Review

Atheism

Belief

Culture

27 April 2023

7 min read

David Baddiel's wrestle with the God desire

David Baddiel’s short book is important, writes Krish Kandiah, as it represents an internal wrestling match that many can relate to.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A painting depicts two wrestlers on the ring mat, watched by eager fans.

Wrestlers by Abraham Bogdanove.

Abraham Bogdanove, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I have been a David Baddiel admirer ever since he penned the anthem Three Lions with his friend Frank Skinner. The song has provided a hymn of hope to every England fan since 1996. “Football’s coming home”, I sing to my friends, family and TV screen every time England plays. Fans declare it out over the pitch, as though the louder they sing, the more likely it is their prophecy will come true.

As the author of a song that has sought to inspire faith in the England team it is perhaps ironic that David Baddiel’s new book “The God Desire” is all about why he cannot bring himself to have faith in God.

I really enjoyed reading the book and the subsequent back and forth I had on Twitter with Baddiel. He comes across like the kind of guy it would be great to sit in a pub with and talk about life, faith and football until closing time. I hope I get the chance.
The book, for me, offers three significant strengths and one major topic of contention.

A new tone for the new atheists

Baddiel offers what might be called a ‘New New Atheist’ approach. He differentiates himself from the now old New Atheists like Professor Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchings by challenging their machismo:

“Some atheists divine [sic] – correctly – that what religion provides for human beings is comfort, and then, in a way that can feel a bit adolescent, they feel impelled to say, essentially, ‘Comfort? That’s for babies.’ “

Baddiel refuses to ridicule the consolation of faith and indeed seems instead to long for it. He is kinder, warmer, more polite than old New Atheists, taking a far less dismissive tone. Perhaps part of this comes from his deep and sincere friendship with Frank Skinner who is a devout Catholic Christian. Their friendship is reflected in Baddiel’s robust yet gracious approach to controversial topics. It is an approach that can act as a model for a lot of our discussions in increasingly polarised times.

Baddiel’s critique of New Atheism also has an epistemological angle. He observes that in an age of social media our relationship to the concept of truth has changed. He reflects that in previous eras truths were handed down from authority figures but now there is a democratisation of truth - through social media everyone can share their own truth.

This is one of Baddiel’s most interesting observations:

“In a moral universe dictated by social media, punching up and punching down are the new markers of good and evil, and if religion is no longer considered a vastly powerful and high-status force, but rather a series of fragile and individual identity-based beliefs that only the unkind would mock, then atheists become pariahs.”

I think Baddiel might be on to something important here. For some atheists, religion is still a huge and influential behemoth that needs to be taken down. We can see that in the aggressive antireligious tweeting of Professor Alice Roberts or the theologically ill-informed op eds of Matthew Parris. They “punch up” against the authority of religion. Others “punch down”: from their morally superior position they are prepared to issue something akin to imperialistic judgmentalism against anyone who dares to identify as religious.

But punching up or punching down says nothing about the truth or otherwise of the position. Instead, it speaks to relative social position. Like Baddiel I believe both in the right to freedom of expression, and in the concept of objective truth.

An honest recognition of the desire for God

This new tone permits Baddiel to admit that he recognises in himself the existential longing for the things that faith can provide. He writes:

“My argument, on the other hand, is, in a general sense, psychological. It requires an admission, which frankly most atheists, I’ve noticed, aren’t prepared to make. Which is: I love God.”

Baddiel’s coming out with this brave admission reminds me of these words of Canadian artist and novelist Douglas Coupland as he draws to a close his book “Life After God”:

“My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.”

Some might read too much into Baddiel’s confession. A whole book explaining why he doesn’t believe in God may seem then pointless, as though he “doth protest too much.” But for me Baddiel’s short book still feels important – it represents an internal wrestling match that many people can relate to – wanting to believe in God on one hand but struggling to find the evidence on the other.

A helpful evaluation of the benefits of faith

Baddiel explores three reasons why he would love to believe in God: story, parenthood and immortality.

Firstly, he recognises a longing for meaning in life. He believes that belief in God can provide the possibility of life having an external story, offering not only direction and significance but a source for moral evaluation:

“God also offers story. Humans have a need to organise, to structure, the chaos of existence. They need to feel that life has narrative. Narrative requires satisfactory checks and balances, such as good being rewarded, and evil being punished. God provides all this. He storifies life… With story comes another God benefit: meaning. A sense, on an individual level, that your own narrative has significance: that it matters, in some way. This can only be the case if Someone or Something is taking account of it.”

