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

redesigned universities of the future would draw upon the same rich catalogue of culture treated by their traditional counterparts, likewise promoting the study of novels, histories, plays and paintings, but they would teach this material with a view to illuminating students’ lives rather than merely prodding at academic goals.
Anna Karenina
and
Madame Bovary
would thus be assigned in a course on understanding the tensions of marriage instead of in one focused on narrative trends in nineteenth-century fiction, just as the recommendations of Epicurus andSeneca would appear in the syllabus for a course about dying rather than in a survey of Hellenistic philosophy.
    Departments would be required to confront the problematic areas of our lives head-on. Notions of assistance and transformation which presently hover ghost-like over speeches atgraduation ceremonies would be given form and explored as openly in lay institutions as they are in churches. There would be classes in, among other topics, being alone, reconsidering work, improving relationships with children, reconnecting with nature and facing illness. A university alive to the true responsibilities of cultural artefacts within a secular age would establish a Department for Relationships, an Institute of Dying and a Centre for Self-Knowledge.
    In this way, as Arnold and Mill would have wished, secular education would start to outgrow the fears it associates with relevance and redesign its curricula to engage directly with our most pressing personal and ethical dilemmas.
    Few would fall asleep. ( illustration credit 4.8 )
    ii. How We Are Taught
    1.
Rearranging university education according to the insights gained from religion would entail adjusting not only the curriculum but also, just as crucially, the way it is taught.
    In its methods, Christianity has from its beginnings been guided by a simple yet essential observation that has nevertheless never made any impression upon those in charge of secular education: how very easily we forget things.
    Its theologians have known that our soul suffers from what ancient Greek philosophers termed
akrasia
, a perplexing tendency to know what we should do combined with a persistent reluctance actually to do it, whether through weakness of will or absent-mindedness. We all possess wisdom that we lack the strength properly to enact in our lives. Christianity pictures the mind as a sluggish and fickle organ, easy enough to impress but forever inclined to change its focus and cast its commitments aside. Consequently, the religion proposes that the central issue for education is not so much how to counteract ignorance – as secular educators imply – as how we can combat our reluctance to act upon ideas which we have already fully understood at a theoretical level. It follows the Greeksophists in insisting that all lessons should appeal to both reason (
logos
) and emotion (
pathos
), as well as endorsingCicero’s advice that public speakers should have a threefold ability to prove (
probare
), delight (
delectare
) and persuade (
flectere
). There is no justification for delivering world-shaking ideas in a mumble.
    2.
However, defenders of secular university education have seldom worried about
akrasia
. They implicitly maintain that people will be properly affected by concepts even when they hear about them only once or twice, at the age of twenty, before a fifty-year career in finance or market research, via a lecturer standing in a bare room speaking in a monotone. According to this view, ideas may fall out of the mind in much the same random order as the contents of an upturned handbag, or may be expressed with all the graceless banality of an instruction manual, without threatening the overall purpose of intellectual endeavour. Ever sincePlato attacked the Greeksophists for being more concerned with speaking well than thinking honestly, Western intellectuals have been intransigently suspicious of eloquence, whether