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More than half a century later Baddiel is still an insomniac, and he’s still terrified by the prospect of dying. But then, last night, I rewatched Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, a strangely emotional film which is, in the end, all about “the God desire”: the human hunger for answers and cosmic justice, the consolation of knowing that something or someone is watching over the world and that you are part of the mechanisation of some great plan. 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.
That night, he lay on the top bunk of his bed, fervently praying – “probably” the first and last time he has prayed with any sincerity – that “my life as it was in Dollis Hill in 1971 would still somehow continue after death”.That’s a psychoanalytical parental thing, but if you expand it, yeah: God definitely provides a witness.
It seems to me indicative, and endearingly guileless, that the first time we met in person he quoted verbatim from a sniffy review I’d written about one of his novels a decade previously.He also shares his concern that love may have replaced God in our modern society, and become a kind of deity in itself – thus our propensity to look for ‘God’ continues in various guises. But even its target audience of atheists will find it insubstantial, for Baddiel has made as little effort to understand them as he has the God-botherers (in a recent interview, he admitted that he hasn’t “really read Voltaire”). A philosophical essay that utilises Baddiel's trademarks of comedy, storytelling and personal asides, The God Desire offers a highly readable new perspective on the most ancient of debates. The love gods sometimes carried symbols that made it possible to tell them apart, but they were just as often shown as almost interchangeable winged male deities.
As a result, he finds it problematic when gung-ho fellow atheists “don’t grasp how intertwined religion is with ethnicity, which is also a key component of many people’s identity, as well as their sense of vulnerability”. Yet Baddiel and his two brothers were sent to the North West London Jewish Day School “because that was the nearest school that we could go to where we probably wouldn’t get beaten up for being Jewish … that meant that I went to a school where I learned Hebrew, I said blessings before every meal, I had to wear religious garb, and I was inculcated in a very Jewish way – which was weird, because I’d come home and they’d make me bacon sandwiches. so the good will of God is the first cause of our salwttiou: "God will have all men to be saved" ( 1 Timothy 2:4. Her parents, who were refugees from the Nazis, used to have Seder nights at the Baddiel home until his father knocked it on the head: “He was pretty curmudgeonly.Not always witnessed in the way you’d like, though, and that’s perhaps one of the reasons that, for someone as rich and successful and accomplished as he is, Baddiel seems to sit uneasily with himself.
As for those with knowledge of the philosophy of science, when they read here that science reveals “objective truths”, they are entitled to laugh, given the work done on the contribution of values to theory choice. Yet “it is almost impossible to feel this urge,” he adds, “if, like me, you’re an atheist but also a member of a minority that is associated with religion”. Wokism is not building orphanages or soup kitchens, these pseudo religious concepts are popular simply because they offer a self defined righteousness without demand or accountability. His first television appearance came in a bit-part on one episode of the showbiz satire, Filthy, Rich and Catflap. It seems like it could’ve been summed up pretty quickly, with the statement: “our desire, for God does not prove God’s existence”.Baddiel discusses the human phenomena that attempts to give meaning to reality and honestly acknowledges his own endeavours. So once humans get to the point where they realise we’re going to die, life is meaningless, it’s all shit, they would all be depressed. If only so that when I resign, Theresa May can finally be proved right that No Deal is better than a Baddiel.
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