Religion for Atheists?

Review from
"A banal and impudent argument for the uses of religion"
by Terry Eagleton.

What is religion? Where did it come from? What is it useful for? Why some people do not have a religion and others need it so badly?

To me, as a future sociologist, religion and the social means to organize are very interesting subjects. That's why I couldn't help to write about Terry Eagleton's review of Alain de Botton's book.

In this review, Eagleton explains what some authors and philosophers had said though history. Some, like Voltaire, agreed that religion has been necessary to control masses, but that atheism has been allowed among the elite; this way it had an indispensable social role. Auguste Comte, for example, “designed an ideal society complete with secular versions of God, priests, sacraments, prayer and feast days”, and Friedrich Nietzsche indicated that if God is dead, so is the conception of humanity.

"Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion", the book written by Alain de Botton, maintains Voltaire’s tradition when considers that religious beliefs and rituals are irrational, but at the same time are important in order to maintain a civilised society with a sense of community. In Eagleton’s words, this book takes other people’s beliefs and reorganizes them for moral sake, “social consensus and aesthetic pleasure. It is an (unoriginal) astonishingly impudent enterprise, (where) religious faith is reduced to a set of banal moral tags”.

But, honestly, despite all these comments and descriptions of religion uses, doesn’t humanity need to reaffirm empathy and its sense of society? Maybe “Religion for Atheists” is more than just an insult for religious believes, and it will allow us to discover a practical use for all those things dogmas tell us not to question... Well, we’ll have to find that out.

If you feel any interest in the subject, here you have another opinion about this book you can contrast with Eagleton's view. Just that this time is Richard Cole's review “Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton: Alain de Botton's attempt to encourage secular society to steal religion's most fruitful ideas is admirable but ultimately hollow.” Now, if you are feeling the same way I am, and you want to know what Alain de Botton has to say, here you have him in the TED Talk "Alain de Botton: atheism 2.0"