The God Desire

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To explain what you mean by being an atheist Jew is complicated,” he says, “and I’m drawn to complexity. The book, I think, to some extent comes from trying to explain what that is.” On reading it, he says, Stoppard told him, “I’m really enjoying your conversation with yourself”, which is on-brand for Baddiel (and a bit on-brand for the courteous, sphinx-like Stoppard). He’s a great one for conversations with, and about, himself. Where “character comedians” hate being themselves on stage, Baddiel never tried to create a gap between his public image and his private one. Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, he says, was an exercise in “let’s see how close as possible we can get to who we actually are on TV”.

There’s no evidence from this otherwise lively book that Baddiel has seriously engaged with what Jewish thinkers have had to say about God over the last two millennia. Enjoyed this long essay. In some ways it draws on John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism and sure enough that book is mentioned here. This is a begrudging, melancholic atheism in which punches are pulled, unlike the militant approach of the New Atheists. Gray has since returned the favour by reviewing it at The New Statesman. So clever is Mr Baddiel that he can find the God Desire everywhere. He was rewriting the book when Elizabeth II died. As he watched the response, he wondered whether the veneration of her reign - and of her longevity - were attempts to make her immortal. A compelling hypothesis. I love David Baddiel. I like his comedy, his song about football coming home, and the fact that he’s the only celebrity I’ve ever spotted around London. 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. Even though he sees how the non-existence of God could give you a carpe diem attitude, he’s “plagued by anxieties and weaknesses … that stop me Yolo-ing my way through the world”.I really think it’s a great book … the real triumph is its tone, its straightforwardness, and its spectacular tact and wit” - Adam Phillips, author of Monogamy In the beginning Baddiel makes clear he would dearly love there to be a guy in the sky – “a superhero dad” landlord who puts us up in “post-death neighbourhoods” – but knew long ago that desire “provides no frame for reality”. Well, no. I mean, I’ve read The God Delusion, I’ve read John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism. When I couldn’t sleep, I was listening to a The Rest Is History [podcast hosted by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook] about the Enlightenment, and they were talking about Voltaire being the first atheist who wrote properly about atheism, and I did think: ‘Hmm, I haven’t really read Voltaire and I’ve written a book about atheism. That’s probably shit … ’ But as far as I’m concerned, if it’s readable and accessible and makes people intellectually entertained for however long it is, I don’t care that much that I clearly haven’t read the huge tracts on this elsewhere. But yeah, you’re right: there is some chutzpah in it.” I have just hit the milestone of forty years and I have been an ordained Christian Minister for nearly a decade. My new life with Jesus began in my mid-twenties from a place of atheist machoism that Baddiel is correct to critique in this book. I grew up in a secular home in North London where football was one of our many god’s. I remember fondly as a child being able to stay up late during a sleepover with my friends to watch our favourite programme “Fantasy Football League” staring David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and of course ….Statto! All this leaves Baddiel in a curious position. He is happy to describe himself as “a fundamentalist atheist”, someone who “ know[s God] doesn’t exist”, yet he refuses to be “dismissive of religion”. He will no doubt be abused on social media both by the faithful and the militantly faithless, but it seems like an interestingly complex place to be.

I'm about a quarter of the way into this thus far and it's very well argued and written. It's a book you know the author HAD to write, and those are the best books’JON RONSON - I am not sure if I would describe the author and his way of writing in this book as self-indulgent. What he appears to be is very self-confident, or appearing to be, in saying “I am who I am and I believe this”. Maybe this seems out of place to me when moral relativism can seem too often nowadays to be a fashionable reason for standing for nothing. But at times I did wonder; do you have enough self-reflection and a healthy amount of self-doubt about you? In this very short book, comedian David Baddiel damns religion with praise that is both faint and under-researched. Atheists, he laments, have a habit of denying “the ­presence in themselves of what religion is there to serve”, pretending they are “too hard and adult to require comfort and hope in the face of death”.

