The Shard in London was unveiled this week, a glass building so tall and sharp that it threatens to pierce God’s eye. Some think it’s preposterously phallic and ugly. I’m with those that see it as inventive and hopeful. South of the river, London is still dominated by rotting Victorian warehouses and modernist blocks. If The Shard is the sign of a brave new futurism, then so be it. I’d rather live in a city dominated by alien rhomboids and metal cathedrals than the tired slums of yesteryear, when the money was slight and the imagination lacking.

However, I was surprised by my old priest, Fr Ray Blake of Brighton, comparing The Shard to the Tower of Babel in the Bible. Quite what he means is hard to tell because the meaning of Babel is itself opaque. In the story, a united humanity builds a tower, “whose top may reach unto Heaven.” God sees the tower and says, “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.”

There are two ways of reading this story. One is that is simply explains why we speak different languages – man reached a certain point in his civilization and God decided, in his infinite wisdom, to mix things up a bit. Babel is thus an “origin myth” (which could be literally true or fable) that has no more moral weight than all those interminable lists of “begats” that we get in Genesis. This God seems rather capricious.

An alternative explanation is that man was punished for the sin of pride. He constructed a tower in celebration of himself (it was not a temple) and from manmade things. Realizing that man had the capacity to stop worshipping him and start worshipping themselves, God evens the playing field by scattering humanity across the continents. Later, Christians believe, God offers Christianity as a way of reuniting ourselves around the divine made flesh. Of course, we pretty much screwed that up, too.

So is The Shard the new Tower of Babel? I wouldn’t say so. It’s certainly built for the purpose of man’s enjoyment rather than worship of God, but then Christ is healthily contemptuous of such things and urges us to render material them unto Caesar anyway. “You can have your consumerist, wealth-obsessed civilization and keep it,” the modern prophet might say. “We are more interested in what happens next.” Critics of The Shard should adopt the Franciscan approach and wander through the opulent city in the rags of the poor. Be in the world, but not of it and chuckle at the follies of the rich.

But what the Tower story does remind us that the antithesis of monotheism – Judaic, Christian or Muslim - is worship of man. That might seem like a harmless assertion, but actually it contradicts the modern impulse to put man first, be it for benign or malign reasons. You find that in theology, where rules and teachings have been adapted to make it easier to be a believer. It sometimes feels like my own Catholicism only encounters orthodoxy for 60 minutes on a Sunday morning. The rest of the week is a constant negotiation over what is and isn’t the right thing to do. 

Within civil society, there was a trend in the 20th century to see man as the genius of his own invention, someone who could command his own destiny. Disease, environmental catastrophe, recession and the pitiless logic of war indicate that he cannot. Mankind is primed for self-destruction: only this species would behold a wonder like the split atom and then use it to murder hundreds of thousands at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Love man – yes. But don’t worship him. It’s the failure to recognize a moral order beyond what men want that leads to the collapse of civilizations. 

These past few days, I’ve been trapped indoors by the rain. England has been hit by a cloud of unhappiness; a cyclone of damp. I stood beneath an umbrella in the garden one afternoon, shielded imperfectly from a storm of hail – bare feet on the stone path, hands trembling at the stub of a cigarette. It’s a martyr’s weather, but without the satisfactory ending.

What to do between writing? There’s an occasional visit from my mother, which means a cup of tea and church gossip. [A mad woman comes every Sunday and interrupts the sermons. She says the pastor is an agent of the devil. Several members of the congregation probably agree.] Otherwise, unable to go out, it’s a cigarette beneath an umbrella, a cheese sandwich, and some music. I don’t like to read. Other people write so much better than me – it’s insulting.

