Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (12 page)

However powerful any proposition may be, it becomes so much more so in front of a crowd of 500 people who exclaim in unison after every point:

There is little chance of resisting a theological argument which flows like this one, from the stage of the New Vision Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee:

The contrast with the typical lecture in the humanities could hardly be more damning. And unnecessary. What purpose can possibly be served by the academy's primness? How much more expansive the scope of meaning in Montaignes essays would seem if a 100-strong and transported chorus were to voice its approval after every sentence. How much longer might Rousseau's philosophical truths linger in our consciousness if they were structured around rhythmical verses of call-and-response. Secular education will never succeed in reaching its potential until humanities lecturers are sent to be trained by African-American Pentecostal preachers. Only then will our timid pedagogues be able to shake off their inhibitions during lectures on Keats or
Adam Smith and, unconstrained by false notions of propriety, call out to their comatose audiences, ‘Do you hear me? I say do you
hear
me?' And only
then
will their now-tearful
students fall to their knees, ready to let the spirit of some of the world's most important ideas enter and transform them.

4.
Aside from needing to be delivered eloquently, ideas also have to be repeated to us constantly. Three or five or ten times a day, we must be forcibly reminded of truths that we love but otherwise will not be able to hold on to. What we read at nine in the morning we will have forgotten by lunchtime and will need to reread by dusk. Our inner lives must be lent a structure and our best thoughts reinforced to counter the continuous pull of distraction and disintegration.

Religions have been wise enough to establish elaborate calendars and schedules which lay claim to the lengths as well as the depths of their followers' lives, letting no month, day or hour escape without administration of a precisely calibrated dose of ideas. In the detailed way in which they tell the faithful what to read, think, sing and do at almost every moment, religious agendas seem at once sublimely obsessive and calmingly thorough. The
Book of Common
Prayer, for instance, decrees that its subscribers should always gather at six-thirty in the evening on the twenty-sixth Sunday after Trinity, as the candlelight throws shadows against the chapel walls, to listen to a reading from the second section of the deuterocanonical Book of Baruch, just as on 25 January they must always think of the Conversion of St Paul, and on the morning of 2 July reflect on the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and
imbibe the moral lessons of Job 3. Schedules are more exacting still for Catholics, whose days are punctuated by no fewer than seven occasions for prayer. Every evening at ten they must, for example, scan their consciences, read a Psalm, declare
In manus tuas, Domine
(‘Into your hands, Lord'), sing the
Nunc dimittis
from the second chapter of the Gospel of St Luke and conclude with a hymn to the mother of Jesus (‘Virgin now and always, take pity on us sinners').

How free secular society leaves us by contrast. It expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. Like science, it privileges discovery. It associates repetition with punitive shortage, presenting us with an incessant stream of new information – and therefore it prompts us to forget everything.

For example, we are enticed to go to the cinema to see a newly released film, which ends up moving us to an exquisite pitch of sensitivity, sorrow and excitement. We leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire existence in light of the values shown on screen, and to purge ourselves of our decadence and haste. And yet by the following evening, after a day of meetings and aggravations, our cinematic experience is well on its way towards obliteration, just like so much else which once impressed us but which we soon enough came to discard: the majesty of the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, the poetry recital in Edinburgh, the feelings we had after putting down Tolstoy's
The
Death of Ivan Ilyich
. In the end, all modern artists share something of the bathetic condition of chefs, for whereas their works may not themselves erode, the responses of their audiences will. We honour the power of culture but rarely admit with what scandalous ease we forget its individual monuments. Three months after we finish reading a masterpiece, we may struggle to remember a single scene or phrase from it.

Our favourite secular books do not alert us to how inadequate a one-off linear
reading of them will prove. They do not identify the particular days of the year on which we ought to reconsider them, as the holy books do – in the latter case with 200 others around us and an organ playing in the background. There is arguably as much wisdom to be found in the stories of
Anton Chekhov as in the
Gospels, but collections of the former are not bound with calendars reminding readers to schedule a regular review of their insights. We would face grave accusations of eccentricity if we attempted to construct liturgies from the works of secular authors. At best, we haphazardly underline a few of the sentences that we most admire in them and which we may once in a while chance upon in an idle moment waiting for a taxi.

