Alcibiades Cleiniou Scambonides

The ideal, Periclean Athenian sees in planning, forethought and caution nothing but specious pretexts of inaction and cowardice. The city endeavored to test whether humanity, when freed as much as possible from restraints, will become an enemy to all restraint and return to barbarism.

This means the Athenian character is inherently fraught with dangers. Athenian cunning eventually devolves into viciousness, a trait that turns the mainstay of the society into a thing of contempt, where even the winners cannot relax because of the pervading fear and distrust.

Alcibiades was aware of and sought to circumvent Athenian devolution. His primary traits were those of equanimity amid the vicissitudes of life and impatience of dishonor and he was one of the first universal men.

John Cheever

With characteristic brevity and diffidence, he only tells us, toward the end, that he loved the light and that he was determined to trace some moral chain of being - no simple matter in a world that, in his own words, lies "spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream." His intention was, however, not only to find evidence of a moral life in a disorderly society but also to give us the poetry of the bewildering and stupendously dreamlike world in which we find ourselves. There are few people around who set themselves such a task, who put their souls to work in such a way. "Normal America" might ask, if it were inclined to formulate such a question, "What sense does that actually make?" Perhaps not much, as "sense" is commonly defined. But there are other definitions. For me no one makes more sense, no one is so interesting, as a man who engages his soul in an enterprise of this kind. I find myself, as I grow older, increasingly drawn to those who live as John did. Those who chose such enterprise, who engage in such a struggle, make all the interest of life for us. The life John led leaves us in his debt. We are his debtors, and we are indebted to him even for the quality of the pain we feel at his death.

How Experience Affects Innocence

He looked at her again; and then, very gently, 'No I will not avoid you,' he replied; 'but I will leave you, for the present, to yourself. I think you will remember - after a while - some of the things you have forgotten. I think you will come back to me; I have great faith in that.'

This time his voice was very touching; there was a strong, reproachful force in what he said, and Gertrude could answer nothing. He turned away and stood there, leaning his elbows on the gate and looking at the beautiful sunset. Gertrude left him and took her way home again; but when she reached the middle of the next field she suddenly burst into tears. Her tears seemed to her to have been a long time gathering, and for some moments it was a kind of glee to shed them. But they presently passed away. There was something a little hard about Gertrude, and she never wept again.

Alain de Botton

The most boring question to ask about religion is whether or not the whole thing is 'true.' The tragedy of modern atheism is to have ignored just how many aspects of religion continue to be interesting even when the central tenets of the great faiths are discovered to be entirely implausible. Indeed its precisely when we stop believing in the idea that gods made religions that things become interesting, for it is then that we can focus on the human imagination which dreamt these creeds up. We can recognize that the needs which led people to do so must still in some way be alive, albeit dormant, in modern secular man. God may be dead, but the bit of us that made god continues to stir.

My guess is that humanity is slowly rediscovering what it lost when it the developed world went secular in the 20th century. It seems evident that what we now need is not a choice between atheism and religion - but a new secular religion: a religion for atheists. What would such a peculiar idea involve? For a start, lots of new buildings akin to churches, temples and cathedrals. These great works of ecclesiastical architecture perform the very clever and eternally useful function of relativizing those who walk inside them. We feel small inside a cathedral and recognize the debt that sanctity owes to such a feeling.

In addition, a secular religion would use all the tools of art in order to create an effective kind of propaganda in the name of kindness and virtue. Rather than seeing art as a tool to shock and surprise, a secular religion would return to an earlier view that art should improve us. It should be a form of propaganda for a better, nobler life.

A secular religion would deeply challenge liberal ideology. Most contemporary governments and even private bodies are devoted to a rather contentless conception of help, they want to help people to be more prosperous and yet they make no suggestions about what these people might do with their lives. This is the opposite of what religions have traditionally done, which is to teach people about good ways of imagining the human condition and about what to strive for and to esteem. Modern charities and governments seek to provide opportunities - but are not very thoughtful about, or excited by, what people might do with those opportunities.

There is a long philosophical and cultural history which explains why we've reached the condition known as modern secular society. Yet it seems there's no compelling argument to stay here much longer in 2010.

(Come all ye faithless, January 2010)