The philosophy of religion and love with Alain de Botton and Alex O'Connor

Summary

Podcast Episode Summary

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Podcast: Philosophy For Our Times
Episode Title: The philosophy of religion and love with Alain de Botton and Alex O'Connor
Date: November 25, 2025
Host: Ali (IAI)
Guests: Alain de Botton (author, philosopher), Alex O’Connor (philosopher, public speaker)

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Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation between philosopher and writer Alain de Botton and Alex O’Connor, known for his popular philosophy content online. Moving beyond the narrowly defined debates about the truth or falsity of religious beliefs, they explore how religion and philosophy intermingle, what timeless needs religion serves, the distinction between the sacred and the secular, and why a “philosophy of love” deserves more attention both inside and outside the academy. The tone is thoughtful and gently provocative, encouraging listeners to re-examine religion and philosophy as rich sources of meaning and community that extend far beyond doctrine.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Limits and Promise of Philosophizing Religion

• Beyond Truth Claims:
  Alain argues that confining philosophical discussions of religion to the question of God’s existence is “too narrow” ([03:15]). He emphasizes that exploring concepts like ritual, community, architecture, and awe reveals the far-reaching philosophical territory occupied by religion.
  • “Philosophy has not done its job when it’s merely addressed the question of God’s existence or non-existence. …You will be circling around the question of God’s existence for what I believe to be too, too much time.” – Alain de Botton ([03:15])
• Religion as a Human Phenomenon:
  Religion can be examined philosophically to understand the needs it serves—such as awe, ritual, and communal belonging—rather than solely analyzing truth claims or reducing it to sociology ([04:21], [05:03]).

2. The Universal Experience of Awe and Finitude

• Awe as a Central Religious Experience:
  Alain highlights ‘awe’ as a prime example of a profound experience enabled by religion, framing it as “welcoming an encounter with our finitude…a new sense of themselves against a scale which is very different from the ordinary human scale” ([05:03]).
• The Shift in Philosophical Approach:
  He reflects on the “anguished search” of 19th-century philosophers, whose explorations of religion were motivated by personal involvement and loss of faith, in contrast to today’s more detached academic approaches ([06:09]).

3. From New Atheism to Neo-Religious Impulses

• Atheism as a Starting Point:
  Alex reflects on Alain’s book, Religion for Atheists, noting the optimism that atheists could move beyond discarding religion to selectively preserve its valuable elements ([07:11]). Alain asserts that the impulses previously focused in religion now surface in “environmental movements, political movements, lifestyle movements, in fashions, in music” ([07:50]).
  • “We’re never going to get away from this. It’s just permanently rumbling around.” – Alain de Botton ([07:50])
• Religion Hosting, Not Owning, Human Needs:
  Rather than seeing religiosity as a single impulse, Alain advocates viewing religion as a host or vessel for experiences deeply rooted in human nature ([09:46]). He draws on William James’s notion of “varieties of religious experience.”

4. Boundaries of the Sacred and the Secular

• Secular Rituals and Art:
  Art galleries, public rituals, and the impulse to mark time (e.g., solstices) are cited as examples of modern spaces in which the “charge” of the sacred persists, even in secular societies ([11:15]).
• Religious Art in Secular Spaces:
  Alain and Alex debate the relocation of religious art into museums. Alain notes the “peculiar” disconnect where devotional art is observed aesthetically, stripped of its original context and spiritual potency ([13:00], [14:37]).
  • “If you fell to your knees in front of one of those things and said, redeem me, a guard would come up to you and arrest you…We’re struggling to situate religion within the secular realm.” – Alain de Botton ([13:00])

5. Philosophy as Personal and Existential Practice

• Learning to Die:
  The discussion connects academic philosophy’s detachment to missing the urgency found in historical philosophers, referencing Montaigne: “To philosophize is to learn to die” ([16:57]).
  • “The best kind of philosophy is probably done outside the academy, where there isn’t that pressure to pass an exam out of it. …It’s coming from somewhere very profound and very urgent. I think that’s where you get the good stuff.” – Alain de Botton ([17:40])
• Philosophy’s Scope:
  Alain urges, with characteristic wryness, that philosophy’s subject matter should include “everything” relevant to human experience—even a “philosophy of mustachios” ([18:30]).

