Where are the Morals?

[Brakeman]

First off, Alain De Botton is an Idiot.

There are no good kernels of corn in religion's shit.

From Pharangula. http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2...one-thing/

In this TED presentation, he advocates just adapting religion to atheism, something he calls Atheism 2.0, but which is actually just Religion 0.0 again...
de Botton wants to pick and choose from religion and keep the good parts for atheism, which is a nice idea, but he seems to be totally lacking in sense and discrimination in what the virtues of religion are. And then, unfortunately for him, he picks a few examples of something he thinks religion got right, and one of them is education. Fuck me.

He suggests looking at how churches teach the ‘facts’ of their faith, and is quite enthusiastic about the importance of repetition. Repeat things five times, he says, and then you’ll master it; he just suggests replacing God and Jesus with Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Has de Botton ever been anywhere near a classroom?

and from "Why Alain de Botton is a moron" by Fisun Güner http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/culturehous...s-a-moron/

You see, de Botton thinks that museums and art galleries are getting it all wrong. Every day, ‘honest, upright citizens leave highly respected museums and exhibitions feeling underwhelmed’. Rather as they once entered churches to find God, they now enter museums to find ‘better versions of themselves’. And since it’s not actually the art we want but deliverance, the museums are consistently failing to deliver.

So what could be better than that museums reframe the paintings on display as if they were prescriptions for specific ‘psychological frailties’ (everything from poor memory to pessimism to a broken heart). In other words, art would be better viewed as an instrumental tool through which our broken psyches might be healed. So, if Alain ruled the world – let’s say he were one of Plato’s philosopher-kings (never mind that Plato distrusted art and wished to banish it) – museum captions would offer more than bland, neutral facts like name and date, but moral instructions ‘appropriate’ to the work of art, prompting us to, for example, ‘remember to be patient’. Or, as a writer on the New York Times amusingly suggested when reviewing de Botton and Armstrong’s book, Jasper Johns’s Drawer, in which a drawer is embedded in a canvas, might be accompanied by the caption, ‘Open yourself to new experiences’, or worse, ‘Search within’. The parody is pretty close to what’s actually on offer.