In the same way that Proust was transfixed by smell, I find the right kind of melody transports me somewhere else. By accident, I rediscovered Couperin and now I’m listening to Leçon de Ténèbres again and again. I’m probably confusing my composers (Gesualdo? Palestrina?), but if I stretch out on the floor and close my eyes, I think I can hear this music ten years ago in a room in Cambridge. I have few happy memories of that place, but one of them was the year that I took lodgings at the lonely end of my college. The windows wouldn’t shut properly and a wind blew from the living room, down the hall, and into my bedroom. There wasn’t a corner of my home that wasn’t cold. The pain was exhilarating: like a wet electric shock running all over my body.

I converted to Christianity while living in those rooms, thanks to several exciting conversations with a priest in his study. He had a big black Labrador that stunk of nicotine. Then I’d return home and stretch out on the bed, close my eyes, and listen to the sacred music that travelled the breeze from the living room, down the hall, and into my bedroom. “Qui tollis peccáta mundi, miserére nobis; qui tollis peccáta mundi, súscipe deprecatiónem nostram.”

In that crystal clear isolation, I came closer to God than evermore. Perhaps it was the product of physical and mental discomfort, I do not know. But whenever someone opened the door of my cell – letting the wind and the music escape - the spell was broken. And yet, I could never resist inviting them in. I dreamt one night that I had put the nails through Christ’s hands myself. When I awoke in terror, I called a girl. Physical infatuation followed and I never felt the same frozen peace again. Lord, have mercy.

Some months later, I went to confession at an abbey. They said on the phone that I could turn up at any time and someone would hear me. I rang the bell repeatedly for ten minutes, until a man in his eighties opened the door wearing nothing but a bathrobe. I said I was here to confess. “I was asleep,” he replied. “I’m very old.” He complained about his knees throughout the confession and, at the end, said he was going back to bed. I suspect that I went home and did the same.

Ten years later, the music ends and I peel myself off the floor. Back to the kettle, back to the fridge, back to work. Tap, tap, tap, type, type, type.  The days of innocent slumber are over. A pretty memory for an ugly spring.

This is a brief post to wish everyone a happy Easter. It’s been unusually sober and religious for me. I had hoped to stay with friends in South Carolina but work commitments kept me in Washington. Everyone I knew in DC was out of town, so it was just me and Netflix for most of the weekend. I ended up going to church every day, culminating in an Old Rite Mass on early Sunday morning (I got up at 7am!). Now I feel rested and happy. The ordinary Lent-ending binge – with its associated regret and paranoia – has been averted. This year I have walked the straight and narrow path without a single tipsy trip or turn. Heck, I might be a candidate for sainthood.

As all my regular readers will now know, I don't like the New Atheism. I don't like its chauvinism, its bad manners, its appeal to adolescent barbarity, the lack of philosophers and theologians involved, and, most of all, its intellectual arrogance. So it was with the expectation of getting very angry indeed that I picked up The Good Book: A Secular Bible by Professor A.C. Grayling. Surprisingly, it proved a worthwhile effort. For this might be the text that sinks the New Atheism forever - so artless, humorless, vain, and conceited that it is.

The Good Book offers a non-religious religious text for non-religious readers in search of something a bit religious that isn’t in any way remotely religious. It’s hard to think of a more perfectly oxymoronic title than A Secular Bible, although The Kama Sutra for Eunuchs springs to mind. It is a collection of sayings by humanist figures strung together in a narrative that parodies the Christian Bible. There are chapter headings like “Genesis”, “Wisdom”, and “Parables”, and it is structured in verses. The language is epic; naturalism ascending into heroic lessons on reason. “Genesis” begins this way: “In the garden stands a tree. In springtime it bears flowers; in the autumn, fruit. Its fruit is knowledge, teaching the good gardener how to understand the world.” [Pause for thought: is the gardener morally good or just a good gardener? And is there a link between the two? The original Good Book was written in Hebrew, which lends itself better to subtleties like this]. This section goes on to describe the apple falling on Newton’s head, “[He] saw what no one had seen before: that an apple draws the earth to itself, and the earth the apple/ Through a mutual force of nature that holds all things, from the planets to the stars, in unifying embrace.” From this we bound to the first lesson. Life ticks by, but man is unique in nature because he notices it. “In humankind there is experience also, which is what makes good and its opposite/ In both of which humankind seeks to grasp the meaning of things.” QED, it is the ability to recognize what works and what fails that gives us ethics and makes us different from the animals.