6. The Case for a Philosophy of Love

• Love as Central Philosophical Terrain:
  Asked what area of philosophy is neglected, Alain immediately singles out love, arguing for a robust “philosophy of love” that would unite historical, cultural, and practical investigations, and which would resonate with contemporary issues ([19:55]).
  • “Every department should be offering courses on the philosophy of love at the moment.” – Alain de Botton ([19:55])

7. The Lingering Influence of Christianity and Religion in the West

• Christian Ideas and Western Values:
  Alex raises claims about Christianity’s foundational role in shaping concepts like human rights. Alain counsels caution, noting it’s a “multifactorial thing” and emphasizing the freedom outside academia to entertain speculative connections without overstatement ([21:09]).

8. The “Meaning Crisis” and the Role of Community

• Lost Guardians:
  Alain diagnoses the so-called crisis of meaning in modernity as a loss of caretakers for things like community:
  • “Religions connected you up with other people around something other than merely commerce or romantic bonds. …We don’t see ourselves as in any way belonging to a community.” ([22:46])
• Secular Analogues and Cultural Nuance:
  Alain relates experiences in Taiwan and Japan, describing how practices that look religious can serve entirely secular family or communal functions: “It’s just a tradition totally divorced from any belief” ([24:39]).

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Memorable Quotes & Notable Moments

• On Philosophizing Religion Beyond Belief:
  “I think religion is at its most sterile as a topic of discussion when we simply look at it as a question of belief.” – Alain de Botton ([01:43])
• On the Universality of Religious Impulses:
  “We’re never going to get away from this. It’s just permanently rumbling around.” – Alain de Botton ([07:50])
• On Sacred vs. Secular Art:
  “We love the art, but [are] very weird about the culture that actually created it.” – Alain de Botton ([13:00])
• On Academic vs. Vital Philosophy:
  “The best kind of philosophy is probably done outside the academy, where there isn’t that pressure to pass an exam out of it. …It’s coming from somewhere very profound and very urgent. I think that’s where you get the good stuff.” – Alain de Botton ([17:40])
• On Philosophy of Love:
  “Every department should be offering courses on the philosophy of love at the moment.” – Alain de Botton ([19:55])

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Timestamps for Core Segments

• Philosophy vs. Belief in Religion – [01:43]–[04:21]
• Universal Drives: Awe and Finitude – [05:03]
• 19th-Century Philosophical Engagement with Religion – [06:09]
• Religion’s Influence Despite Secularization – [07:50]
• Nature of Religious Impulse and Human Experience – [09:46]
• Secularization of Ritual and Sacredness – [11:15]
• Treatment of Religious Art in Museums – [12:24]–[14:37]
• Philosophical Engagement: Learning to Die – [16:57]
• Scope & Mission of Philosophy – [18:30]
• Philosophy of Love as Needed Field – [19:55]
• Christianity and Western Values – [21:09]
• Meaning Crisis and Secular Analogues of Religion – [22:46]–[24:39]

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Tone and Style

The discussion is reflective, exploratory, and sometimes playfully critical of modern academic philosophy’s limitations. Both speakers engage openly, with Alain’s responses balancing wit and depth. Throughout, the tone remains accessible, with complex ideas made tangible through relatable examples and metaphors.

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For listeners and readers alike, this episode is a rich, nuanced examination of what religion and philosophy mean in the modern world, why love should be at philosophy’s core, and how ancient spiritual needs live on—even in the most secular of spaces.

Transcript

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[Alain de Botton]

I mean, philosophers of the 19th century were very interested in all of this. What do human beings encounter when they encounter the religious, what bits of themselves are brought into play, etc. Much less popular questions now.

[Ali (Host)]

Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's Ali here and we have a special interview for you today. Alex o', Connor, a writer and public speaker known especially for his philosophy videos on YouTube. Look him up if you don't know him, will be interviewing Alain de Botton, a well known author and public speaker who has published widely, especially on philosophy's relevance to life and on love. This conversation will indeed touch upon love, upon philosophy and what it can offer, and also on religion. So without further ado, I will hand it over to Alex.

