Religion for atheists - review

Religion for Atheists
by Alain de Botton
(Hamish Hamilton, £18.99)

Popular philosopher Alain de Botton is a non-believer, from an atheist family, who enjoys all the benefits of secular life. For him, the rituals and trappings of religion are so distant that he finds them charming, quaint, even inspiring.

He thinks that by reintroducing some of these rituals in secular form we might restore the soulful dimension lacking from modern society. At least, he pretends to think this. Disingenuous, half-baked, beautifully written and drolly sincere, this book feels like a spoof Radio 4 Thought for the Day.

Wouldn't it be nice, he says, if we could all sit down together, rich and poor, black and white, and eat for a "modest" fee at a restaurant called "Agape" (divine love)? De Botton does not say if this enterprise would be commercial, state-funded, tax-deductable, obligatory or voluntary - let others work that out.

De Botton is a fount of pure ideas. He longs to share them. To tell museum curators how to organise their collections - first floor, Gallery of Suffering; second floor, Gallery of Compassion. To help artists decide what to paint - "Christianity never expected its artists to decide what their works of art would be about; it was left to theologians [] It would be useful if our secular artists were occasionally to create works which took parental care as their central theme." He even wants to control conversation at the Agape restaurant, with a crib sheet coaxing diners away from the one-upmanship of "'Where do your children go to school?' towards a more sincere revelation of themselves - 'What do you regret?' 'Who can you not forgive?'"

De Botton's tone is often rabbinical, as if he can see our souls with X-ray specs: we are "suffering from the missing invitation, or the unanswered letter", we are "weak-willed", "sexually aloof", "infantile, incomplete, unfinished, easily tempted and sinful". We forget what we have learned in museums "by the time we reach the car park". And as for marriage - oh dear. "We grow thoughtless and mendacious towards each other. We surprise ourselves with our rudeness. We become deceitful and vindictive." His conception of humanity sometimes feels artificially low, in order to justify the medicine of his bright ideas, his avowedly "paternalistic strategies".

Sceptical of relentless morning and night news programming - a "transubstantiated" matins and vespers - he would like to see instead a nightly minute of silence observed, for us to contemplate the 200-400 billion stars in our galaxy and the 100billion galaxies beyond. It would give us "perspective" and "console us for our hatred of someone who hadn't called us back". It's a moment of beautifully created bathos.

A faux-naif style is a trademark of De Botton, and it has helped him, in the past, to write freshly about the oldest problems in the book - love, work and Proust. This manifesto feels equally gripping, because it is so bizarre.

When De Botton recommends we resurrect the medieval Feast of Fools by joyfully copulating with strangers on the tables of the Agape restaurant, a feeling that we are being hoaxed creeps over us. That is confirmed when he suggests we should imitate medieval pilgrims and "deposit wax versions of our anxieties" at shrines across the world. In the final chapter, he blithely tells us he has been following in the footsteps of the French sociologist and founder of the secular "Religion of Humanity" Auguste Comte, "visionary, eccentric and only intermittently sane". In other words, the manifesto we have just read is a jeu d'espirit, a self-satire, a paper dart intended to sail between the two warring, intransigent camps of believers and atheists, confusing and annoying both of them.

He has already anticipated the religious response. "Religions are not buffets, they will protest, from which choice elements can be selected on a whim. However, the downfall of many a faith has been its unreasonable insistence that adherents must eat everything on the plate."

It is frustrating to see a non-believer riddling so playfully, as if we lived in a post-religious world, when in fact religious privilege is still rife. But De Botton is enjoying himself here, and we should take him in good humour.