The God Desire

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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.” Mr. Baddiel has written another beautiful book on a terrible subject. As he grows older, he finds himself dwelling on his mortality. Most of us make peace with it, but he cannot. Rather, he wonders whether we need to believe in gods to cope with the darkness that waits for us all. They envy those who have the certainty that they will meet members of their family again. Like him, they are reluctant atheists, wishing things were different but seeing no alternative. 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.

As a fan of Baddiel and a Pastor, I feel compelled to write this response to “the God desire” as someone who meets the challenge of this book. Baddiel is correct in his conclusion that human beings invest in stories. But not in stories that cost them. Void of any persecution the Church in the west has tragically warped Christianity into something that appears no different (to Baddiel and millions of others) than any other story offered by purveyors of morality which is why it has lost its saltiness. Those who believe in God should not use logical arguments to support belief because God exists beyond logic and reason" - yeah, completely disagree on this one. There's a difference between 'support' and 'prove'. Archibald described the book as a “funny, incisive look at the question why God exists, rather than does God exist?" and hailed Baddiel "as the new voice in non-fiction". That much gets projected onto images of a deity — in all religious traditions — seems both historically incontrovertible and existentially true: Baddiel is good at recognising the human need for stories that give meaning to life.We cannot pretend anymore that Jewish atheists (or agnostics) do not exist or that they have no place in the Jewish community. Baddiel has opened the lid and the reality has come tumbling out. A mindset change is needed whereby we no longer view those who do not come to services as lazy or bad Jews, but recognise that it can be out of a conviction that needs to be respected, even if it is not endorsed.

Take from that what you will. Instead of humour, therefore, I suspect the main appeal of these little books is that they’re just extra moreish owing to their concise punchiness. They also give you access to Baddiel’s clearly razor-sharp and rigorous mind, a mind which allows him to articulate everyday sentiments with uncommon clarity. Baddiel coins the term “Oblivion knowledge” to diagnose the desire of the book’s title – that niggling sense we all share that there was an eternity before we were born and there will be an eternity after we’ve gone. He writes: “Every bishop and imam and rabbi knows this, and that’s why so many pray so fervently. We pray and pray and pray, to drive out that knowledge.” 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" religion is no longer considered a vastly powerful and high status force, but rather a series of fragile and individual identity-based beliefs" - Unsure how he can conclude that religion in today's world is no longer powerful and high-status. Maybe this is true in certain circles/cultures, but definitely not on a global scale.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. His essential belief is that we have created God because we want a ‘superhero dad to chase off death’. He makes the case that there is something too great about god, too great to be true. His arguments revolve around the central tenants of belief that he feels underpin his ‘fundamentalist atheism’.