[Alex O'Connor]

Alanda Baton. Welcome.

[Alain de Botton]

Thank you so much.

[Alex O'Connor]

Do you think that religion is primarily a philosophical enterprise?

[Alain de Botton]

I think religion is at its most sterile as a topic of discussion when we simply look at it as a question of belief. So I take from your question the idea of like, could we do some philosophizing around religion to, to make the topic intriguing. And I think absolutely, it's, it's a very ripe topic. But as I say, in the modern world it's often seems like either I believe, which when I get interested in religion and, you know, start to delve into it, or I don't believe, which is I leave it totally alone. That seems like a very unfortunate approach. I think that you can't really understand the modern world without understanding religion. I mean, in all areas of the world, the way in which we live nowadays is, you know, if you're a believer, but especially if you're not a believer, so many concepts, ideas, et cetera, are going to owe something positive, negative, but it's going to owe something to a religious past. So you can't get away from it and therefore philosophizing about religion. Absolutely.

[Alex O'Connor]

I mean, to say that when people talk about religion, sometimes it's arguments that God exists and arguments that God doesn't exist. And sometimes they treat it as though it's sort of just a sociological phenomenon. Like it's almost something that should be fully analyzable with psychology. I suppose I'm interested. I mean, you wrote a book about religion, Religion for atheists. And when you begin to approach a topic like that, are you approaching it as a philosophical question about truth claims or sort of a brain thing?

[Alain de Botton]

I don't want to limit, you know, the applicability of philosophy to simply the truth claims of God's existence. Right. I, I think that's too narrow. And, and you know, you say, well, there's the sociological other bit. Is that such a sociological. I mean, it depends on you. You know, we're playing with words here. Is that the sociological bit? Could there be a philosophy where one explores notions of community? Is there a philosophy of ritual? Is there a philosophy of time? Is there a philosophy of travel insofar as religions get us traveling? Is there a philosophy of architecture? Of course there is. So I think philosophy has not done its job when it's merely addressed the question of God's existence or non existence. And I think this is part of the unfortunate narrowness of the curriculum when it comes to, you know, discussions of religion that if you're discussing in a philosophy course, religion, you will, you will be circling around the question of God's existence or non existence for what I believe to be too, too much time.

[Alex O'Connor]

And what should people be circling around with as much enthusiasm?

[Alain de Botton]

They might be asking, what are the needs which religion serves? So I don't think it's a sociological question necessarily. It can be answered philosophically. Does the appetite for religion tell us what are the drives towards religion?

[Alex O'Connor]

I suppose you have views on what those drives are. I'm interested, given the plurality of religious beliefs which seem to make contradictory truth claims, but at the same time seem to share something in common, such that we can look everywhere and find religiosity in humans. That. What are those universal factors that you think draw people to religiosis?

[Alain de Botton]

I mean, there are so many. But let's look at a concept like awe. Awe. It's really the notion of welcoming an encounter with our finitude, which is normally our finitude is a sad thing. It's not something that we want to embrace. It doesn't seem to have any charge for us. In certain circumstances, under the aegis of what you can call religion, there is often an encounter with awe and it's really to do with scale. The human being gets A new sense of themselves against a scale which is very different from the ordinary human scale in time, space, also potentially, potentially wisdom, knowledge, etc. And words like mystery comes in, etc. So I mean, philosophers of the 19th century were very interested in all of this. What do human beings encounter when they encounter the religious, what bits of themselves are brought into play, etc. Much less popular questions now, but very necessary, I think.

[Alex O'Connor]

What do you think changed? I mean, it does seem that now people are almost obsessed with that strictly truth claim related part of philosophy. Why did that happen?

