Belief in the afterlife is simply not there for a non-believer. Some of these manoeuvres are accessible to non-believers and some are not. Alain de Botton (How Proust Can Change Your Life) has written another provocative consideration of one of lifes conundrums: the significance of religion in. They are an attempt to control ourselves, heal ourselves and console ourselves. I think the origins of religion are essentially to do with the challenges of living in a community and the challenges of bad stuff happening to us, of which the ultimate is death. The central idea of the book is that religion supplies lots of useful and supportive structures that atheists have rejected along with the supernatural. I think that’s very much the Dawkins view that essentially religion is a species of stupidity, and this seems to be very narrow-minded. So you don’t agree with the “tough-minded critics” who characterise religious people as simpletons and maniacs? You don’t say “I’m an atheist because I’ve looked at all the evidence and this is what I think.” Similarly you don’t say “I’m religious because I’ve surveyed all the evidence.” As the writer and freelance philosopher Alain de Botton argues in Religion for Atheists, cultural and intellectual institutions are no. No, because I think most of us don’t make up our minds in a rational way. These days politics and culture have more modest aims. Your opening gambit in your new book, Religion for Atheists, is to say, of course religions are not true, and you leave it at that. Read more: “ The God issue: New science of religion“ “I want to make sure atheists are deriving some of the benefits of religion”
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