The followers of the faiths feel no such inhibitions. For Jews, the ritual of reading aloud the Five Books of Moses, two sections at a time, on a Monday and a Thursday, has lain at the heart of their religion since the end of the Babylonian captivity in 537 BC. On the twenty-second day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei, the holiday of Simchat
Torah marks the end of one read-through of the Books and the start of the next, with the final section of Deuteronomy and the first of Genesis
being recited back to back. The congregant who has been assigned to read Deuteronomy 34:1–12 is quaintly designated the
Chatan Torah
(‘bridegroom of the Torah'), while the one in charge of reading Genesis 1 is referred to as the
Chatan Bereshit
(‘bridegroom of Genesis'). We secular types may think we love books, but how lacklustre our attachment must seem compared with that of the two bridegrooms who make seven circuits around the synagogue, chanting out their joy and beseeching God, ‘
Hoshiah na
' (‘Deliver us') while the other members of the congregation wave flags, kiss one another and shower sweets on all the children present. How regrettable that when we turn the final page of
Marcel Proust's
Time Regained
, our own society would consider us peculiar indeed if we went on to compete for the honour of being the bridegroom of
Swann's Way
(
Chatan Bereshit shel betzad shel Swann
).

5.
Secular life is not, of course, unacquainted with calendars and schedules. We know them well in relation to work, and accept the virtues of reminders of lunch meetings, cash-flow projections and tax deadlines. We somehow feel, however, that it would be a violation of our spontaneity to be presented with rotas for rereading
Walt Whitman or
Marcus Aurelius. Moved though we may be by
Leaves of Grass
or the
Meditations
, we deny that there might be any need, if we wish these books to have a genuine influence on our lives, of revisiting them daily. We are more alarmed by the potentially asphyxiating effects of
being compelled to have structured encounters with ideas than by the notion that we might otherwise be in danger of forgetting them altogether.

But forget them we do. The modern world is dense with stimuli, of which none is more insistent than that torrent which we capture with the term ‘
news'. This entity occupies in the secular sphere much the same position of authority that the liturgical calendar has in the religious one, its main dispatches tracking the canonical hours with uncanny precision: matins have here been transubstantiated into the breakfast bulletin, and vespers into the evening report.

The prestige of the news is founded on the unstated assumption that our lives are forever poised on the verge of critical transformation thanks to the two driving forces of modern history: politics and technology. The earth must therefore be latticed with fibre-optic cables, the waiting rooms of its airports filled with monitors and the public squares of cities ribboned with the chase of stock prices.

For religions, by contrast, there is seldom any need to alter insights or harvest them incrementally through news bulletins. The great stable truths can be written down on vellum or carved into stone rather than swilling malleably across handheld screens. For 1.6 billion Buddhists, there has been no news of world-altering significance since 483 BC. For their Christian counterparts, the critical events of history came to a close around Easter Sunday in AD 30, while for the Jews the line was drawn a little after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Roman general Titus in AD 70.

Even if we do not concur with the specific messages that religions schedule for us, we can still concede that we have paid a price for our promiscuous involvement with novelty. We occasionally sense the nature of our loss at the end of an evening, as we finally silence the television after watching a report on the opening of a new railway or the tetchy conclusion to a debate over immigration and realize that – in attempting to follow the narrative of man's ambitious progress towards a state of technological and political perfection – we have sacrificed an opportunity to remind ourselves of quieter truths which we know about in theory and forget to live by in practice.

6.
Our peculiar approach to culture spills over from education into associated fields. Comparably suspect assumptions are rife, for example, in the manufacture and sale of books.

Here too we are presented with infinitely more material than we can ever assimilate and we struggle to hold on to what matters most to us. A moderately industrious undergraduate pursuing a degree in the humanities at the beginning of the twenty-first century might run through 800 books before graduation day; by comparison, a wealthy English family in 1250 would have counted itself fortunate to have three books in its possession, this modest library consisting of a Bible, a collection of prayers and a compendium of lives of the saints – these nevertheless costing as much as a cottage. If we lament our book-swamped age, it is because we sense that it is not
by reading more, but by deepening and refreshing our understanding of a few volumes that we best develop our intelligence and our sensitivity. We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

We are often urged to celebrate not only that there are so many books to hand, but also that they are so inexpensive. Yet neither of these circumstances should necessarily be deemed unambiguous advantages. The costly and painstaking craftsmanship behind a pre-Gutenberg
Bible – revealed in the illuminated flowers in the margins, the naive drawings of Jonah and the whale and the brilliant blue skies dotted with exotic birds above the Virgin – was the product of a society which accepted containment as the basis for immersion, and which wished to elevate individual books into objects of extraordinary beauty so as to emphasize their spiritual and moral significance.