[Alain de Botton]

I mean, this is speculation and I won't know. I think that what made the 9th century such a ripe century for philosophical inquiry was that many of the people doing the best thinking were those who had themselves come from a religious background and had lost their faith or questioned their faith. So this was not disembodied philosophy, this was an anguished search for something. And if you look at Nietzsche, for example, you know, the reason why Nietzsche's thoughts on religion so fascinating is that, you know, his father was a pastor, he himself started off religious. And you know, there's, there's what you could call ambivalence. There's a fantastic degree of ambivalence which makes for nuance. And, you know, these people are all kicking guard. I mean, these people are philosophizing to save their lives and their inquiry into religions are anything other than what you might call academic in the negative sense. And it gives the inquiry a real urgency.

[Alex O'Connor]

You wrote Religion for Atheists in part, it seems as a counter to the popular new atheism of the time that, yeah, religion is evil and needs to be abandoned and all of this kind of stuff. And one of the things you pressed was that atheism shouldn't be where you end up. It's a starting point and that's move forward from there. And I think at the time there was this optimism that if we just sort of throw off the supernatural elements and just isolate the good bits, we can get our community spirit while also retaining a spiritual autonomy. A lot of people now think that atheism has kind of failed to deliver on that promise. I wonder if you agree with that sentiment. So many years.

[Alain de Botton]

Look, I don't think that the, the impulses that went into religion, that animated religion for thousands of years and that no longer animate it in, in many parts of the world. I, I don't think these things are going to disappear. They are very firmly lodged in our spirit. And I think we keep seeing in different ways, I Wouldn't necessarily call them religious impulses, but neoreligious impulses, impulses that religions have drawn on cropping up in other ways, in all sorts of ways, in environmental movements, in political movements, in lifestyle movements, in fashions, in music. We're never going to get away from this. It's just permanently rumbling around. The question is just whether we're inclined to draw connections between these things and a word like religion. I would encourage us to do so because it enriches what we're trying to do. I was just doing an event here and someone was saying, what about communal living? In the context of a talk I gave on love. Someone saying, what about communal living? Why are we placing all this emphasis on one person around the group? Now, religions has a lot to say about this, about communal living and Eros and Agape and, you know, the group versus the family. And I mean, it's a. It's an enormous topic in Christianity and also in Buddhism, et cetera. It really helps to know your religious history when trying to investigate whether you should set up a flat share in Dalston. It sort of. It just. It deepens the sense, the resonance around what you. What you might be trying to do.

[Alex O'Connor]

What extent do you think. To what extent do you think you can talk about religion or religiosity as a unified drive or spirit within people? Given the variance of its expressions, it seems as loose a term as, like, politics or something.

[Alain de Botton]

Yes. And I think maybe it's wrong to appropriate it and say that thing is a religious impulse. What we want to say is that thing is part of the, you know, constituency of being human. It's existed since the year.it will continue to exist. What we might say is, for a long time, it flew under the banner of religion. For a long time, this side of human nature was enriched deep and nuanced by thinkers who actively identified themselves as religious. So just to be aware of that, is it actually a religious. No, you know, the William James idea, varieties of religious experience, sort of saying a certain kind of experience is religious per se, rather than. No, certain varieties of experience have been looked at by religion, lent names by religion. Do they belong to religion? No, I think that's a religious mindset. I think. I don't think they belong to religion. Religion has simply hosted them for a long time.

[Alex O'Connor]

I wonder what kind of experiences or impulses we're talking about. I mean, famously, if you study theology, the most difficult question to answer is what a religion is. I'm not going to press you on a definitional point. But clearly some experiences, like, you know, getting up to stretch your legs or something, might be thought of as essentially secular, you know, and so even if we can't precisely define what religious experiences are, we know that there's a difference between engaging in sacred things and profane or secular things. And what do you think characterizes that distinction?

[Alain de Botton]

I think, you know, I think we find things that used to belong to originally in all sorts of rather unusual areas. You go to an art gallery. Yeah. And there's like a walled off area and somehow extra value seems to be in a particular zone. And we're thinking, okay, it's not a church, is it? Here we're not in a church, but we're remembering churches. There's something a little church like, around this. We or people's impulses to ritualize certain things. I mean, so much of religions is about time, that calendar, and about moments that are given a certain kind of meaning by a group. And most of our diaries, most of our time things are led by the news at the political level and led by, you know, our own personal agendas. But every now and then something peeks through. Somebody says, oh, it's the summer solstice. Everyone thinks, oh, what is the summer solstice? What does that mean? Oh, yes, it's longest day. And people think it's the longest day. What does that exactly mean? Is it just about the number of hours or is there something here that's inviting something else? And I think in the most secular hearts, there might be a certain kind of curiosity that extends beyond the merely secular.

