A mindset change is needed whereby we no longer view those who do not come to services as lazy or bad Jews, but recognise that it can be out of a conviction that needs to be respected, even if it is not endorsed. Baddiel commented: “One of the things that Jews Don’t Count outlined was how anti-Semitism is racism, not religious intolerance, because I’m an atheist, but that would have got me no free passes out of Auschwitz. So clever is Mr Baddiel that he can find the God Desire everywhere. He was rewriting the book when Elizabeth II died. As he watched the response, he wondered whether the veneration of her reign - and of her longevity - were attempts to make her immortal. A compelling hypothesis. 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.

But, as he observes, a public image always involves a series of misprisions. And in any case he contains multitudes, slaloming cheerfully between highbrow and lowbrow. His early work with Rob Newman set a million teenagers saying “You see that pair of pants? That’s you, that is” and his 90s partnership with Frank Skinner helped bring about the “New Lad”. But he has also written with grace and subtlety about David Foster Wallace and the Roth/Updike generation, created a feature film about a Muslim who discovers he was born Jewish and a play about quantum physics, published comic novels and literary novels and children’s books, done standup shows he sees as halfway to Ted talks, and a documentary about his father’s dementia. Now, wearing his (in his phrase) “Mr Jew mantle”, he appears on heavyweight TV shows and publishes monographs in the TLS. One can’t help but feel that if he allowed his intellectual curiosity fuller rein he might discover the ways in which within his own tradition God is all about life. The author puts his case bluntly at the start; he would love there to be a God because he is terrified of death and the complete oblivion that implies. That is why he feels certain being an atheist, a “fundamentalist atheist” in his own words, because the desire for something is not the same as proving that something exists. In short a “God” of some sort it is the coping mechanism many of us use to get around the seeming irrationality of us living and dying without an obvious reason for being and then not being.Growing up with typical football “fans” yet not having the sporting ability or the natural physique to truly fulfil either the position of “a player” or a “hooligan.” Baddiel was the example I could emulate. Funny, intelligent, confident and straight talking. I have admired his work ever since and in some weird way I have grown up with him. I last saw Baddiel at the Hay Festival being interviewed by Simon Schama on his book “Jews don’t count.” A masterful treatment on the antisemitism of the progressive left. Baddiel coins the term “Oblivion knowledge” to diagnose the desire of the book’s title – that niggling sense we all share that there was an eternity before we were born and there will be an eternity after we’ve gone. He writes: “Every bishop and imam and rabbi knows this, and that’s why so many pray so fervently. We pray and pray and pray, to drive out that knowledge.”

The author is emphatic without yelling at the reader like Richard Dawkins (whose 2006 book has a similar title) or AC Grayling, who witheringly accuses believers of “failing in their responsibility to themselves as intelligent beings”. The God Desire is an affectionate two fingers up. This is the obverse challenge of David Baddiel’s new book “The God Desire”. A wonderfully honest insight into Baddiel’s journey of psychology that attempts to rationalise the distinctly human need to make reality not entirely mute. religion is no longer considered a vastly powerful and high status force, but rather a series of fragile and individual identity-based beliefs" - Unsure how he can conclude that religion in today's world is no longer powerful and high-status. Maybe this is true in certain circles/cultures, but definitely not on a global scale. Baddiel’s argument against God (or the existence thereof) is a subtle one, hidden in the ambiguity of his own desire for a deity. A far more mature position than that of the New Atheists whose arguments are so easily refuted. Dawkins, Harris and Fry have been of great assistance to my own Christian growth and others. and therefore there must be no god, because due to the fact that we kill a lot of animals, god must not care about them, therefore he must not exist.Personally I have noticed with friends born into a particular religion, who had subsequently become, rather more than an atheist. They assumed that because their lives had dramatically changed, then no trace of their religious upbringing remained. But my observations of the people concerned, leads me to consider the contrary rather, not only had they not shaken off religion, but it informed their subsequent behaviour.

Baddiel became a cabaret stand-up comedian after leaving university and also wrote sketches and jokes for various radio series. His first television appearance came in a bit-part on one episode of the showbiz satire, Filthy, Rich and Catflap. In 1988, he was introduced to Rob Newman, a comic impressionist, and the two became a writing partnership. They were subsequently paired up with the partnership of Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis for a new topical comedy show for BBC Radio 1 called The Mary Whitehouse Experience, and its success led to a transfer to television, shooting Baddiel to fame.By contrast, Baddiel admits he is terrified of mortality, so he understands why religious people want to believe there is another world beyond it. This, however, only ­reaffirms in his mind that God is not real. The God Desire is “an urge for something to exist for which there is no existential proof, and that no one has, in concrete terms, experienced”. He offers us the equation: “desire + invisibility = God”.