The Digested Twenty-first Century (28 page)

Still with me? Probably not. But never mind. I shall carry on regardless. One second after big bang, the universe would have contained mostly photons, electrons and neutrinos, and their anti-particles, together with some protons and neutrons.

Colliding photons might produce an electron and a positron; if they met up they would annihilate each other, but the reverse process is not so easy. Eventually, when the temperature had fallen to allow the strong force to take effect we’d begin to see the nuclei of deuterium. From then on it was downhill through supernovae and black holes to the present day.

But how do we resolve the problem of singularity? Through
supersymmetry? String theory? 10-dimensional space? These are only partial explanations. All we can say for certain is that it is possible to write five sentences that make sense on their own, but when put together in a paragraph are intelligible only to God. And me.

Digested read, digested:
Third Time Unlucky.

If the intended reader of this book should want to go beyond disagreement with its author and try to identify the sins that animated him to write it, he or she will not just be quarrelling with the ineffable creator who made me this way, they will also be defiling the memory of a simple, pious woman called Mrs Jean Watts.

It was Mrs Watts’ task, when I was a boy of about nine, to instruct me in lessons of nature and scripture, and there came a day when she said, ‘So you see children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made the grass to be green, which is exactly the colour that is most restful to our eyes.’

I was appalled by this. Even though it was to be several months before I was to fully comprehend the subtleties of Darwinian evolution and to unlock the secrets of the genome, I simply knew my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in two sentences. The eyes were adjusted to nature, not the other way round.

I do not believe it is arrogant of me to say that I had uncovered the four irreducible objections to religious faith – its misrepresentations of the origins of man and the cosmos, its combination of
servility and solipsism, its dangerous sexual repression and its wishful-thinking – before my boyish voice had broken. Everyone knows I have always been right about everything, even when I have later changed my mind, and there is at least one other person conceited enough to make similar claims. My brother.

Religious friends – I use both words guardedly – often call me a seeker because I have studied the world’s sacred texts in greater depth than any scholar. Like almost everything else, this irritates me immensely. I read these books because I am, by nature, tolerant and wish to engage with the idiocies many hold dear. The difference between me and them is that while I would not try to convert others to atheism, they feel obliged to save my soul. This is an important distinction. The purpose of this book is not to prove God does not exist; it is to prove I am cleverer than Richard Dawkins.

Sheltered as my life normally is within the rarefied sanctuary of the Washington intellectual elite, I have always made it my business to give comfort to the world’s conflict zones by blessing them with a visit – often accompanied by my dear friend, Salman Rushdie. And I ask you this: if the express purpose of religion is to make you happy, then why is every zealot a psychopathic paedophile?

Yes, more people have died in the name of religion than ... Oh, you’ve already heard this somewhere before, have you? Well let me tell you something you don’t know. The reason that Jews and Muslims don’t eat pork has nothing to do with the meat’s cleanliness. It comes from their Freudian repression of their lust for pigs.

Religion serves only the self-satisfied and the conceited; it dates back to a period of prehistory when nobody – not even the mighty Democritus – had the faintest clue what was going on and God was needed not just as an explanation but as an instrument of social repression...

But I can see that I am again in danger of losing you in the
radicalism and unfamiliarity of my discourse, so let me devote the next 150 pages to a brutal deconstruction of the evils of the Bible and the Qur’an – though they hardly merit the attention of my intellect. I could talk about the weakness of evidence by revelation, but suffice it to say that the Bible is a catalogue of lies compiled by ruthless, amoral, sexually perverted liars and that the Qur’an is a catalogue of lies borrowed from the Bible.

I must also talk about the tawdriness of the miraculous, the priapism of blood sacrifice, the molestation of children and the empty concept of heaven which are endemic in every believer, but I should also like to counter the case against the secularists. Were not Hitler and Stalin the biggest mass-murderers in modern history, say the vicious religious apologists such as Mother Teresa? I say only this. All the Nazis were Catholics and Stalin was a theocrat.

The time for the new Enlightenment has come. Cast aside your false gods and know one thing and one thing only. There is no God but me.

Digested read, digested:
Our Christopher, who art in Washington, hallowed be my name.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart make Dawkins and Hitchens burn in Hell, O Lord my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen
.

Much of what we say about God these days is facile. The concept of God is meant to be hard. Too often we get lost in what Greeks called
logos (reason) rather than interpreting Him through mythoi – those things we know to be eternally true but can’t prove. Like Santa Claus. Religion is not about belief or faith; it is a skill. Self-deceit does not always come easily, so we have to work at it. Our ancestors, who were obviously right, would have been surprised by the crude empiricism that reduces faith to fundamentalism or atheism. I have no intention of rubbishing anyone’s beliefs, so help me God, but Dawkins’s critique of God is unbelievably shallow. God is transcendent, clever clogs. So we obviously can’t understand him. Duh!

I’m going to spend the next 250 pages on a quick trawl of comparative religion from the pre-modern to the present day. It won’t help make the case for God, but it will make me look clever and keep the publishers happy, so let’s hope no one notices!

The desire to explain the unknowable has always been with us, and the most cursory glance at the cave paintings at Lascaux makes it clear these early Frenchies didn’t intend us to take their drawings literally. Their representations of God are symbolic; their religion a therapy, a sublimation of the self. Something that fat bastard Hitchens should think about.

Much the same is true of the Bible. Astonishingly, the Eden story is not a historical account, nor is everything else in the Bible true. The Deuteronomists were quick to shift the goalposts of the meaning of the Divine when problems of interpretation and meaning were revealed. So should we be. Rationalism is not antagonistic to religion. Baby Jesus didn’t want us to believe in his divinity. That is a misrepresentation of the Greek pistis. He wanted everyone to give God their best shot and have a singalong Kumbaya.

