In giving up on so much, we have allowed religion to claim as its exclusive dominion areas of experience which should rightly belong to all mankind — and which we should feel unembarrassed about reappropriating for the secular realm. Early Christianity was itself highly adept at appropriating the good ideas of others, aggressively subsuming countless pagan practices which modern atheists now tend to avoid in the mistaken belief that they are indelibly Christian. The new faith took over celebrations of midwinter and repackaged them as Christmas. It absorbed the Epicurean ideal of living together in a philosophical community and turned it into what we now know as monasticism. And in the ruined cities of the old Roman Empire, it blithely inserted itself into the empty shells of temples once devoted to pagan heroes and themes.
The challenge facing atheists is how to reverse the process of religious colonization: how to separate ideas and rituals from the religious institutions which have laid claim to them but don’t truly own them. For instance, much of what is best about Christmas is entirely unrelated to the story of the birth of Christ. It revolves around themes of community, festivity and renewal which pre-date the context in which they were cast over the centuries by Christianity. Our soul-related needs are ready to be freed of the particular tint given to them by religions — even if it is, paradoxically, the study of religions which often holds the key to their rediscovery and rearticulation.
What follows is an attempt to read the faiths, primarily Christianity and to a lesser extent Judaism and Buddhism, in the hope of gleaning insights which might be of use within secular life, particularly in relation to the challenges of community and of mental and bodily suffering. The underlying thesis is not that secularism is wrong, but that we have too often secularized badly — inasmuch as, in the course of ridding ourselves of unfeasible ideas, we have unnecessarily surrendered some of the most useful and attractive parts of the faiths.
Religions have a habit of squatting on things which did not originally belong to them, as seen here in the Church of San Lorenzo in Miranda, Rome, built in the seventeenth century within the remains of the Roman temple of Antoninus and Faustina. (illustration credit 1.2)
4.
The strategy outlined in this book will, of course, annoy partisans on both sides of the debate. The religious will take offence at a seemingly brusque, selective and unsystematic consideration of their creeds. Religions are not buffets, they will protest, from which choice elements can be selected on a whim. However, the downfall of many a faith has been its unreasonable insistence that adherents must eat everything on the plate. Why should it not be possible to appreciate the depiction of modesty in Giotto’s frescoes and yet bypass the doctrine of the annunciation, or to admire the Buddhist emphasis on compassion and yet shun its theories of the afterlife? For someone devoid of religious belief, it may be no more of a crime to borrow from a number of faiths than it is for a lover of literature to single out a handful of favourite writers from across the canon. If mention is made here of only three of the world’s twenty-one largest religions, it is no sign of favouritism or impatience, just a consequence of the way that the emphasis of this book lies on comparing religion in general with the secular realm, rather than on comparing an array of religions with one another.
Atheists of the militant kind may also feel outraged, in their case by a book that treats religion as though it deserves to be a continuing touchstone for our yearnings. They will point to the furious institutional intolerance of many religions, and to the equally rich, though less illogical and illiberal, stores of consolation and insight available through art and science. They may additionally ask why anyone who professes himself unwilling to accept so many facets of religion — who feels unable to speak up in the name of virgin births, say, or to nod at the claims reverently made in the Jataka tales about the Buddha’s identity as a reincarnated rabbit — should still wish to associate himself with a subject as compromised as faith.
To this the answer is that religions merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition; for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have. They have managed to combine theories about ethics and metaphysics with a practical involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, hostelry, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture — a range of interests which puts to shame the scope of the achievements of even the greatest and most influential secular movements and individuals in history. For those interested in the spread and impact of ideas, it is hard not to be mesmerized by examples of the most successful educational and intellectual movements the planet has ever witnessed.
5.
To conclude, this book does not endeavour to do justice to particular religions; they have their own apologists. It tries, instead, to examine aspects of religious life which contain concepts that could fruitfully be applied to the problems of secular society. It attempts to burn off religions’ more dogmatic aspects in order to distil a few aspects of them that could prove timely and consoling to sceptical contemporary minds facing the crises and griefs of finite existence on a troubled planet. It hopes to rescue some of what is beautiful, touching and wise from all that no longer seems true.
II
Community
(illustration credit 2.1)
i. Meeting Strangers
1.
One of the losses modern society feels most keenly is that of a sense of community. We tend to imagine that there once existed a degree of neighbourliness which has been replaced by ruthless anonymity, a state where people pursue contact with one another primarily for restricted, individualistic ends: for financial gain, social advancement or romantic love.
Some of our nostalgia centres around our reluctance to give charitably to others in distress, but we are as likely to be concerned with pettier symptoms of social separation, our failure to say hello to one another in the street, for instance, or to help elderly neighbours with the shopping. Living in gargantuan cities, we tend to be imprisoned within tribal ghettos based on education, class and profession and may come to view the rest of humanity as an enemy rather than as a sympathetic collective we would aspire to join. It can be extraordinary and odd to start an impromptu conversation with an unknown person in a public space. Once we are past the age of thirty, it is even somewhat surprising to make a new friend.
In attempting to understand what could have eroded our sense of community, an important role has traditionally been accorded to the privatization of religious belief that occurred in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century. Historians have suggested that we began to disregard our neighbours at around the same time as we ceased communally to honour our gods. This begs the question of what religions might have done, prior to that time, to enhance the spirit of community, and, more practically, whether secular society could ever recover this spirit without relying on the theological superstructure with which it was once entwined. Could it be possible to reclaim a sense of community without having to base it on religious foundations?