Second, Baddiel notes that God provides an answer to the longing for there to be a benevolent force guiding us through the universe. Baddiel frames that in the need for a parent-figure:

“God is this: an archetype, a super-projection, of a parent who can be both blissful and terrifying.”

This could be seen as a recycling of the Freudian critique of belief in God as an immaturity, a babyishness as Baddiel might call it. But instead, it reads as longing.

Thirdly, and for Baddiel most significantly, God offers immortality. Baddiel puts it clearly:

“At heart, though, God is all about death. The other issues are spin-offs.”

Belief in God can help us confront the biggest fear that human beings face: the prospect of our own death.

A point of contention

As a Christian, there is much to agree with in the above points. However, my main point of contention is very neatly identified by Baddiel himself:

“The God Desire should not have to lead to the God Delusion.”

Baddiel seems to argue that the very fact that he wants God to exist must mean that he can’t possibly exist, that he must simply be a projection of his own desire. This is the exact opposite conclusion to that reached by CS Lewis following a not dissimilar journey to Baddiel’s:

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water… If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world…”

Baddiel concedes this line of reasoning but reflects that desire in those cases are met by tangible, visible things - food and water in this case. He summarises that “desire + invisibility = God.” God, for Baddiel, seems to be so utterly transcendent, that he cannot be evidenced, discovered, known. If he cannot be evidenced, then he cannot exist.

But what if God, truly and utterly transcendent, has chosen to make himself known? And what if that revelation is right under our noses in the person of Jesus Christ? This is the central and astonishing thesis of Christianity, grounded in the evidence of Jesus’ birth, his miracles, his teaching, and, ultimately, his resurrection from the dead. This evidence cannot be discovered merely by psychological reflection, as Baddiel has discovered. There are further historical, theological, spiritual, moral and scientific theories that need engaging with.

I hope that Baddiel writes a sequel. In it he would explain why his desire + invisibility equation does not stop him standing up for universal human rights, for example. He would investigate the historical evidence for Jesus and the concrete experiences of millions in their connection with God. He would look further at the explanatory power that the Christian faith gives to life and see why compassion and justice matter. He would admit that his sense of the divine, was evidence of God’s existence. He would discover that his love for God had been met by God’s love of him.

I am hoping one day there’s a warm fire, a cold beer and long night available to amicably talk these things through. In the meantime, I commend his book to you and encourage you, with Baddiel, to continue wrestling with the big questions of life.

Article

Awe and wonder

Culture

Digital

Music

22 January 2025

1 min read

The rave: a last bastion of hope?

Was the Brat summer the last chance for rave culture?

Isaiah Morris

Isaiah is a visual artist and writer.

The anniversary party.

Rhythm Section.

The Rave is a site for communal epiphany, a burst of divine revelation. Illegal raves and alternative club culture seeps into the popular imagination, informing it in ways unbeknownst to most. But it wasn’t until last Summer’s Brat (Charli XCX) landed on the global charts that people began questioning the importance of Rave and Club culture again. Is our Brat the herald of a new golden Rave dawn? I think not.

However, undergirding the Rave is something far more profound, perhaps even religious. Raving suggests that the world might be otherwise, and it does this through a temporary release from this world’s demands. What might this say about our cultural moment?

Coordinating the Rave’s aesthetic is the dance between the DJ and ravers, accentuated by the practicalities of a decent sound system, lights, and a bit of fog. Inaugurating Rave’s epiphany, though, are the diverse motions of bodies to a singular beat. Techno reduces digital sounds to their basics and then pushes that to its boundary. Circumventing the rigidity of technology’s logic are the gestures of human spontaneity on the dance floor. The rave asserts that technology doesn’t have the last say over human life.

At the Rave, those traditionally on the margins of society become the center: a temporal expression of eternal longing, momentarily experienced as a shared catharsis and liberation. The dance floor is a bulwark against an increasingly de-ritualised and dehumanising society. It is a testament to the body being a medium for hope. Whether an intoxicated body or, in a growing trend, a sober one, it is the human fleshyness which takes priority. Both options respond to how one might cope with and confront the technological barrage.