The Good Book offers an ethical blueprint to the Good Society, as opposed to a faith-inspired dictat. It catalogues the sum of human knowledge as drawn from practical experience rather than mystical revelation. Grayling quotes great figures like Aristotle or Lycurgus of Sparta, whose legal experience forms a great many of the “Acts” that readers are encouraged to emulate. We learn to be nice to one another, to study, to pursue the truth, to reject superstition and bigotry. And in this enterprise, A.C. Grayling may have done the world a great service. He has exposed the New Atheism for the unimaginative, anti-intellectual bore that it really is. If you want to know why it won’t fly, buy this book.

From the above excerpt, it should be obvious that the prose is leaden, repetitive, and self-important. Parodying the Bible only reminds the reader of how marvelous the real Good Book is. In its Hebrew variant, the Tree of Life is a complex image divided and subdivided into branches of good and evil. Rabbis have spent centuries arguing about its meaning: one word can be expanded into a million and translated ten-times more ways. In Grayling’s hands, it is either a pear tree or a metaphor for a BSC in Chemistry. Compare Grayling to the King James Version. A few words to remind you of their beauty and power: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat/ And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” Perhaps the Christian version has a more censorious take on the getting of wisdom, but the English is far superior. And artistry and mystery are elevating to man, where as practical observations will put him to sleep; especially when extended over 608 pages. It’s an artificial, unedifying read – like cracking open a billion Chinese fortune cookies, studying every empty platitude that falls out, while masticating that nasty vanilla shell that sticks in the tongue and dries the gum.

The Good Book is a work of stupendous arrogance. Not only is it vain to try to rewrite the most influential and popular book ever written, it takes some nerve to try to sum up all human experience in a single read. Inevitably, things will be overlooked. “Mythology is fantasy” according to Grayling, but Jung would disagree. He argued that they are the conscious realization of things buried in our psyche. Most contemporary anthropologists would at least concede that there is a need demonstrated across all societies for the expression of something beyond material life – normally communicated in worship and veneration. Whatever its source, it is perverse to dismiss it so. It is downright bizarre then to construct or appropriate a whole new mythology in service of Grayling’s ethical fancies. The chapter called “Parables” is manufactured in part out of a conversation between a fox and a leopard as recounted by a heathen. And yet, the overall narrative of “historical discovery” suggests that all of human knowledge is interconnected – that progress begat progress. The Bible was more elaborate, as the enormous differences between the sensual Psalms and the tyrannical letters of St. Paul demonstrate. Moreover, knowledge actually isn’t disseminated across history in that way. A philosopher might think that it is, because he/she is textual in approach. But history shows that ideas are invented, censored, forgotten, and later reconstituted in a different form to their conception. There is no religious or cultural context applied to any of these stories. Greek society was very religious and very moral. That’s why Socrates was condemned for corrupting the youth of the city and promoting false gods. Nor would sociologists enjoy this book. Concepts like “man”, “society”, or “knowledge” pass undefined. Marx would rankle at the book’s lack of concern for material realty; Foucault would laugh at its naïve faith that “learning” is objective and unrelated to power.

Aside from these authorial missteps, The Good Book illustrates two big problems with the New Atheism. First, the ethical system of the Bible is superior to Grayling’s version precisely because there is a God involved. The threat of God’s wrath means that readers are not persuaded to be nice to each other, they are compelled. Likewise, Christ’s physical resurrection gives us hope of salvation. Without his divine nature, Jesus was just a failed revolutionary. It is the literal realization of God on Earth that gives Christ moral authority, confirming the truth of everything that has gone before and prophesying what is to come. Even if the reader does not believe in God, they can surely see the greater social utility of theistic morality than Grayling’s republic of ethical astronomers. The Good Book’s model for basing ethics on experience raises this question: what if experience and necessity urge us to make a decision that is objectively evil? Theistic morality says that we have to say no, but Grayling’s text is full of loopholes. Without an authority external to man, good and evil become constructs. Recall that in Genesis, Grayling wrote, “In humankind there is experience also, which is what makes good and its opposite.” Not only can he not name evil at this foundational stage [why? Is this political correctness?], but he defines good as the sum of human experience. Until very recently, experience said that blacks made good slaves, that the disabled could be sterilized, or that women were intended for housework and breeding. There was also a consensus that accumulated human experience proved there was a God that served a useful moral purpose.

