‘We are all each others’ interpreters – a process requiring trust and rootedness.’ Photo: by Andrei Panfiloiu on Unsplash
A process of creativity, hospitality and courtesy? Peter Bevan investigates ‘Implicit Religion’
‘Theology should focus on understanding life and the world as experienced by people in the messy process of living.’
In Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton identifies two sets of human needs that secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill. The first of these is the need to live together in communities, despite our deeply-rooted selfish and violent impulses. The second is the need to cope with terrifying degrees of mental pain, from professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones, and to our own decay and demise. God may be dead, says de Botton, but the urgent issues that impel us to invent God still demand resolutions. He concludes, in his introductory pages, that it is possible to remain a committed atheist but still find religions sporadically useful, interesting and consoling, and be curious as to the possibilities of importing certain of their ideas and practices into the secular realm. From this perspective he identifies the daily interaction of the secular with the sacred.