[Alex O'Connor]

When you walk into the National Gallery, they have Da Vinci's Burlington House drawing, and it feels almost like a chapel. There's this almost reverence towards these images. But a lot of the art in those galleries has been literally stripped from its religious home and placed into this, like, neoclassical temple on Trafalgar Square for people to. For people to gawk at?

[Alain de Botton]

Yeah.

[Alex O'Connor]

On a bit of a tangent, I wonder what you think about that. There's an accessibility that this gives to the engagement with beautiful religious art. But is there something a bit inappropriate about doing that kind of relocation?

[Alain de Botton]

I think you raise a fascinating thing, and it's almost weirdly, because it's taking place in a nominally Christian nation. Yeah, there's a lack of guilt around that. It was actually because we're much more sensitive to ripping things out of cultures that are not our own. I mean, we're not that sensitive, but we're more sensitive. You know, weirdly, if this was a Mayan temple, Bits of Mayan temples scattered. We'd think, should this be going on or shouldn't this be kind of going to someone who, as it were, believes in it? But I agree. I mean, the National Galleries are hugely peculiar. The Sainsbury Wing is a hugely. I mean, it's beautiful, but it's really peculiar. And that, you know, a psychoanalyst would go, what's being denied here? What's. There's something here that's not being allowed to emerge. And it's really our debt to the religious. It's sort of like here is an old, you know, the languages of impassive. Here's an altarpiece painted by so and so in the year of so and so on. Oil on the. No mention that what you're seeing is the dead Christ. Thank Jesus Christ, as it were. This is the death of the Savior. And if you fell to your knees in front of one of those things and said, redeem me, a guard would come up to you and arrest you. I mean, you're not supposed to do it. If you started weeping in front of a painting of the Virgin Mary in the National Gallery, they'd have you arrested. So we're struggling to situate religion in. Within the secular realm. And, and, and, and our attitudes to art are quite strange. You know, we, we love the art, but very weird about the culture that actually created it. We don't see these things as devotional pieces.

[Alex O'Connor]

Yeah. At the very least, it would be very weird if somebody were. Were doing that. They might get a few sort of stares. But isn't that kind of, at least ostensibly, what it's supposed to be for? Which is a little bit strange and tells us that maybe we're getting something wrong. But likewise, people seem to treat churches like museums. Most beautiful churches in the world will probably have more tourist visitors than devotional visitors. In fact, the devotional visitors are probably cordoned off into some private corner with a separate entrance to make way for.

[Alain de Botton]

But, but it goes the other way, which is, if you go to Courtauld's Galleries or something, you know, another museum, and you look at, you know, Van Gogh landscape, he thought of this as a work of religion. He thought his landscape. Now, what he meant by a work of religion was a work that should inspire transcendence, generosity, transformation, a transformation of values towards the, you know, the values of Christ, essentially. He might not directly have said that, but that was kind of the spirit of his work. He wanted his work to be taken as seriously as an altarpiece. And we have the same problems when we look at a Van Gogh, we think, oh, that's nice, nice hatching there and an interesting perspective. Rather than like the artist is looking. The artist who was going to kill himself within three weeks of painting something is thinking, this is my last testament to what it is to be human. And we're like, oh, looks interesting. Yeah, it's interesting. Orange. And you're thinking, what the hell's going on? We can't understand. We have no space to understand the profundity of the artworks that are in our midst because they're too intense, the screaming is too loud, the call to transformation is too powerful. I think we don't know what to do with it. So we just embarrass silence.

