Religion for Athiests - Reviews
Rowland Manthorpe in the Telegraph, 03 February 2012
This book should carry a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-style warning: DON’T PANIC. Don’t panic, this is not another contribution to the “debate” about God, the Eton wall game of contemporary discourse, where no one can see the ball, no one knows what the rules are, and there hasn’t been a goal in more than 100 years. Alain de Botton is an atheist, but he has no time for the “unproductive question” of whether or not religion is true. His concern is the ways in which religions can be useful, even to non-believers. More...
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Charles Moor in the Telegraph, 30 Janurary 2012
'The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of a religion,” say Alain de Bottonin the first sentence of this book, “is whether or not it is true.” Many believers will find this an unpromising start, but de Botton is not writing for them. His book is subtitled “A non-believer’s guide to the uses of religion”. More...
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Jeanette Winterson in the Times
Alain de Botton is a believer — but not in God.
Religion for Atheists begins and ends with the idea that secular society needs its own institutions that give space and support to our inner life. We need systems, structures, rituals, directed reading, fellowship, visual encouragement and regular discipline of the kind the great religions of the world have offered for thousands of years. What we don’t need is the ideology and dogma that comes with a belief in the Divine. More...
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Stephen Cave in the Financial Times, January 20 2012
When the revolutionaries of France began building their new order, they knew it would have to include religion. Even the atheists among them saw that the people needed comforting rituals and sanctioned celebrations to usher them through life. The Christian God, however, had been sent to the guillotine; an alternative was required. Their answer was the Cult of Reason. More...
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Richard Holloway in Literary Review
There are two schools of interpretation in Christian theology that appear to be in direct contradiction to each other but are, in fact, compatible. There is the conservative or 'realist' account of faith, which is a high-octane supernaturalism. It holds that there is a real God out there who made everything that exists and sustains it in being by his providence. He actively intervenes in history and performs miracles that selectively interrupt natural processes, the most scandalous being his own incarnation in the person of a first-century Jew who, before resuming his place at God's right hand in Heaven, established an institution to continue his work on earth until his return at the end of time to punish the wicked and reward the good. More...
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A N Wilson in Spectator, 21 January 2012
Over 125 of the 320 pages in this book are either blank, or taken up with black-and-white illustrations, of subjects as various as Madonna and her former husband Guy Ritchie, slates arranged by Richard Long, Buddhist truth-seekers going for a walk in a wood, and a little boy having his Bar Mitzvah in a New York restaurant. It is in the remaining 200 or so pages that the author must persuade his readers that there is no reason why atheists should not practise a religion, or, if they are not disposed to follow one of the existing cults, why they should not make one up for themselves. More...
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