A tree without roots

From Mercator, an excellent illustration here of Chesterton's dictum that when people stop believing in God, they will believe in anything.

It seems that Alain de Botton has proposed the building of an atheists' temple and wants the sentiment, religiosity, and morality without the theology which created it. As the great sage is reported to have said,

One can be left cold by the doctrines of the Christian Trinity and the Buddhist Fivefold Path, and yet at the same time be interested in the ways in which religions deliver sermons, promote morality, engender a spirit of community, make use of art and architecture, inspire travels, train minds and encourage gratitude at the beauty of spring.

This is simply sentimentality, and as Oscar Wilde wrote,

A sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.

This kind of non-thinking reminds me of the scene towards the end of  Huxley's Brave New World in which the Savage, a Catholic, whips himself penitentially, and the Ford-worshiping onlookers copy him, without understanding, in an orgy of sado-masochistic self-flagellation. 

If (as God forbid) I were to lose all religious belief, morality, apart from unenlighened self-interest, would have no appeal whatsoever.