"God is dead! Can I have his stuff?"

Zac Alstin reviews Alain de Botton's "Religion for Atheists."

I listened to Justin Brierley's conversation with Bottin on Unbelievable. As with all of Brierley's shows, it's well worth listening to.

The best that can be said about Botton's "pitch" is that he testifies to the human need for the numinous, even when that need is found in a person who is crippled by upbringing from being able to fully appreciate the numinous, kind of like a blind person who wants to experience the beauty of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" but can't.

The worst is that Botton likes pretty things to fill up his day.

In Christianity, the opposite of "religion" is not "spirituality"; it is "superstition."

A Facebook post made the following observation:

This was posted today from one of my friends who is a very Emergent Christian. "The most boring and unproductive question a person can ask of a religion is whether or not it's true" - Alain de Botton

It may not be the case that Alain de Botton and the emergent guy are indifferent to the truth. What they may be saying is that "talking about religion" is the problem because simply talking about religion can in no way get us to the truth. Religion is one of those things, according to this view, which is not subject to discussion because it is motstly or entirely subjective - something proven or not proven in the interiority of the human.

Of course, the problem with that perspective is that it makes communication impossible because unless there is something objective about the thing we are discussing, then everyone's separate "interiority" is equally uncommunicable - perhaps even the statement that ""The most boring and unproductive question a person can ask of a religion is whether or not it's true" is itself an incommunicable thought.

Pope John Paul II in Fides et Ratio offered this on the problem of defining the religious as incommunicable:

"Deprived of reason, faith has stressed feeling and experience, and so run the risk of no longer being a universal proposition. It is an illusion to think that faith, tied to weak reasoning, might be more penetrating; on the contrary, faith then runs the grave risk of withering into myth or superstition."

Pope Benedict XVI follows up on the role of reason in Christianity and his tour de force at Regensburg, a part of which is the following:

"The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate."

We are either reasoning creatures or we are not. God has either made reason a touchpoint for everyone or He has not. If either of those two statements are true, then any belief that cannot be proven by contingent, empirical data is mere superstition.

And if that last bit is true, then who cares what Alain de Botton "thinks"?