Religion for Atheists

I read two others books by Alaine de Button many years ago and thought they were pretty meh, but enjoyed this one a lot more. Some of the selected topics were pleasantly surprising to me, namely pessimism and perspective, which are also my favourite concepts in the book. 

Some quotations to remember:

All buildings give their owner the opportunity to recondition visitors’ expectations and lay down rules of conduct specific to them.

Our vulnerability insults our self-reception; we are in pain and at the same time insulted that we could so easily be so.

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 we already fully understood at a theoretical level.

The benefits of neo-religious pessimism are no where more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness.
[...]
These religions do recognize our desire to adore passionately. They know our need to believe in others, to worship and to serve them and to find in them perfection which eludes us in ourselves. They simply insist that these objects should be divine rather than human. [...] Faith has the good sense to give us angels to worship and lovers to tolerate.
[...]
Modern secular optimists, on the other hand, with their well-developed sense of entitlement, fail to savour any epiphanies of everyday life as they busy themselves with the construction of earthly paradise.

During moments of frustration and disaster, [Spinoza] recommended the adoption of a cosmic perspective [...] ‘under the aspect of eternity’ sub specie aeternitatus. [...] Spinoza proposed that we use our imaginations to to step outside of ourselves and practise submitting our wills to the laws of the universe, however contrary to our intentions.
[...]
Rather than try to redress our humiliation by insisting on our wronged importance, we should instead endeavour to apprehend and appreciate our essential nothingness.
[...]
Our secular world is lacking in the sorts of rituals that might put us gently in our place. It surreptitiously invites us to think of the present moment as the summit of history, and the achievement of our fellow humans as the measure of all things - a grandiosity that’s plunges us into a swirl of anxiety and envy.

We are therefore in need of art to help our own neglected hurt, to grasp everything that does not come up in casual conversation and to coax us out of an unproductively isolated relationship with our most despised and awkward qualities.