Angry Atheists want to put on a “Rational Celebration of Christmas”. And they’re doing it by selling you things. 3MinuteTheologian wouldn’t mind if what they had to sell was in any way adult.

 
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Every year, about this time, we get another round of the Christmas Culture Wars. You know the sort of thing: this council has banned the word “christmas”; that school wants a nativity play without Jesus. It’s all nonsense. This year the nonsense has been deepened, made richer and weirder, by those wonderful people from the shocktroop wing of Angry Atheism. On 18, 19 December (and one further performance on 21 December by public demand), the usual group of bien-pensants and metropolitan entertainers will be performing in something called “Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People”. Chris Addison, Phill Jupitus, Stewart Lee, Dara O’Briain and Mark Thomas, with a special appearance, reading from his own works, the so-called “arch atheist” Richard Dawkins: ooh, I hope he’s on last. It’ll be a bit like St John himself reading from the prologue to the Gospel!

Robin Ince, who has organised the event, denies that it is intended to be deliberately provocative: “If it riles people,” he says to the Daily Telegraph, then “it does so because they’re fools”.1 That may be so. But I was struck by Ricky Gervais’s description of why he is involved in the performance. When he was a boy he believed passionately in Jesus (he doesn’t say what that “belief” meant, but he did mean it). Then, one day when he was eight his older brother caught him drawing a picture of a bible scene. “Why do you believe in God?” Bob asked, disingenuously. But before the young Ricky, philosopher and artist could reply, his mother cut off the conversation: “Bob!” she warned. Then, as Ricky says, “I knew. I knew that she was hiding something that he wanted to tell me. I thought about it for an hour and that was it. I didn’t believe any more.”

Marvellous! A moment’s revelation when he was eight years old, hung on the hook of sibling rivalry, and every since then, Ricky hasn’t believed. Can you imagine what would happen if the story was the other way round, if it had been a moment of belief that emerged when he was eight years old? ‘You believe in God because of something that happened when you were eight?’ ‘You base your adult philosophy of life on something that happened when you were in short trousers!?’

Which is why I think the current crop of angry, prominent, self-publicising atheists are such a disappointment. Their beliefs and their lack of beliefs are so thin. There is almost nothing to them. They are based on the strawest of straw men arguments, the most hominem of ad hominem reasoning. “Religion! Shit on it!” as Stephen Fry so eloquently put it in a recent episode of the “intellectual” quiz show QI.

Oh, and one other thing. Tickets for this “Rational Celebration of Christmas” cost at least £30… and Ricky Gervais is promoting his tour in the New Year. This godless people want to sell you stuff. Try your local church or cathedral for an alternative carol service. It won’t cost you a penny.

  1. Dominic Cavendish, “Ricky Gervais: Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People”, The Daily Telegraph, 6 December 2008 [↩]