion).

So there we have it then, that’s the belief manifesto. Now, where the hell are my bloody state-funded schools? We’re always told about the high performance of superstition schools verses non-denominational ones, but we know that’s because any parent willing to pretend to be religious to get their child in is a parent interested in their child’s education, and involved parents equal successful children. Can you imagine the unseemly scramble for places if we were to be granted a state-funded Enlightenist school? Children would be welcome from any religious or ideological background, with the parents only having to fulfil the brief of allowing their children to be taught in the Enlightenist manner.

All entirely sensible if you ask me.

I wish Muriel were running The Brights instead of Mynga. Then I could call myself an enlightenmentalist or something.