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)