David Baddiel rejects religion – but describes himself as a ‘reluctant unbeliever’

The cover design of this tract-length book associates it with David Baddiel’s excellent Jews Don’t Count (2021), which exposed a prejudice infecting both ends of the political spectrum. The God Desire resembles its precursor in other ways. Wit and dry humour abound. But as a verdict on the human appetite for the divine, it is disappointing.

The question of whether life has ultimate meaning and purpose can plainly claim to trump all others. Atheism may be a viable world view, but it is hardly unproblematic. The same goes for theism. Yet rather than building up a case to support his conclusions (work undertaken with forensic rigour on separate terrain in Jews Don’t Count), Baddiel starts by assuming the truth of unbelief before telling us that faith-based explanations of existence are rooted in a thirst for either domination or solace. A cascade of similar utterances then follows.

God was famously scorned by Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and other authors of the hermeneutics of suspicion.