The God Desire: On Being a Reluctant Atheist

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There is, of course, no necessary link between what we want to be true, and what is true, and so it is a red herring to talk about desire in the way that Baddiel does. Rather, I’d prefer to know what he thinks about the many arguments for God’s existence, which include: In Greek mythology, Pothos was the god of desire and longing. One of the daimones, he was entirely defined by this purpose. Pothos controlled whether a man or woman was attracted to another person. While Eros inspired love, Pothos inspired a longing that could be more intense, but also more temporary. There is some interesting explanation of God as a kind of ultimate parent, and Baddiel touches upon our collective need for narrative and humanity’s constant search for wider meaning.Eros and Psyche is a myth that has inspired many sculptures. The pair were a favorite subject for ancient Greek and Roman sculptures. Everything I know about God comes through these disabled bones,” writes Julia Watts Belser, historian of ancient religion, Jewish rabbi and disabled activist. In her latest book, Loving Our Own Bones (Hodder & Stoughton), these three strands of her identity combine in a provocative and scholarly commentary ...

In so many ways, I think we struggle to understand this. Even when we return to God and repent of our sins, we come apologetically, ashamed. Even as children of God, we so often come cringing.

Here is why Christianity is right to insist that all people recognize themselves as sinners: Not because God is angry and wants us to suffer for our sins, but because he deserves all our love, worship, and adoration, and he wants fellowship and relationship with us, and we have withheld our hearts, denied him our trust, and worshipped vain, petty, and empty things as god. We have made golden calves out of things that abuse us and adored them in place of our Father. But, as he observes, a public image always involves a series of misprisions. And in any case he contains multitudes, slaloming cheerfully between highbrow and lowbrow. His early work with Rob Newman set a million teenagers saying “You see that pair of pants? That’s you, that is” and his 90s partnership with Frank Skinner helped bring about the “New Lad”. But he has also written with grace and subtlety about David Foster Wallace and the Roth/Updike generation, created a feature film about a Muslim who discovers he was born Jewish and a play about quantum physics, published comic novels and literary novels and children’s books, done standup shows he sees as halfway to Ted talks, and a documentary about his father’s dementia. Now, wearing his (in his phrase) “Mr Jew mantle”, he appears on heavyweight TV shows and publishes monographs in the TLS. By contrast, Baddiel admits he is terrified of mortality, so he understands why religious people want to believe there is another world beyond it. This, however, only ­reaffirms in his mind that God is not real. The God Desire is “an urge for something to exist for which there is no existential proof, and that no one has, in concrete terms, experienced”. He offers us the equation: “desire + invisibility = God”. Christianity is the story of the divine entering into concrete truth that makes sense of the universe in the centrality of existence. Which is why the Church is so utterly wrong to present the Christian message in the irrational fringes of understanding, for the God of the Bible does not claim to be the god of the gaps but the God of reality – in Christ, He has flesh like ours. Two years ago, David Baddiel published an angry polemic, Jews Don’t Count , which set out to demonstrate “how identity politics failed one particular identity”. Since many on the left more or less consciously regard Jews as both privileged and “white”, he argued, they often fail to take antisemitism as seriously as other forms of racism. Despite a good deal of humour, the analysis is razor-sharp – and designed to persuade basically decent fellow progressives that they have something of a blind spot.

The unpredictable and often fleeting nature of desire and yearning are likely what led to Pothos being given different parentage by later writers. Zephyrus and Iris were fitting parents for the inconsistent god of love. Rosh Hashanah, or Jewish New Year, begins this week. But what is it, and how can Christians speak to their Jewish friends and neighbours about the festival? Joseph Steinberg explains The desire of God is for restoration with all who have wandered away from him, with those who have sinned egregiously against him, and with those whose adoration he ought never to have lost. Never mind that plenty of people have argued there is existential proof of God, Baddiel’s thesis is rooted in the “genetic fallacy”, the idea that because we can hypothesise a psychological explanation for something, we can dismiss it as man-made – and to this the author adds the weight of numbers. It’s the sheer ubiquity of God-belief (whether we are drawn to “the Queen” or “Doctor Who”) that seems to convince him it is the product of emotional need, a “babyish” yearning for “God the Parent” who provides an afterlife that offers an alternative to the “nothingness” of the grave.

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After studying at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School in Elstree, he read English at King's College, Cambridge and graduated with a double first. He began studies for a PhD in English at University College London, but did not complete it. It’s curious that when we speak of the “will of God,” we are more likely to get into philosophical arguments about the way the universe works than we are to focus on the heart of God. Strong's 1722: In, on, among. A primary preposition denoting position, and instrumentality, i.e. A relation of rest; 'in, ' at, on, by, etc.