[Alex O'Connor]

Do you think that's a little bit what we're doing in philosophy? In the same way we take this deep, for want of a better word, incredibly deep subject material that confronts us in our most sort of fundamental needs. And maybe for fear, maybe for misunderstanding, we start talking about, oh, well, the cosmological argument fails because of this premise. And we start sort of doing that. It feels a little bit like looking at the painting and going like, oh, you know, the brushworks are quite nice.

[Alain de Botton]

Which is why, you know, there's that lovely Montaigne quote. To philosophize is to learn to die. That sounds hugely. If you, if you pitched up at, you know, the King's philosophy department said, I'm here, you know, to philosophy, to learn to die. And then they show you the exit. Right? That's not what these guys think they're doing. So, so, but, but it's telling you something that at certain moments, a philosopher, and it's not just, you know, it's not just sort of neo Stoic philosophers like, like Montaigne, it's, it's, you know, a lot of, you know, Kierkegaard would have the same thing, Nietzsche would have the same thing, Wittgenstein have the same thing, which is essentially they are philosophizing to save themselves, to give their life meaning, to spare themselves agony, et cetera. And it sounds very weird, very intense, and it shouldn't. You can study anything academically. You can study poetry, you can study poems that an impassioned 22 year old wrote to his girlfriend and you can turn it into an essay on, you know, meter in Keats, but what are you doing from it? So I think that the best kind of philosophy is probably done outside the academy, where there isn't that pressure to pass an exam out of it. And it's done by People who are, broadly speaking, doing it for very personal motives. Those personal motives might not be visible, but it's coming from somewhere very profound and very urgent. I think that's where you get the good stuff.

[Alex O'Connor]

What do you think is then the point of doing philosophy? Do you agree with this assessment of learning to die? Do you think there's a kernel of truth?

[Alain de Botton]

I very much believe that the task of philosophy is to. Philosophy is a way of thinking. It's a particular discipline of thinking. It doesn't really define its subject matter. It's a way of thinking. And it's a way of thinking with a desperate search for precision, for nuance, for adventure. And the topics which can lend themselves to philosophical inquiry are and should be far broader than those that the modern university allows for. It shouldn't be merely certain questions of epistemology or whatever. It should stretch, you know, it should be a philosophy of everything, a philosophy of grass, a philosophy of shyness, a philosophy of despair, a philosophy of mustachios, a philosophy of hair. Everything, everything that is part of the human realm should. Should lend itself to a certain kind of philosophical inquiry.

[Alex O'Connor]

I think, given the abundance of PhDs and the need to do something unique, it won't be long before you do have theses on the philosophy of mustaches. But I suppose you don't mean literally in that. In the university, like philosophy department, you have to offer a limited number of modules, and I understand the critique that we're spending too much time on metaphysics, epistemology, but we can't do everything. So would you be able to highlight, like, a particular area that's broad enough to be a module or a department within a sub department in philosophy that you think is just being completely neglected by these academic types?

[Alain de Botton]

Look, I do think we should have a philosophy of love, right? I think that's a very. You know, it's a good area to settle on because that will bring you all sorts of things, the uses of the word love through history. Fascinating, you know, immediately gets you into Eastern and Western notions, fascinating Buddhist notions. You've then got the Greeks, the Romans, the Christians, on and on. It's a very, very rich vein. It'll get young people very interested because they're wrestling with these things. Every department should be offering courses on the philosophy of love at the moment.

[Alex O'Connor]

It's become quite popular to claim that, unbeknownst to Enlightenment thinkers that have shaped the course of the west over the past few hundred years, Christianity has had much more of a lurking presence than people have given it credit for. People are beginning to claim that the uniqueness of the west, its concept of human rights, that everybody deserves equal treatment, is essentially based in the imago dei, the image of God from, from Genesis. Others criticize this as a bit of a, of an overstep from, from the influence of Christianity. I wonder what you think about its influence.

