Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion Read Online Free PDF

initiative of neither the perpetrator nor the victim. It is the day itself that is making us sit here and talk about the peculiar incident six months ago when you lied and I blustered and you accused me of insincerity and I made you cry, an incident that neither of us can quite forget but that we can’t quite mentioneither and which has been slowly corroding the trust and love we once had for each other. It is the day that has given us the opportunity, indeed the responsibility, to stop talking of our usual business and to reopen a case we pretended to have put out of our minds. We are not satisfying ourselves, we are obeying the rules.
    2.
The prescriptions of the Day of Atonement bring comfort to both parties to an injury. As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day. It appalls our reason to face up to how much we suffer from the missing invitation or the unanswered letter, how many hours of torment we have given to the unkind remark or the forgotten birthday, when we should long ago have become serene and impervious to such needles. Our vulnerability insults our self-conception; we are in pain and at the same time offended that we could so easily be so. Our reserve may also have a financial edge. Those who caused us injury are liable to have authority over us – they own the business and decide on the contracts – and it is this imbalance of power that is keeping us quiet, yet not for that matter saving us from bitterness and suppressed rage.
    Alternatively, when we are the ones who have caused someone else pain and yet failed to offer apology, it was perhaps because acting badly made us feel intolerably guilty. We can be so sorry that we find ourselves incapable of saying sorry. We run away from our victims and act with strange rudeness towards them,not because we aren’t bothered by what we did, but because what we did makes us feel uncomfortable with an unmanageable intensity. Our victims hence have to suffer not only the original hurt, but also the subsequent coldness we display towards them on account of our tormented consciences.
    3.
All this the Day of Atonement will help to correct. A period in which human error is proclaimed as a general truth makes it easier to confess to specific infractions. It is more bearable to own up to our follies when the highest authority has told us that we are all childishly yet forgivably demented to begin with.
    So cathartic is the Day of Atonement, it seems a pity that there should be only one of them a year. A secular world could without fear of excess adopt its own version to mark the start of every quarter.
    iii. Our Hatred of Community
    1.
It would be naive to suppose that the only reason we fail to create strong communities is because we are too shy to say hello to others. Some of our social alienation comes down to the many facets of our nature that have no interest whatsoever in communal values, sides that are bored or revolted by fidelity, self-sacrifice and empathy and which instead incline with abandon towards narcissism, jealousy, spite, promiscuity and wanton aggression.
    Religions know full well about these tendencies and recognize that if communities are to function, they must be dealt with, but by being artfully purged and exorcized rather than simply repressed. Religions therefore present us with an array of rituals, many of them oddly elaborate at first glance, whose function is to safely discharge what is vicious, destructive or nihilistic in our natures. These rituals don’t of course advertise their brief, for to do so would bring a degree of self-consciousness that might make participants flee from them in horror, but their longevity and popularity prove that something vital has been achieved through them.
    The best communal rituals effectively mediate between the needs of the individual and those of the group. Expressed freely, certain of our impulses would