The varieties of non-religious belief and Alain de Botton’s "Religion for Atheists"

Published in The Melbourne Anglican April 2012

I wonder how many species of atheist you know? In the light of the Global Atheist Convention coming to Melbourne this month, I’m drawing up an atheist taxonomy to make sense of the varieties of non-religious belief. Until recently my neat pigeon-holing of atheism divided my non-believing friends—with no disrespect implied—into the mad and the sad. Let me explain…

The mad atheists typified by the so-called New Atheists, are those at the vanguard of the ‘God wars’ currently fomented by a conflict-crazed media. These people are led by biologist and science populariser Richard Dawkins, the ‘high priest’ of New Atheism and like Dawkins they are very, very angry at religion. Apart from their rage, they can be recognised by 4 further characteristics: their belief that religion is to blame for the world’s woes; their dogma that science is the one and only road to truth; their ability to quote Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy verbatim; and being early adopters of technology, they know that the new iPad is called the New iPad and not the iPad 3.

The sad atheists on the other hand are those who wrestle with the God question seriously. They know that the stakes are high and that without God it is notoriously difficult to make sense of the world or of human life or death or joy or justice or even, at the philosophical end of the spectrum, of truth itself. But despite the cost, the sad atheist is convinced that there is no One who might offer a well of life-giving meaning to quell our anxieties.

Such was my neat dichotomy of atheism until it was rent asunder by popular philosopher Alain de Botton. Unless you are mediaphobic you couldn’t have missed the recent visit to Australia of de Botton; he received copious coverage promoting his book, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion. And it is de Botton who has forced me to expand my taxonomy, adding another category—the glad—to the mad and the sad.

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Why is Heidegger so obscure?

What Heidegger does by writing as he does is to remind us that the things of which he writes are not simple and so his writing points us to them and triggers our thinking about them. We then ask if his ambiguous utterances are the best we can do but we know they are far better than naive thinking that obscures the obscurity of Being.

The varieties of non-religious belief - Alain de Botton and Richard Rorty

Despite the New Atheists' denials that they are any sort of believers at all, atheist beliefs about God and religion seem to come in many varieties. I'm thinking of three: the mad, the glad and the sad.

The mad atheist (think Richard Dawkins' brand of New Atheism) is cranky as hell at religion; the glad atheist (think Alain de Botton and Richard Rorty--more below) floats through the godless life with nary a care for the issues at stake, and the sad atheist knows that the stakes are high but cannot believe in the One who might offer the ground of all being to quell our anxieties.

Currently I'm wrestling with two non-believers of the glad variety--Richard Rorty and Alain de Botton--similar in their conclusions although while de Botton takes a short cut, Rorty takes the long road via a lifetime of serious thinking.

I'm in the process of writing a review of de Botton's Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion. (Published February 2012 by Hamish Hamilton.) RFA's first line is a  shot over the bows of Dawkins and Co. as well as the seriously religious: "The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true."

For de Botton, the tragedy of atheism is to have thrown out some of the wonderful trappings of religion with the dirty bathwater that consists of arguments about religious truth claims. "Of course no religions are true in any god-given sense," says de Botton in the second sentence of the book and then proceeds cheerily to ignore the question that serious thinkers, atheist and religious (and yes, fundamentalists on both sides too) think that matters.

More soon...