Though he's a popular rather than a professional philosopher, Alain de Botton has a graduate degree in philosophy from King's College London, so he really has no excuse for saying things like this:
The starting point of religion is that we are children, and we need guidance. The secular world often gets offended by this. It assumes that all adults are mature – and therefore, it hates didacticism, it hates the idea of moral instruction. But of course we are children, big children who need guidance and reminders of how to live. And yet the modern education system denies this. It treats us all as far too rational, reasonable, in control. We are far more desperate than secular modernity recognises. All of us are on the edge of panic and terror pretty much all the time – and religions recognise this.
I'd call this a horrendously bad generalization, except there is no sample and thus no actual generalizing. It's just sweepingly false general claims padded by proof substitute ("But of course").
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