The God Desire

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So it is impossible to look at the repetitive creation of legends, across every culture and throughout history, which in one way or another outsmart death and promise immortality, without concluding that God is a projection of a very fundamental desire within us for it not to be so inevitable" His logic, if logic applies, is sound. After all, if you think Santa has his work cut out on Christmas Eve, spare a thought for planning post-death accommodation for the 120 billion humans who have lived and died on this planet in the last 200,000 years – not to mention all other possible intelligent lifeforms in our 14 billion-year-old (or 6,000-year-old) God-created Universe. We’re talking town planning that makes Milton Keynes look like my son’s Lego set. Christianity rests in the claim of the incarnation. That the historical figure Jesus of Nazareth is indeed the author of creation. Being God in flesh does not only go some way to explain the miraculous events that took place at His coming but also brings divine truth into reality and not the inverse. A claim that ends all superstation and emotivism. Christianity is a faith in the tangible facts as they are presented in this unique and historical person. One has to ask why any publisher would bankroll so slim a volume on such an enormous subject? In his defence, Baddiel is very funny; he’s certainly provocative. And on name recognition alone, The God Desire will be discussed on a thousand podcasts – after all, the BBC recently sent Judge Rinder to the Holy Land. and therefore there must be no god, because due to the fact that we kill a lot of animals, god must not care about them, therefore he must not exist.

It's hardly "impossible" when some people the exact same evidence used as evidence FOR God, in the sense that all other natural desires have something that fulfils them (thirst - water etc). And yes, Baddiel may be “happy to admit to my own babyishness… desperately in need of comfort, both psychological and physical”, but he immediately goes on to say that he is someone “with enough self-awareness to perceive these as urges, rather than as ideas”. If it were my cosplay convention, I’d strike his name from the guest list. But one aspect of faith that is insufficiently appreciated is its relationship to doubt. What if the world as I see it is an illusion? What if my actions do have some cosmic significance? When I look at a baby, with its ingenious anatomy, I doubt that it is just a happy arrangement of atoms – and it’s the desire to engage with the glorious mystery of life that leads us towards God. The author puts his case bluntly at the start; he would love there to be a God because he is terrified of death and the complete oblivion that implies. That is why he feels certain being an atheist, a “fundamentalist atheist” in his own words, because the desire for something is not the same as proving that something exists. In short a “God” of some sort it is the coping mechanism many of us use to get around the seeming irrationality of us living and dying without an obvious reason for being and then not being. Tragically, this god that Baddiel challenges has been cultural created by the Church in a desperate bid for survival in an ageing theocracy that is trying to meet the requirements of post-enlightenment thought. It is a mere concept of god that Baddiel fell prey to at six years old and was unsurprisingly left void.

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In The Master, set at the beginning of the 1950s, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix ) is a WWII veteran with PTSD. He is lost and inhibited, and very much the kind of person you might imagine would fall under the spell of a charismatic cult leader like Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character, Jordan Peterson — Oops! Freudian slip, that should read “Lancaster Dodd”! The combination of Freddie’s vulnerability and Dodd’s use of others’ admiration for him as a way of filling the hole at the centre of his soul makes the two men perfect for one another. Dodd is using his newfound gig as a prophet to work through all kinds of his own internalised issues, and Freddie is easy prey for Dodd’s developing Christ complex. This sets up a fascinating (possibly romantic) dynamic. 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. Though this insight only occurred to me after completion of it, on giving an impromptu resume of my initial considerations. The author is emphatic, without yelling at the reader like Richard Dawkins (whose 2006 book has a similar title) or AC Grayling Baddiel’s book is a masterclass critique of today’s cultural Christianity that is both fictional, misunderstood and far removed from Jesus’ life and teaching. Baddiel asks questions of God that those who claim to be Christian should be asking themselves to purge the Church of any phantasm conjured up to combat our mutual fear of nothingness.

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. Faith is something we crave like nothing else, and I think Baddiel is right to suspect that no matter how much machismo and swagger your atheistic thinkers like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins express when they, through their body language, point out that their essentially nihilistic position requires a kind of defiance of base instinct necessitating a brutal strength of character, there is still some part of absolutely everybody (those men included) that aches for Godly transcendence. It doesn’t matter how much you might pretend you’re above it all. Part of my rationale into the consideration for Baddiel's reasoning, revolves around his religion and, his apparent ambivalence towards it.
During his ruminating he spends what I considered, an inordinate amount of time looking into philosophical considerations.
The names of the eminent thinkers are familiar, though I have never considered actually reading their work. 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?David Baddiel is both respectful and honest in his approach and has read on the subject impressively referencing Augustine’s Confessions and TS Elliot as some of his sources as well as being versed in Hebrew literature and ritual through his own Jewish upbringing.

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”. Because another thing we look away from, in the killing of animals, is just how much they are like us. One of the things the internet has done is circulate, on a vast scale, short films of animals being cute. A lot of the time this means: being like us. I watched, once, some YouTube footage of a pig who had been raised by a specific human and allowed to grow old. In the clip the pig sees this human again after several years of separation and rushes over to the edge of the pigsty, braying and trying to leap the fence with what seemed to my eyes like joy: like the joy of recognition – indeed, of love. If you post links to such films approvingly, cynics – men (always men) born with the knowledge that they know best – will tell you, with lordly condescension, that you are anthropomorphising. By which they mean projecting human emotions and responses onto animals. When they say this, they tend not “to consider the possibility that if this were not anthropomorphism – if the pig just, as the film clearly suggests, had empathy and memory and other-directedness, if it was really overjoyed to see the person who reared it again years later, if it was capable of love – if the pig were showing the big emotions which we humans think make us special, then complacently slaughtering and eating pigs might become a bit problematic.

To demonstrate a cognitive dissonance perhaps unique to Judaism (and why there are so many branches of the faith, from strictly-Orthodox to secular humanists – it’s a Baskin-Robins religion) he recalls turning down an invite to light Chanukah candles by telling the rabbi he’s an atheist. “So am I!” replied the rabbi.

He does spend a paragraph or two on phrases like: “Throughout history…there has…been progress towards something that might be called actual truth…the thing we call science.” This hints towards Scientism – the belief that science is the only discipline that can lead to truth (ironically self-refuting, because Scientism can’t be proven scientifically). An inseparable identity In an age when news is readily accessible, Jewish News provides high-quality content free online and offline, removing any financial barriers to connecting people. Reading this, I thought- on the other hand, if everything we can imagine is real, then the higher power is as real as anything else we assign meaning to and behave accordingly to. Like the value of money, which is just mass-produced pieces of paper or figures recorded in cyberspace, or the belief that the person we love is so completely unique from all of the billions of other humans (while they are indeed unique, the uniqueness is minuscule compared with the similarities among all humans). What is "real" anyway? Are our thoughts and feelings not "real" in some way because they drive our (individual and collective) behavior? Well, the author draws a line between objective reality and what he refers to as magical thinking or storytelling that gives shape to our lives and beliefs. But more about that in the book. Book Review of The God Desire by David Baddiel, this book was a recent birthday gift from my son Jamie. It is an interesting read, both ‘The God Desire’ and ‘Jews Don’t Count’ are very straightforward and accessible without losing nuance. He is occasionally prone to grand oversights, but as long as you don’t read it as a conversion book, then that’s fine.

The argument from objective morality: Some things are morally right and others are morally wrong. This goes beyond human opinion, and needs grounding in a transcendent, objectively moral being.