Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (27 page)

4.
After successfully defining their identity, many corporations have gone on to engage in what business writers refer to as ‘brand extension', the process whereby a company revered for its approach in one commercial sector carries over its values into another. Companies that began by making suits, for example, have realized that their values could just as effectively be applied to the design of belts and sunglasses, from which point it was only a short leap to imagine translation into furniture, then restaurants, apartments and eventually whole holiday resorts. These companies have wisely recognized that their customers' allegiance is to an ethos rather than to a single product, and that the beauty and goodness that were first distinguished in a tie could be no less present in a chair leg, an entrée or a sun lounger.

Inertia or unnecessary modesty has to date, however, prevented the most vigorous of modern companies from extending their brands across the full range of human requirements and, most cogently for the purposes of the present discussion, from applying their expertise to the apex of Maslow's famous pyramid of needs. Corporations have instead chosen to set up shop along the base of this pyramid, making minor improvements to services and products designed to help us to sleep, eat, be safe or move while leaving unaddressed our desire to self-actualize, learn, love and inwardly grow. It is a failing of historic proportions, for instance, that BMW's concern for rigour and precision has ended so conclusively at the bumpers of its cars rather than stretching to the founding of a school or
of a political party, or that
Giorgio Armani's eponymous corporation has determinedly skirted the possibility of running a therapy unit or a liberal arts college.

Intellectual movements have likewise, and just as regrettably, shunned attempts at brand extension. They have failed to imagine that their ideas could generate complementary, analogous services and products in the material realm, and become more vivid to us for having physical equivalents.

What makes religions so distinctive is that they have dared to assert coherent brand identities across a diverse range of areas, from the strictly intellectual and theological to the aesthetic, sartorial and culinary. Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism have all succeeded in relating larger ideas about the salvation of mankind to such subordinate material activities as managing weekend retreats, radio stations, restaurants, museums, lecture halls and clothing lines.

Because we are embodied creatures – sensory animals as well as rational beings – we stand to be lastingly influenced by concepts only when they come at us through a variety of channels. As religions seem alone in properly understanding, we cannot be adequately marked by ideas unless, in addition to being delivered through books, lectures and newspapers, they are also echoed in what we wear, eat, sing, decorate our houses with and bathe in.

5.
One way of describing the activities of companies and religions is as forms of
commodification – the process whereby haphazardly available, ill-defined goods are transformed into named, recognizable, well-stocked and well-presented entities.

We are familiar enough with this process as it is carried out by corporations trading in material things: time and again, companies have scoured the globe in search of previously scarce consumer items and brought regularity to the supply of tea and paprika, kiwis and papaya, sparkling water and jojoba oil. Religions have demonstrated comparable abilities in the spiritual realm, managing, through the use of ritual, to rescue moments and feelings that under other circumstances might have been overlooked or forgotten, but which have instead – thanks to a religious version of commodification – acquired ennobling names and fixed dates in calendars.

We have almost all had the experience of gazing at the night sky in September, when the alignment of the planets makes the full moon look especially bright and close by. We may briefly have pondered its majesty and the challenge it poses to our normal, earth-centric perspective. But those of us who are neither astronomers nor astronauts are unlikely to have formalized our lunar observation in any way, or indeed to have given it much further thought beyond a few minutes of contemplation.

For Zen Buddhists in Japan, however, the ritual known as
tsukimi
has thoroughly commodified the business of moon-watching. Every year, on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the traditional Japanese lunisolar calendar, followers gather at nightfall around specially constructed cone-shaped viewing platforms, where for several hours prayers are read aloud which use the moon as a springboard for reflections on Zen ideas of impermanence. Candles are lit and white rice dumplings called
tsukimi dango
are prepared and shared out among strangers in an atmosphere at once companionable and serene. A feeling is thereby supported by a ceremony, by architecture, by good company and by food – and so lent a secure place in every Japanese Zen Buddhist's life.