We’ll pass over Augustine and Original Sin, because that was a bit of a Christian own goal, and move on to Thomas Aquinas, in whom we can see that God’s best hope is apophatic silence. We can’t say God either exists or doesn’t exist, because he transcends existence.
This not knowing is proof of his existence. QED. A leap of faith is in fact a leap of rationality. Obviously.

Skipping through the Kabbalah, introduced by the Madonna of Lourdes and Mercy (1459–), through Erasmus and Copernicus, we come to the Age of Reason. It was unfortunate that the church rejected Galileo, but that was more of a post-Tridentine Catholic spat than a serious error and it didn’t help that a dim French theologian, Mersenne, conflated the complexities of science with intelligent design, but we’ll skip over that.

Things came right with Darwin. Many assume he was an atheist; in reality he was an agnostic who, despite being a lot cleverer than Dawkins, could not refute the possibility of a God. Therefore God must exist, or we drift into the terrible nihilism of Sartre where we realise everything is pointless. Especially this book.

The modern drift to atheism has been balanced by an equally lamentable rise in fundamentalism. Both beliefs are compromised and misconceived. The only logical position is apophatic relativism, as stated in the Jeff Beck (1887–) lyric, ‘You’re everywhere and nowhere, Baby. That’s where you’re at.’

I haven’t had time to deal with the tricky issues of the after-life that some who believe in God seem to think are fairly important.

But silence is often the best policy – geddit, Hitchens? And the lesson of my historical overview is that the only tenable religious belief is one where you have the humility to constantly change your mind in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

God is the desire beyond this desire, who exists because I say so, and the negation of whose existence confirms his transcendence. Or something like that.

And if you believe this, you’ll believe anything.

Digested read, digested:
The case dismissed.

The most boring question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true. Manifestly, none are. Yet this should not stop us cherry-picking the bits we like and repackaging them as self-help aphorisms for a liberal middle-class who consider themselves too clever for Paulo Coelho. I was brought up a committed atheist, but even I had a crisis of faithlessness that originated in listening to Bach’s cantatas, was developed by exposure to Zen architecture and became overwhelming on reading my own prose.

Why then should secular society lose out on the benefits a religion can offer merely because it rejects certain of its catch-phrases? Is there not a middle way where Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins can join hands and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony? My strategy, then, is to take various religious principles completely out of context and apply them as feelgood, quasi-spiritual soundbites to areas such as education, literature and architecture. And if mention is made here of only three of the world’s largest religions – Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism – it is no sign of anxiety that I might get a fatwa if I also rope in Islam.

One of the losses modern society feels most keenly is that of a sense of community. Religions may have evolved out of a need to enforce social cohesion, but one cannot deny the sense of belonging that going to church confers on the participants. In our atavistic, rationalist world we have lost these connections. While we may surrender up to half our income in taxation, we have no sense of how that money is being spent. How much better it would be if the less fortunate members of the polity were able to
congregate in one place to say thank you to me in person while the Monteverdi Choir sings Mozart’s Mass in C Minor.

A squalid new-build university in north London. Not at all like the university I went to, but one to which the little people can reasonably aspire. Yet what are they being taught? Land reform in 18th-century France? What is the purpose of that? Literature and history are superficial categories. How much greater benefit would there be to student and society alike if universities were to have a Richard and Judy Department for Relationships or a Deepak Chopra Centre for Personal Growth? Imagine also the power of hearing Montaigne’s essays rewritten as versicles and responses with a 100-strong student chorus after every sentence.

Religion may offer empty promises of a happier afterlife, but we should not overlook its power in helping people to cope with the fact that they are never going to be as rich or as clever as me. Face it, some people are born losers and some aren’t – and the losers need whatever consolation they can find. The orthodoxy of modern science is that we will eventually be able to explain everything in material terms, yet what science ought to be doing is helping us celebrate those things we will never master. Thus we would do well to prostrate ourselves in front of an image of Brian Cox and meditate on the 9.5 trillion kilometres that comprise a single light year.

One of the great miseries imposed on atheists is the renunciation of ecclesiastical art. Yet what person has not been enriched by the altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald for the Monastery of St Colin in Beckenham? The stations of the cross help the religious in their suffering, yet what is to stop us imposing our own spiritual needs on modern art? What was Christ’s crucifixion but an existential dilemma? Viewed through this perspective, the secular can once more reclaim the Sistine Chapel as a symbol of a male
midlife crisis. So let’s do away with the grubby architecture of northern British towns and rebuild a new Jerusalem in north London, a temple to myself and Auguste Comte.

Digested read, digested:
Yet more De Bottonanism.

Here’s a photo of me standing on a rock looking wistful. Here’s another photo of me sitting on a bench looking soulful. Here’s yet another photo ... Cut them out. Put them on your wall. Make a calendar. B xxx

I confess that when we began thinking about
Wonders of Life
, my first thought was ‘Why me?’ as I gave up biology as an academic subject in 1984. But then I looked in the mirror and I thought: ‘Yeah. That’s amaaazin.’ Evolution, DNA and butterflies. They’re amaaazin, too. I mean, look at this blade of grass. It’s basically made of the same shit as you and me. That’s like, mind-blowin. More so for me than for you. I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

Water. It’s magnificent. Every time a new star is born, a chain of events is set in place, catapulting hydrogen and oxygen atoms on an interstellar journey of billions of miles that ends up in my bath. I find it so hard to get my head around that. Did you know there are two species perfectly adapted for walking on water? One are insects known as
gerridae;
the other is me.