Richard Halloway reviews The Atheists Guide to Christmas

Published on Friday 17 December 2010 17:49

The Atheist's Guide to Christmas Friday Books, 272pp, £8.99

One Christmas Eve at midnight mass, when I was Bishop of Edinburgh, I got into the pulpit at St Mary's Cathedral in the capital's West End and told the assembled multitude that I'd been too busy that week to prepare a sermon. Instead, I proposed to read them an English translation of a recently discovered scroll of papyrus that was causing great excitement in the normally somnolent community of New Testament scholars. Though its authenticity was being disputed, all agreed that it was a remarkable document which would bear further study. It purported to be a reminiscence written as an old man by Jonathan the son of Simon, inn keeper at Bethlehem some time around 4BC. The manuscript was completely intact and its Aramaic was remarkably fluent. I then proceeded to read them the translation made of the document by Professor T Capote, head of the department of Semitic studies, of Euphoria University in California.

It began thus: I, Jonathan son of Simon, of Bethlehem in Judaea, wish to set down my memory of certain events in my boyhood that are now being spoken of and written about, most recently in a text by a Greek physician called Luke. I am well beyond my allotted three score years and ten, but I can still remember the incident vividly. This is not due to any feat of remembering: it is because the memory has never left me.

I might almost say it has dominated my life. Then followed an account of how he had seen a child born in his father's caravanserai one bleak midwinter night, and of how he had been struck by the sweet sorrow of the young mother's face; of how, when he grew up, like his father he had become a businessman, but in Jerusalem not Bethlehem, with a contract to supply the Roman garrison in that city; and of how, a lifetime later, he had again seen the woman watching the child born that night being crucified by the very soldiers he provisioned and equipped; and of how it haunted him still.

What I said in the pulpit that night was published in a national newspaper a week later, and I received many excited letters from readers, asking where they could get copies of the translation of the papyrus scroll, and how they could get in touch with Professor Capote.

I had to write back and tell them I'd made the whole thing up – something the congregation had quickly caught on to – and that I was following an ancient tradition in which a message full of meaning and significance for the listeners was delivered through a narrative or story that was never meant to be taken literally – just like the Christmas stories themselves. We know nothing about the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, not even when or where it was, but we do know that he became a person of colossal significance for his followers, who read that significance back into the nativity narratives they composed, very much the way a movie trailer gives us key elements of a film. This is largely true of the Bible as a whole: take it literally, and you miss most of the point; take it as largely symbolic narrative, and it continues to be packed with life-changing meaning.

In these days of almost universal religious illiteracy, one of the most intriguing paradoxes of the time is that the people who seem to care for and know most about religion are atheists and unbelievers. This was clearly demonstrated in a recent survey done in America, where believers showed an extraordinary level of ignorance about the faiths they themselves professed, while passionate sceptics and unbelievers where very clued-up about the farrago of fact and fantasy that encircles all religions.

This paradox is well illustrated in The Atheist's Guide to Christmas, an enjoyable send-up of the Christmas story and what our late-capitalist culture has turned it into. It is, on the whole, a good-natured book, all the proceeds of which will go to the Terence Higgins Trust, so buying it could even be an act of Christian charity. However, it also suggests another paradox to me, and one that I have become increasingly intrigued by: there is an almost religious intensity about the new atheism, and some of it comes through in this book. One sign of this is its impatience with agnosticism, about which it cracks some good jokes, very much the way passionate believers jolly people along to get off the fence and make a commitment. But why is admitting that one does not know whether there is an ultimate meaning to the universe such a ridiculous position to hold? In many ways it is the default position for any sceptical intelligence: of that whereof we cannot know we should just belt up. However, the true believers, whether God positive or God negative, get really annoyed with agnostics. Makes you think, doesn't it?

That said, this book is fun, especially if you read it as a prospectus for a complex and varied religious position. The comedians in it – and there are too many of them – all sound like clergy on Thought for the Day trying to lure your attention with terrible jokes and really annoying word-play. Of course, no book of this sort would be complete without a contribution from the Apostle to the Godless himself, the Venerable Richard Dawkins, and you will not be disappointed. When, after his birth, the Good Fairy visited Richard in the manger where they laid him, she showered upon him almost every gift a man could desire: physical beauty; a voice as bewitching as the tone of a silver flute; a prodigious intellect; a Napoleonic capacity for hard work; and wit as sharp and darting as a rapier. But in order to save him from the fate that befell that other great Angel of Light, she deprived him of a sense of humour – without which it is impossible to understand religion, the joke the universe has played on humanity, with a punch-line that can't be delivered until the end of time.

Richard Dawkins gives us a story in this book, a witty and elegant imitation of Bertie Wooster, which parodies the contortions Christian theologians have to go through to explain the intricacies of their art.

It is, of course, brilliant but, brrr, it left me feeling chilly. I had to top up my mulled wine and eat a warm mince pie before I could carry on.

The book is divided into:

Stories – most of which you can skip unless you like being patronised by people who think they are funny;

Science – an excellent section, especially Brian Cox's lyrical hymn to the creation. He is so biblical and rhapsodic in the beauty of his language that I think it should immediately be added as a tenth lesson to the annual Service of Nine Lessons and Carols. Simon Singh's contribution is also terrific. He offers us a suggestion for something to do on Christmas Day. Switch on an analogue radio and retune it so that it is not on any station, and listen. The hiss you will hear is caused by random electromagnetic waves, 2 per cent of which are coming back to us from 13 billion years ago and that unimaginable, originating catastrophe scientists call the Big Bang, which gave birth to the universe and everything that has happened since;

Philosophy – all the articles are interesting, though AC Grayling's is the best. He delivers a beautiful homily on kindness, the real message of Christmas;

Arts – which contains some interesting stuff, particularly David Baddiel and Arvind Ethan David on why there are so few atheist movies;

Events – the Sunday school section, with games and activities for children, the best of which, for my money, is God Trumps, a humanist card game which lists and ranks the habits and foibles of the major religious belief systems. After all, ridicule is always the best solvent of pomposity, and, OMG, how religion POMPS!

Funny that, especially when the founder of the biggest religion on earth was born in a stable – or so they say.