Religions bring scale, consistency and outer-directed force to what might otherwise always remain small, random, private moments. They give substance to our inner dimensions – precisely those parts of us which
Romanticism prefers to leave unregulated, for fear of hampering our chances of authenticity. They don't solely relegate our feelings to volumes of poetry or essays, knowing that books are in the end hushed objects in a noisy world. When it is springtime, Judaism takes hold of us with a force that Wordsworth or Keats never employed: at the first blossoming of trees, the faithful are told to gather outdoors with a rabbi and together recite the
birkat ilanot
, a ritual prayer from the
Talmud honouring the hand that made the blossom:

We need institutions to foster and protect those emotions to which we are sincerely inclined but which, without a supporting structure and a system of active reminders, we will be too distracted and undisciplined to make time for.

The secular, Romantic world sees in commodification only loss, of diversity, quality and spontaneity. But at its finest the process enables fragile, rare but important aspects of existence to be more easily identified and more dependably shared. Those of us who hold no religious or supernatural beliefs still require regular, ritualized encounters with concepts such as friendship, community, gratitude and transcendence. We cannot rely on being able to make our way to them on our own. We need institutions that can remind us that we need them and present them to us in appealing wrappings – thus ensuring the nourishment of the most forgetful and un-self-aware sides of our souls.

6.
Plato's hope that philosophers might be kings, and kings philosophers, was to be partially realized many hundreds of years after he expressed it in the
Republic
, when in AD 313, thanks to the efforts of Emperor
Constantine, Jesus took up his position at the head of a gigantic state-sponsored Christian Church and thereby became the first quasi-philosophical ruler to succeed in propagating his beliefs with institutional support. A similar combination of power and thought can be found in all the major religions, alliances which we can admire and learn from without necessarily subscribing to any of their ideologies.
The question we face now is how to ally the very many good ideas which currently slumber in the recesses of intellectual life with those organizational tools, many of them religious in origin, which stand the best chance of giving them due impact in the world.

ii:
Auguste Comte

1.
This book is not the first to attempt to reconcile an antipathy towards the supernatural side of religion with an admiration for certain of its ideas and practices; nor is it the first to be interested in a practical rather than a merely theoretical effect. Out of the many efforts in this line, the most determined was undertaken in the nineteenth century by the visionary, eccentric and only intermittently sane French sociologist Auguste Comte.

Comte's ideas proceeded from a characteristically blunt observation that in the modern world, thanks to the discoveries of science, it would no longer be possible for anyone intelligent to believe in God. Faith would henceforth be limited to the uneducated, the fanatical, children and those suffering the final stages of incurable diseases. At the same time, Comte recognized, as many of his contemporaries did not, that a secular society devoted solely to the accumulation of wealth, scientific discovery, popular entertainment and romantic love – a society lacking in any sources of ethical instruction, consolation, transcendent awe or solidarity – would fall prey to untenable social maladies.

Comte's solution was neither to cling blindly to sacred traditions nor to cast them collectively and belligerently aside, but rather to identify their more relevant and rational aspects and put them to use. The resulting programme, the outcome of decades' worth of thought and the summit of Comte's
intellectual achievement, was a new religion, a religion for atheists or, as Comte termed it, a Religion of Humanity, an original creed expressly tailored to the specific emotional and intellectual demands of modern man, rather than to the needs of the inhabitants of Judaea at the dawn of the Christian era or of northern India four centuries before that.

Comte presented his new religion in two volumes, the
Summary Exposition of the Universal Religion
and the
Theory of the Future of Man
. He was convinced that humanity was still at the beginning of its history and that all kinds of innovation – however bold and far-fetched they might initially sound – were possible in the religious field, just as in the scientific one. There was no need to stay loyal to beliefs dating from a time when humans had barely learned how to fashion a wheel, let alone build a steam engine. As Comte pointed out, no one intent on starting a new religion from scratch in the modern era would dream of proposing anything as hoary and improbable as the rituals and precepts bequeathed to us by our ancestors. The age he lived in, he asserted, afforded him a historic opportunity to edit out the absurdities of the past and to create a new version of religion which could be embraced because it was appealing and useful, rather than be clung to because it induced fear and represented itself as the only passport to a better life.