[Alain de Botton]

Look, I think it depends how much you're asking it to step so it becomes an overstep if you're, you know, saying there is a direct line. I, I, I would, I handle that topic lightly. I could, I'd go into it, but I would handle it relatively lightly and, and say, you know, isn't it intriguing that in these regions that have placed such emphasis on, you know, a unique relationship between the individual and God, there's also democracy, but there's so many other, it's a multifactorial thing. And I think that this is where academics sometimes get into trouble when they, they think they need to say something with such element of verifiability. They then either over egg the argument which is in trouble, or they then shy away from the argument which is also makes things blander. And I think, you know, one of the freedoms of now speaking outside an academy is you can, you can allow for more speculative thought without the need to, you know, prove it in front of a PhD committee.

[Alex O'Connor]

A lot of people have said that the meaning crisis that we're living through, which I think is a perennial thing. I don't think there's anything unique about the, the current time, although perhaps there is like statistically more people depressed, more people upset. Maybe telecommunication technologies are making us all go insane. Some people blame this on a decline in religiosity, rise of secularism, disaster for mental health, all of this kind of stuff. How much stock do you place in that? And do you think it can be blamed on a decline in religiosity? Has there even been such a thing?

[Alain de Botton]

I think we can say that some of the things that religion was looking after have been left without guardians, as it were. Very simple thing, community. Now there will be all sorts of awful things, elements around community and religion, but there were some good things as well. And I think that religions connected you up with other people around something other than merely commerce or romantic bonds. It situated you within a community of, well, agape love, you know, which is handy in a way. And we've drifted very, very far from that. We don't see ourselves as in any way belonging to a community. And that's an enormous, it's an enormous problem in politics Politics, secular politics is really struggling to deal with that. Doesn't really know how to articulate that. But we're aware of it. We're aware of it particularly when people head towards extreme subgroups where one becomes aware that people go, ah, that group, that. That's a religion, that's become a religion, that, that, that political movement's become a religion. Something's. Something's trying to be articulated here. And you know, liberalism, mainstream liberalism has, has wrestled with this. How come that's not a religion, as it were? And, you know, it's a big topic.

[Alex O'Connor]

Oh, yeah. I think people will listen and say that that makes sense. Like, I can abstractly separate out these parts of religion from religion as a whole. But if you're an atheist, you believe the reason religion is so prominent is because it serves some. Some purpose. Right. It evolved for a reason. And if it could have, if those things could have been served sort of on their own, they didn't need this metaphysical baggage and the belief in the God and the afterlife and stuff, then surely it would have just evolved that way.

[Alain de Botton]

But I mean, it does evolve that way. And I was in Taiwan recently and observing how people use temples, and I spoke to people going, you know, do you consider a religious person? Oh, no. Why are you here lighting a candle? They go, oh, it's just for my dad. And you're. What is it for your dad? Oh, it's just a family thing we have here. It's just a tradition totally divorced from any belief. Yeah, it's like the whole of Taiwan's. Well, not every bit, but a lot of the. So what we would read religios. And this is the problem with, of how anthropology met Eastern religion in, in the 18th and 19th centuries. And massive misunderstandings are going on about how, you know, there were things called temples and before. All right, they're going to be using those temples bit like we use churches. Not really. I think missing a lot of the kind of nuance that, you know, in regards to Japan. Immediately people go, you know, are you a Buddhist? Oh, not really. Well, what are you. You're going to go to Shinto shrine? All right, so, so what does that mean? And, and are you a Christian? Well, not really. You know, a blending of religious beliefs into something that looks much more like a secular sort of encounter with the. What we would call the arts. Like, if you went to a museum and you looked at modern art, you looked a Roscoe. Are you a Roscoe White? No, no, I just. Just enjoying Roscoe at the moment. Are you. Are you into modern art? Well, sometimes, but, you know, do you sort of mean a more loosely held, Something that's closer to the aesthetic than the religious as we'd understand it? Yeah.

[Alex O'Connor]

Well, Alanda Baton, thanks for your time.

[Alain de Botton]

Thank you so much.

[Ali (Host)]

Thank you for listening to Philosophy for Our Times. I hope you enjoyed that interview. These are two very prominent names who had never met before, so it's nice to see what new combinations can bring. What do you find most interesting? Religion, love, philosophy or another topic? Let us know. The email is in the show notes of this episode and see you soon. Bye.