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March 12, 2012
This is a wonderfully provocative book. Its author, the accomplished essayist Alain de Botton, can only be described as a lapsed secularist. Raised as a “committed atheist,” he remains skeptical of truth claims raised on behalf of religion.
“The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true – in terms of being handed down from heaven to the sound of trumpets. … Let us bluntly state that of course no religion is true in any god-given sense.”
Score one for Voltaire and Hitchens. But de Botton is far from simply rejecting religion: “The premise of this book is that it must be possible to remain a committed atheist and nevertheless to find religion sporadically useful, interesting, and consoling.”
If anything, this understates de Botton’s case. The book is an extended sermon on the truth that if God did not exist we would have to invent him – with the rider that He didn’t, so we did. More precisely, “we invented religion to serve two central needs, … the need to live together in communities … and the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain.” “God may be dead,” but we need Him as much as ever.