Free Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton Page B

asking of any biblical passage what general rules of conduct it could exemplify and promote.
    Teaching wisdom rather than knowledge:John Wesley, a sermon outdoors in York, 1746. ( illustration credit 4.7 )
    In the secular sphere, we may well bereading the right books, but we too often fail to ask direct questions of them, declining to advance sufficiently vulgar, neo-religious enquiries because we are embarrassed to admit to the true nature of our inner needs. We are fatefully in love with ambiguity, uncritical of the Modernist doctrine that great art should have no moral content or desire to change its audience. Our resistance to a parabolic methodology stems from a confused distaste for utility, didacticism and simplicity, and from an unquestioned assumption that anything a child could understand must of necessity be infantile in nature.
    Yet Christianity holds that, despite outward appearances, important parts of us retain the elemental structures of earliest childhood. Just like children, therefore, we need assistance. Knowledge must be fed to us slowly and carefully, like food cut into manageable bites. Any more than a few lessons in a day will exhaust us unduly. Twelve lines of Deuteronomy may be enough, for instance, along with a few explanatory notes which point out in plain language what there is for us to notice and to feel therein.
    The techniques that the academy so fears – the emphasis on the connection between abstract ideas and our own lives, the lucid interpretation of texts, the preference for extracts overwholes – have always been the methods of religions, which had to wrestle, centuries before the invention of television, with the challenge of how to render ideas vivid and pertinent to impatient and distracted audiences. They have realized all along that the greatest danger they faced was not the oversimplification of concepts but the erosion of interest and support through incomprehension and apathy. They recognized that clarity preserves rather than undermines ideas, for it creates a base upon which the intellectual labour of an elite can subsequently rest. Christianity was confident that its precepts were robust enough to be understood at a variety of levels, that they could be presented in the form of crude woodcuts to the yeomen of the parish church or discussed in Latin by theologians at the University of Bologna, and that each iteration would endorse and reinforce the others.
    In the preface to a volume of his collected sermons,John Wesley explained and defended his adherence to simplicity: ‘I design plain truth for plain people: therefore … I abstain from all nice and philosophical speculations; from all perplexed and intricate reasonings; and, as far as possible, from even the show of learning. My design is … to forget all that ever I have read in my life.’
    A handful of brave secular writers have been able to express themselves with a similarly inspiring openness, among the most notable beingDonald Winnicott in the field of psychoanalysis andRalph Waldo Emerson in literature. But these characters have been regrettably few in number, and most have also drawn upon a religious background to mould and buttress their sensibilities (Winnicott began as a Methodist, Emerson as a Transcendentalist).
    The greatest Christian preachers have been
vulgar
in the very best sense. While not surrendering any of their claims to complexity or insight, they have wished to help those who came to hear them.
    7.
By contrast, we have constructed an intellectual world whose most celebrated institutions rarely consent to ask, let alone answer, the most serious questions of the soul. To address the incoherencies of the situation, we might begin to overhaul ouruniversities by doing away with fields like history andliterature, ultimately superficial categories which, even if they cover valuable material, do not in themselves track the themes that most torment and attract our souls.
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