The God Desire Quotes

“Some religious ideas may be on the decline, but not, I would say, human exceptionalism. Fewer people might believe in God than they used to, yet, although veganism is on the rise, most of us are still perfectly happy with the fact that we kill and eat huge amounts of animals when we don’t really need to. Most of us don’t bother with questioning this much. But I assume, if asked why we all think it’s OK to kill animals and not humans for meat, most would agree that humans are more important, more sacred, more valuable, more entitled to life than animals. There is secular backing for this idea – we have culture and language, and animals don’t (not true, they just have different culture and language) – but at heart it’s a hangover from religion. It’s a hangover from the notion that God made us in His image, and thus we sit at the top of the tree of life.”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“But also, the cynic may have to accept something else. That he, as a human, is not exceptional. He might have to accept that perhaps, when you look at how animals, certainly mammals, behave – how they have sex with their genitals, and shit from their anuses, and eat with their mouths – and how they appear, with their noses and ears and eyes and feet and hands/paws – that we are just one branch of multiple DNA outcomes. And accepting that – properly, viscerally accepting it – may not just throw a spanner in the works of complacently eating hot dogs. It also must mean that there is no God. Not least because clearly, coming back to the fact of that ongoing genocide, God does not care about the animals.”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“Because another thing we look away from, in the killing of animals, is just how much they are like us. One of the things the internet has done is circulate, on a vast scale, short films of animals being cute. A lot of the time this means: being like us. I watched, once, some YouTube footage of a pig who had been raised by a specific human and allowed to grow old. In the clip the pig sees this human again after several years of separation and rushes over to the edge of the pigsty, braying and trying to leap the fence with what seemed to my eyes like joy: like the joy of recognition – indeed, of love. If you post links to such films approvingly, cynics – men (always men) born with the knowledge that they know best – will tell you, with lordly condescension, that you are anthropomorphising. By which they mean projecting human emotions and responses onto animals. When they say this, they tend not “to consider the possibility that if this were not anthropomorphism – if the pig just, as the film clearly suggests, had empathy and memory and other-directedness, if it was really overjoyed to see the person who reared it again years later, if it was capable of love – if the pig were showing the big emotions which we humans think make us special, then complacently slaughtering and eating pigs might become a bit problematic.”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“Martin Amis once said, of death, that ‘after forty, it’s a full-time job looking the other way’. I sometimes wonder if, at any adult age, it’s also a full-time job – although a less conscious one – looking the “other way’. I sometimes wonder if, at any adult age, it’s also a full-time job – although a less conscious one – looking the other way from the killing of animals. I consider most statements on the internet and elsewhere of people claiming to be on the right side of history as always specious, but if you are foolishly going to try and imagine the moral order of the “future, the one thing I’d be happy to put a small bet on is that in three hundred years’ time people will see our industrial slaughter of animals as a type of genocide.”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“It's remarkable how much religion won't let go of history”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“The God Desire should not have to lead to the God Delusion”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“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.”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“For the ancients, God was useful to explain away things they didn't understand: storms, earthquakes, why crops didn't grow, disease. I would say the instinct is the same now that we do understand those things. We know what causes them.”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“Humans invest emotionally in story in a very intense way. It matters to them. And they are not unaware of the fact that they're investing in is fictional even while they build all sorts of cosmetic realities around it.”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“As ever, with modern social media driven culture wars, it's about power, or at least, the perception of power. Social media likes to defend the perceived powerless from the perceived powerful, and atheists would be perceived to be wielding the power here. Not least because most well-known atheists are white men who come from a Christian background.”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“To be honest, I don't know if believers really believe it. Maybe suicide bombers - the ones who kill themselves in the hope of being rewarded for their actions after death - maybe they do. But I'm not sure one should put too much stock in the self-awareness of suicide bombers. I think it's possible that what suicide bombers crave, like most people (as social media has revealed), is identity, registered as significance among their peers. Or to put it another way: a suicide bomber does indeed kill themselves for the rewards granted to them in the life after death. A real life after death - not the imaginary one where there are virgins in heaven, but an actual future where their names are venerated by where their names are venerated by others after their limbs have long since stopped flying through the air.”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire