Insofar as modern society ever promises us access to a community, it is one centered on the worship of professional success. This raises two questions: How did religion once enhance the spirit of community? More practically, can secular society ever recover that spirit without returning to the theological principles that were entwined with it? I, for one, believe that it is possible to reclaim our sense of community-and that we can do so, moreover, without having to build upon a religious foundation. They have suggested that we began to disregard our neighbors at around the same time that we ceased to honor our gods as a community. In attempting to understand what has eroded our sense of community, historians have assigned an important role to the privatization of religious belief that occurred in Europe and the U.S. We tend to imagine that there once existed a degree of neighborliness that has been replaced by ruthless anonymity, by the pursuit of contact with one another primarily for individualistic ends: for financial gain, social advancement or romantic love. One of the losses that modern society feels most keenly is the loss of a sense of community. An excerpt from the book below.įrom the Wall Street Journal: In his latest book, Religion for Atheists, de Botton argues that while the supernatural claims of all religions are entirely false, religions still have important things to teach the secular world. Alain de Botton is a writer of book-length essays on love, travel, architecture and literature.
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