Margaret reviewed Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton
A Book of Interesting Ideas But Left with a Feeling of Can't Get There From Here
4 stars
I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this (bought it on a whim having read the back cover blurb and a couple of the first pages). The format of numbered sections & sub-sections, each relatively brief, was a bit off-putting at first but I warmed to it as I read on – a sort of microcosm for what the book was talking about, using a format more usually found in a religious text to frame secular matters.
Overall it was very much up my street – I was brought up in a religious family, attending a (very) High Church Anglo-Catholic church throughout my childhood, but even though my faith lapsed long ago I find myself at times missing the ritual and framework of it. At times I find myself googling in a not-very-hopeful way for secular contemplative rituals (and never finding anything that's not twee or new age or …
I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this (bought it on a whim having read the back cover blurb and a couple of the first pages). The format of numbered sections & sub-sections, each relatively brief, was a bit off-putting at first but I warmed to it as I read on – a sort of microcosm for what the book was talking about, using a format more usually found in a religious text to frame secular matters.
Overall it was very much up my street – I was brought up in a religious family, attending a (very) High Church Anglo-Catholic church throughout my childhood, but even though my faith lapsed long ago I find myself at times missing the ritual and framework of it. At times I find myself googling in a not-very-hopeful way for secular contemplative rituals (and never finding anything that's not twee or new age or flat out religious having done a find & replace on "God" with "Nature"). So the general theme of not throwing the baby of ritual/structure out with the bathwater of superstition was to my tastes.
I thought the book was at its best when de Botton was talking about what he saw as the purposes behind the trappings of religion (much of it about providing structure to one's life and reminding oneself of one's best self; as well as building community through shared experiences).
But it did rather suffer from a "can't get there from here" problem when he started to speculate on how these trappings could be applied in a secular context. Sometimes it felt like his suggestions could only happen if history and people were totally other than they are. And other times it was more that his prescriptions were so vague as to be almost vacuous. To be fair, I don't think providing solutions was the point of the book, even if it did leave me a bit unsatisfied.
Despite that, I do think it will reward a re-read in the future, it has the flavour of a book that will strike me differently each time I read it.