Techno began as a language for African American youth, finding a future amidst the industrial ruins of Detroit. In our late modern moment, Rave culture acclimatises the body to the persistent sound of our technological age. It subverts the dehumanising tendencies of digital culture: mass impersonal media and abstracted global conversations. Instead, a momentary online connection is used to gather offline. When you’re there, you’re not concerned about telling the world. It is an attention to the present moment.

The Rave harbours a liminal threshold between appreciation for this life and the longing for some next one.

Worryingly, some have warned that clubs will dwindle to their knees this decade, squeezed out by neighbouring property developers or no longer economically viable amidst the cost-of-living crisis. The only thing being pushed out, however, is the possible resistance to a particularly greedy homogenisation of culture. In dislocating alternative discourses of ritual, we simultaneously assert that human bodies only have one particular “rhythm”: the rhythm of ceaseless economic expansion.

The Rave resists an uncomplicated acceptance of technology’s gift. Its goods are re-scaled to an embodied celebration of life.

In Raving (2023), McKenzie Wark expands upon this, saying, ‘Techno, not as genre but as technique, lets digital machines speak. Not unlike the way jazz lets analog instruments speak… Sounds at the limit of what the machine or the instrument can do to get free. Blackness in sound as the technique of making the thing free to sound off as itself and to take the human with it, into movement, into feeling, into sensation.’ Rave’s sound quite literally brings technology’s language to the end of itself.

For some, raving is what holds them to life. For others, it’s a momentary release from it. Whilst our bodies cannot exceed techno’s interchange with technology, we do learn how to harness the potential humanness within it. The Rave harbours a liminal threshold between appreciation for this life and the longing for some next one. In twisting its technological medium into a more human configuration, rave culture participates in hope.

Back in 1965, theologian Jürgen Moltmann wrote, ‘Hope’s statements of promise, however, must stand in contradiction to the reality which can at present be experienced. They do not result from experiences, but are the condition for the possibility of new experience… They do not seek to bear the train of reality, but to carry the torch before it. In so doing they give reality a historic character.’ While Moltmann is writing concerning Christianity and the crucified Christ, his framework for thinking about hope is helpful. Hope never occurs outside of history. The Rave embraces this historical moment and attempts to inhabit it as a contradiction.

Recently, I went to Rhythm Section International’s tenth-anniversary party at EartH, Hackney. Rhythm Section was founded as a music collective and is still curated by Peckham’s own Bradley Zero (BZ). Known globally, its parties and label imprint span techno, house, jazz, funk, spoken word, and RnB.

I first danced to BZ’s DJing at a record shop in 2018 while still living in Melbourne. The beauty of this particular community is that it provides a bridge for what Wark identifies: just as jazz brings analogue instruments to their limits, techno does the same for digital. As experienced recently at EartH in Hackney, Rhythm Section tries to push digital and analogue sounds to their threshold across the night. In contrast to the pure techno rave, BZ’s selection causes a polyphonic liberation. Joy is found through the instruments slapped just as much as in the DJ faders pushed.

This joy was evident in the diversity of ages and cultures present. “Mature heads” danced alongside students; some swayed, while others vogued. Without spaces such as these, where else can we celebrate the diversity of human responses to the same sound?

My concern with club culture’s demise is that those places of contradiction are swallowed up by a faux vision of “smoothness”. We replace spaces of alternative being with sameness. A diversity of aesthetics is converted into another apartment complex. We make room for the novelty of Brat but not the culture she draws upon.

Rave culture attempts to redefine the dominant technological language of our day, making the body its lens and not the periphery. By privileging the human body, Rave’s hope acknowledges profound discontent with the world but understands that all “escape” is temporary. This re-calibration enacted in Rave’s ritual de-escalates the supposed importance of technology’s ceaseless expansion. Thus, it exposes a more profound longing, one where it will be an eternal dance that deepens the love of life by going ever deeper into the particularities of individual bodies and their movements.

Because it offers a form of explicit hope, the Rave is a ritualised space filled with the belief that there can be “something more”. And this more-ness is, ultimately, encountered in the face of those we dance with; whether in a fleeting glance to ask, “Are you alright?” or the mutual smile that says, “I love this song”.

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