We need to stop seeing atheist Jews as bad Jews

He writes about sobbing at the end of Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, a play about a Jewish family fleeing persecution, noting: “Jewish culture and traditions have strongly influenced me, and nothing can change the facts of my predominantly Jewish heritage.” But what we see in Abbott’s letter is confirmation of something beyond even the idea of a hierarchy: an insistence that the discrimination Jews and other ethnicities suffer does not even deserve the term racism. The MP has apologised for her letter, and in her apology states that she understands that Jewish people and the other groups mentioned have experienced monstrous racism. There’s plenty to ponder whenever this wise and witty mortal whips out his chisel and tablets of stone, but being privy to another person raging against the dying of the light tends to be as riveting as hearing about their abstract dreams or fun-filled fortnight in Fuerteventura. It’s a discussion to have with the mirror or psychiatrist, not the reader. We’ve all got our existential struggle to juggle. No amount of God gags will make us feel less antsy.

From Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece to the lyrics of Jesus Christ Superstar to conversations with his Catholic friend and fellow comedian Frank Skinner, Baddiel describes his admiration for how Christianity’s God — and its hero, Jesus — offer a story that meets the human need to feel that death can be conquered. For Baddiel — and this is the most telling and poignant remark in the book — “God is all about death”. Baddiel seems tempted by this notion — “a way of thinking about God that might suit me and salve my…despair” — but can’t in the end embrace it. It can’t assuage his abiding fear of death. Alright, let's talk about "The God Desire" here. Now, I'm more of a 'build-a-suit' kind of guy, but philosophy? That's like the Avengers of the mind, and this book isn't pulling any punches. This is the obverse challenge of David Baddiel’s new book “The God Desire”. A wonderfully honest insight into Baddiel’s journey of psychology that attempts to rationalise the distinctly human need to make reality not entirely mute.It is very short, but could've been even shorter, since there is basically one idea: humanity desires God, mainly as a cure for mortality, and for other reasons as well, and if something is desired, but there's no evidence of its existence, then it follows that that something doesn't exist. A refutation of God's non-existence, according to Baddiel, would be someone earnestly believing that there is God, but wishing that there wasn't one. That would be a belief freed from desire (mind and senses purified etc.), and it would've at least put a chink into an atheist's armor, if not destroyed it completely. I'm not so sure about the last argument, as I can imagine some people believing in God, and yet being angry at him (there are plenty of reasons) with enough ferocity to wish him into the non-existence. But other than that, yes, sure, God is the projection of our fear of death and chaos. And, on top of everything, it doesn't work! As Baddiel points out, even at the peak of religiosity (let's say Europe in middle ages), people, devout believers as they were, still didn't want to die and considered death, their own and their loved ones', to be the ultimate calamity. The notion of seeking God as a comfort against the coldness of nothingness is a uniquely western concept, where Christians have been spoiled to complacency. In much of the world Christians are persecuted and tortured for their faith. The UK Parliament published a paper in 2022 stating that Christians are the most persecuted people group in the world with over 360 million suffering high levels (life threatening) cruelty. For them Christianity is far from the superficial preoccupied cry for comfort of the army of ageing middle England flower arrangers who have misunderstood Christianity to being good enough to pass through the pearly gates. There’s plenty to ponder whenever this wise and witty mortal whips out his chisel and tablets of stone As a result, Baddiel well understands why an atheist friend who had lost a son should want to sing Kaddish, the traditional Hebrew prayer for the dead. When he reads the text in English, he admits, he finds himself irritated by “the endless OCD-like repetition of praise [for God], the desperate hope that if you say something enough times, a fragment might get through the ether”. Yet he also responds deeply to the way that “those words, just the sound, the ancient music, the sonic pain of them, connects you, the atheist Jew praying, and the atheist Jew listening, with centuries of tradition and suffering and defiance”. 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”.