Things I Wish I'd Said

“…’The nirvana would be if the questions raised by Oprah Winfrey would be answered by the faculty at Harvard.’ The questions she asks are the most central – how do we live with other people, how do we cope with our ambitions, how do we survive as a society – though she fails to answer them with anything like seriousness.”

Alain de Botton

Update on Saturday, January 21, 2012 at 10:46AM by Otter

From the Mailbag:

Do you think de Botton is right about religions having their fingers on the buttons of what makes people better? 

I’ve argued extensively in this blog that myth and imagination have a far stronger hold on people than do “rational ethics.”  You might argue somebody out of breaking a shop window, but it’s his imaginative apprehension of his place in the universe that will restrain him when nobody is watching.

That might be (and most ordinarily is) in the form of envisioning a God who represents all rightness and who has the power of rewards and punishments when nobody else is there.  

But there are other, more important and more subtle features in religion: one’s understanding of one’s place in the world, for instance, and one’s relationship to others.  When that’s used for aggression and blind self-love, we get terrorism and fundamentalism.  When it’s used for love, we get self-sacrificial people who believe that it really does matter (whatever the rational arguments might conclude) that one should give up one’s life for one’s friends.

Comments

[Susan]

Judging from the single article you link, I resonate with many of de Botton’s ideas on education and culture. But I’ve always found the (fairly popular) notion that the power of a religion must lie in something other than the god at its center to be somewhat bizarre. There are some definite advantages to divorcing the trappings of a religion from its god—not having to deal with a deity being foremost among them—but retaining the god’s power would not seem to be one of them.

[Otter]

Yes, I think he's approaching this much more "functionally" than a lot of people will be happy with. I have mixed feelings about that myself. I believe that religion is good for many people: both the very intelligent and the very stupid. (I think I fall somewhere in between.) Those who cannot be good without the threat of hell or a divine presence should have religion. Those who are intelligent enough to know that religion is not what it pretends to be but rather a means of structuring a reality that has no other expression are also often in need of it.

But the joker in the pack remains the god in the center of the faith, the reality that religion aims to remember and approach when possible, whatever that might be.