Alain do Botton looks at French sociologist Auguste Comte’s attempt to reconcile suspicion of religion with sympathy for its ritual:
One of the most fruitless questions that can be asked of religions is whether or not they are “true”. For the sake of argument and the flow of this article, let us simply assume from the start that they aren’t true in the supernatural sense. For a certain kind of atheist, this is the end of the story; but for those of a more ethnographic bent, it is clearly only a beginning. If we made up our gods to serve psychological needs, a study of these deities will tell us a crucial amount about what we require to preserve our sanity and balance, and will raise intriguing questions about how we are fulfilling the needs to which religions once catered.
Although we tend to think of atheists as not only unbelieving but also hostile to religion, there is a minor tradition of atheistic thinkers who have attempted to reconcile suspicion of religion with a sympathy for its ritualistic aspects. The most important and inspirational of these investigations was by the visionary, eccentric and only intermittently sane French 19th-century sociologist Auguste Comte.
Comte’s thinking on religion had as its starting point a characteristically blunt observation that, in the modern world, thanks to the discoveries of science, it would no longer be possible for anyone intelligent or robust to believe in God. Faith would henceforth be limited to the uneducated, the fanatical, women, children and those in the final months of incurable diseases. At the same time Comte recognised, as many of his more rational contemporaries did not, that a secular society devoted solely to financial accumulation and romantic love and devoid of any sources of consolation, transcendent awe or solidarity would be prey to untenable social and emotional ills.
Comte’s solution was neither to cling blindly to sacred traditions, nor to cast them collectively and belligerently aside, but rather to pick out their more relevant and secular aspects and fuse them with certain insights drawn from philosophy, art and science. The result, the outcome of decades of thought and the summit of Comte’s intellectual achievement, was a new religion: a religion for atheists, or, as he termed it, a religion of humanity.
Comte presented his new religion in two volumes, The Catechism of Positivism: Summary Exposition of the Universal Religion (1852) and the Theory of the Future of Man (1854). He observed that conventional faiths usually cemented their authority by providing people with daily (and even hourly) schedules of who or what to think about — rotas typically pegged to the commemoration of a holy individual or supernatural incident. So he announced a calendar of his own, animated by a pantheon of secular heroes and ideas. In the religion of humanity, every month would be devoted to the honouring of an important field of endeavour — for example, marriage, parenthood, art, science or agriculture — and every day to an individual who had made a valuable contribution within these categories.
Comte was impressed by the way in which established religions had disseminated moral guidance — dictating principles for how to conduct oneself in marriage, say, or fulfil one’s duties to the community — and he lamented that modern liberal governments, in their desire to prove inoffensive to all constituencies, had settled on merely offering factual instruction before letting people out into the world to destroy themselves and others through their egotism and self-ignorance. Therefore, in Comte’s religion of humanity, there were classes and sermons to help inspire one to be kind to spouses, patient with one’s colleagues and compassionate towards the unfortunate.
Because Comte appreciated the role that architecture had once played in bolstering the claims of old religion, he proposed the construction of a network of secular churches or, as he called them, temples of humanity. He suggested that each could be paid for by a banker, whose bust would appear above the door in recognition of his generosity. Inside the temples, there would be lectures, singing, celebrations and public discussions. Around the walls, sumptuous works of art would commemorate the greatest moments and finest men and women of history. Finally, above the west-facing stage, there would be an aphorism, written in large golden letters, invoking the congregation to adopt the essence of Comte’s philosophical-religious world-view: Connais-toi pour t’améliorer (“Know yourself to improve yourself”).
(Hat tip to Michael Nielsen.)