No to God, Yes to the Ritual and the Masters, the new Zest

Alain de Botton wrote an article about the work of Auguste Comte - Not the messiah. Alain de Botton persist about the importance of a ritual and symbolic objects for a culture even without a religion. Firstly the problem is not a religion perse but the monotheistic totalitarian vision, therefore Auguste Comte’s plan for a single religion in a nation-state should be questioned. I have a different proposal along the same lines of celebrating a ritual. But a religion is a bad word, urgently in need of re-branding, I will come up with a better name later, for now let’s use Zest, actually Zest is pretty good. Here are some Zest commandments:

Zest should abolish all canonical texts and concentrate on a ritual. The ritual is learned by observing the masters in the Chassidic and Asian traditions. No law or instructions are written down, or written down but not canonized (and never quoted), instead the rituals are formed as a natural communal dance and passed from generation to generation via a direct initiation and an observation. Therefore it always changes. There is no canonical text or instruction describing a ritual. All monotheistic religions are based on deliberately hiding of the true authorship and reinterpreting a text as fit for each generation. In Zest we celebrate the authors and look at the text as the key to understanding the authors and at the authors as the key to understanding the time. Instead of obliterating an authorship for the sake of a canonical tradition in Zest we would try to understand the context. In the traditional religions humanity is sacrificed to God and the unscrupulous priesthood, in Zest we care about people and what people do, not what they say. As in any observation there is a “broken telephone” element but because we would learn a ritual from an observation, the Zest is a pure polytheism (insurance against the totalitarian monotheism). The vector moves from God to people, from death and afterlife to life. Creativity would flourish, in Zest, it would be paramount to connect an expression with a master and to celebrate this expression in a ritual. In Zest a master would be measured by the power of his inspiration, by the poets he or she inspired, even more than by his own creations.

Further Reading:
• The Bottom Ten Reasons why the Traditional Judaism is Unethical and Immoral
• Charisma is the Result of a Social Ritual
• Mark Vernon quotes Jaron Lanier

Tagged as: alain de botton, philosophy, religion, zest

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