With respect, Mister Dawkins, you should speak only for yourself. As human beings, we need symbols, reminders, and tangible expressions of what is sacred to us. Yes, let's build secular schools, but that's no reason why atheists who want to build temples shouldn't do so. Don't let your anti-theism blind you to all of the needs of atheists.
"You can build a temple to anything that's positive and good," said De Botton.
"That could mean: a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective."
De Botton's new tower of London represents the "perspective" angle as it would offer City types a chance to reflect on things. Plans for other atheist landmarks include a Temple of Love featuring rose-tinted windows and a Shrine to Care, complete with glass statues filled with blood.
These are awesome ideas! I hope that we'll get a chance to see them come to fruition.
Experience wispy abstract values in a concrete, artistic form all around you, and to have a place to get away from one's busy life to reflect and gain perspective on one's life.
Such temples would have the secondary purpose of showing others in a dramatic way how atheists may have ideals and meaning in life.
I am right now in the process of ordering Alain de Botton's book Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion. That book gets into his arguments in detail.
Experience wispy abstract values in a concrete, artistic form all around you, and to have a place to get away from one's busy life to reflect and gain perspective on one's life.
In other words, just sit there and look at bad twenty-first century art and architecture. If one wants contemplative spaces, London is full of pre-modern traditional churches that are far more suitable for the purpose. At least the architecture is better.
I have nothing against atheist or humanist art. Unfortunately most of Mozart's Masonic music is crap, but his Masonic Funeral Music is a superb philosophic statement of brotherhood and equality (just as his Requiem is a superb philosophic statement of hierarchy and vertical power). The French-made Statue of Liberty is also a great idea, and so on.
But I baulk at glass statues filled with blood. That's deeply unpleasant. Will there be animal sacrifices to Reason and Kindness every Sunday?
Like the transcendental monotheist John Muir, this atheist (me) needs no other church, temple, shrine, sanctuary, refuge, or gompa (a Tibetan word for monastery, meaning "a solitary place") other than the mountains, the forests, the oceans, and a clear night sky speckled with stars.
I'm with Dawkins. De Botton is a bit of a nutter, and as one atheist/skeptic blogger I read commented, "I think his black tower would be awfully echoey and empty when all the acolytes of Atheism 2.0 gather. The only thing he’s got to fill it up right now is ego and hubris."
I'm all for "movement" atheism, but this idea strikes me as just silly. But hey, if some atheists want to sink some money into a big building to hang out it, let 'em. I'll just be rolling my eyes and wondering what sorts of other investments they could have made that could represent the virtues of atheism much more effectively.
Like the transcendental monotheist John Muir, this atheist (me) needs no other church, temple, shrine, sanctuary, refuge, or gompa (a Tibetan word for monastery, meaning "a solitary place") other than the mountains, the forests, the oceans, and a clear night sky speckled with stars.
All I need is a quiet room, and I've got several of them.
