Religion for Atheists Quotes

“It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.”
― alain de botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness. Christianity and Judaism present marriage not as a union inspired and governed by subjective enthusiasm but rather, and more modestly, as a mechanism by which individuals can assume an adult position in society and thence, with the help of a close friend, undertake to nurture and educate the next generation under divine guidance. These limited expectations tend to forestall the suspicion, so familiar to secular partners, that there might have been more intense, angelic or less fraught alternatives available elsewhere. Within the religious ideal, friction, disputes and boredom are signs not of error, but of life proceeding according to plan.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“Solitary though we may have become, we haven't of course given up all hope of forming relationships. In the lonely canyons of the modern city, there is no more honoured emotion than love. However, this is not the love of which religions speak, not the expansive, universal brotherhood of mankind; it is a more jealous, restricted and ultimately meaner variety. It is a romantic love which sends us on a maniacal quest for a single person with whom we hope to achieve a life-long and complete communion, one person in particular who will spare us any need for people in general.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves -- that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) -- who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“Secular society has been unfairly impoverished by the loss of an array of practices and themes which atheists typically find it impossible to live with because they seem too closely associated with, to quote Nietzsche’s useful phrase, ‘the bad odours of religion’. We have grown frightened of the word morality. We bridle at the thought of hearing a sermon. We flee from the idea that art should be uplifting or have an ethical mission. We don’t go on pilgrimages. We can’t build temples. We have no mechanisms for expressing gratitude. Strangers rarely sing together. We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“با توجه به پیشرفت علم، برای انسان مدرن دیگر توان اعتقاد به خدا وجود نخواهد داشت. درنتیجه دین و ایمان بازیچه‌ای می‌شود در دست افراطی‌ها و کسانی که در مراحل پایانی زجر و درد از بیماری علاج ناپذیر قرار دارند.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“But we would do well to meditate daily, rather as the religious do on their God, on the 9.5 trillion kilometres which comprise a single light year, or perhaps on the luminosity of the largest known star in our galaxy, Eta Carinae, 7,500 light years distant, 400 times the size of the sun and 4 million times as bright. We should punctuate our calendars with celebrations in honour of VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant in the constellation Canis Major, 5,000 light years from earth and 2,100 times bigger than our sun. Nightly – perhaps after the main news bulletin – we might observe a moment of silence in order to contemplate the 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the 100 billion galaxies and the 3 septillion stars in the universe. Whatever their value may be to science, the stars are in the end no less valuable to mankind as solutions to our megalomania, self-pity and anxiety. To answer our need to be repeatedly connected through our senses to ideas of transcendence, we should insist that a percentage of all prominently positioned television screens on public view be hooked up to live feeds from the transponders of our extraplanetary telescopes. We would then be able to ensure that our frustrations, our broken hearts, our hatred of those who haven’t called us and our regrets over opportunities that have passed us by would continuously be rubbed up against, and salved by, images of galaxies such as Messier 101, a spiral structure which sits towards the bottom left corner of the constellation Ursa Major, 23 million light years away, majestically unaware of everything we are and consolingly unaffected by all that tears us apart.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one--that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“The signal danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings – much to their detriment – are at risk of taking psychological centre stage. They imagine themselves to be commanders of their own destinies, they trample upon nature, forget the rhythms of the earth, deny death and shy away from valuing and honouring all that slips through their grasp, until at last they must collide catastrophically with the sharp edges of reality. Our secular world is lacking in the sorts of rituals that might put us gently in our place.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“چطور می‌توان غم را نشان داد بدون اینکه تمامی آدم را فراگیرد؟”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“این نشانه هوشمندی است که بپذیریم ما هم به لطف و محبت، ثبات و راهنمایی نیاز داریم درست مثل آنچه کودکان ما نیاز دارند.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“In a world beset by fundamentalists of both believing and secular varieties, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride—or superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulation—takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we fare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert—all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“Religions understand this: they know that to sustain goodness, it helps to have an audience. The faiths hence provide us with a gallery of witnesses at the ceremonial beginnings of our marriages and thereafter they entrust a vigilant role to their deities.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“The secular are at this moment in history a great deal more optimistic than the religious – something of an irony, given the frequency with which the latter have been derided by the former for their apparent naivety and credulousness. It is the secular whose longing for perfection has grown so intense as to lead them to imagine that paradise might be realized on this earth after just a few more years of financial growth and medical research. With no evident awareness of the contradiction they may, in the same breath, gruffly dismiss a belief in angels while sincerely trusting that the combined powers of the IMF, the medical research establishment, Silicon Valley and democratic politics could together cure the ills of mankind.... It is telling that the secular world is not well versed in the art of gratitude: we no longer offer up thanks for harvests, meals, bees or clement weather. On a superficial level, we might suppose that this is because there is no one to say ‘Thank you’ to. But at base it seems more a matter of ambition and expectation. Many of those blessings for which our pious and pessimistic ancestors offered thanks, we now pride ourselves on having worked hard enough to take for granted.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“[W]e all incline in astonishingly personal ways to idiocy and spite”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“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.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“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. How free secular society leaves us by contrast. 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. But 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. It privileges discovery, presenting us with an incessant stream of new information – and therefore it prompts us to forget everything. 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. We honour the power of culture but rarely admit with what scandalous ease we forget its individual monuments. We somehow feel, however, that it would be a violation of our spontaneity to be presented with rotas for rereading Walt Whitman.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“عشق رمانتیک چیزی است که ما را دیوانه‌وار به جست‌وجو می‌کشد تا شریک زندگی خود را پیدا کنیم، همان یک نفر که دیگر نیاز تمامی ارتباط‌های اجتماعی را برای ما برآورده می‌کند و کافی است!!!”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion