Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion is selling http://goo.gl/21LyL and (atheist) philosopher Julian Baggini tries praying. I sense a disturbance in the force…
Perhaps we can begin to move away from the bizarre spectacle of otherwise perfectly sensible journalists (Hitchens) or Zoologists (Dawkins) spending valuable time either talking at the brick walls of fundamentalism or smugly accepting applause from a crowd of acolytes. Perhaps we can stop treating religion as if its empirical claims had to be endlessly debated; and see instead if there's anything of use left in them.
Baggini writes:
…practices that are created ex nihilo can fail to have the same purchase as those which have a long history and are validated by tradition and doctrine. I once spoke about this and after the talk a woman came up to me and explained how she had tried to instigate a secular grace before her family meals. This is a kind of prayer I feel is particularly valuable. In a world of waste and taken-for-granted western plenty, to remind ourselves of our good fortune before a meal seems to me morally right. The trouble was that as an invented ritual, it seemed artificial, whimsical. In the end, she gave up
The social reality of faith and its manifestations provided, for so long, a means of transmitting and reinforcing ethical norms. It's simply not sufficient for atheists and humanists to pretend that the only argument to have is one about a conjuring trick with bones. There is a something that needs replacing.
Larkin ponders the question in his poem, Church Going, imagining a future when nobody knows or remembers the purpose of churches and wondering if they'll still retain some sense of being special.
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
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http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/church-going/