Second, Grayling’s decision to produce a sacred text for atheists underlines the New Atheism’s evolution from healthy skepticism to the status of a new religion. It has its inquisition (Richard Dawkins’ endless TV programs exposing miracles we all knew were frauds), its process of confession and redemption (the phenomenon of teenagers posting recantations on Youtube), and now its own Bible. Why does every humanist movement inevitably imitate religion? The French Revolution produced the Cult of the Supreme Being; the Cultural Revolution gave us the Little Red Book. The reason is that man needs something to venerate, something to live and die for. What is unusual about the New Atheism is its lack of artistry. None of its proponents are formally trained in theology, so their knowledge of the subject is embarrassingly limited. Most are scientists of some ilk, so they lack the imagination required to offer something in the place of faith. Their movement will eventually be forgotten because, like this text, they are fundamentally dull.

No better review could be written for The Good Book than this one I found online: “Grayling had signed my copy, so I couldn’t even get my money back”.

Warning: this will make absolutely no sense if you haven’t seen either Alien or The Thing. And if you haven’t, you should. As soon as possible.

What a lucky boy I am: this week I got to see both Alien and The Thing (the prequel). It was an emotional experience, bringing up a lot of repressed memories from my childhood. Both movies are “pretty cewl” (©South Park) on a dramatic level, but they also play to themes of physical decay that mean a lot to me. Every time I see the alien pop out of John Hurt’s chest I think, “Brother, I’ve been there.”

It wasn’t until I re-watched Alien on Friday night, with chamomile tea and a pizza, that I realized quite how much it’s about sex. The sets are pure fetish. The Nostromo looks like Roger Vadim designed a womb: soft tan furnishings, gently throbbing lights, and lots and lots of hexagonals. In contrast, the spaceship that our heroes find crashed on a windswept planet is a Freudian nightmare. They enter it through an open orifice and descend through a small gooey hole into a misty pit full of eggs. John Hurt then stumbles upon a monster that latches onto his face and lays its fetus inside his stomach. One might accuse the alien of pushing his luck, but then he did pay for dinner…

When the little brute burrows its way out of Hurt’s chest, it becomes a metaphor for the nightmare of physical change. When he first reviewed the movie, Roger Ebert hypothesized that its cast is middle aged in order to emphasize that they are a group of ordinary people doing a job, not action heroes. I disagree. I suspect the director (consciously or unconsciously) cast older actors because people over 30 are more vulnerable to physical change than adolescents are. As a young adult, the things that happen to us are unnerving but healthy: they are the body evolving towards its zenith of intellectual and physical capability. After 30-or so, what was once growth becomes decay. The hair falls off one’s head and sprouts elsewhere. Muscle becomes fat; dull aches become “warning signs”. The infinite sexual possibilities of youth become desperate and less probable: one must breed ASAP, before everything dies up or falls off. Romance is dead and man is a walking advert for entropy.

When the body starts doing things that you don’t want it to, it becomes a separate personality from oneself. That theme is picked up in The Thing, which has just hit cinemas. It’s a prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Predictably, it’s an inferior movie. But by dint of the excellent premise, it’s okay. In this movie, the alien is a virus that replicates or consumes its victim, hides in the body, and then attacks others. We never entirely understand the nature of the thing, but it is hinted that its victims don’t know they’ve been taken over. The monster only bursts forth (with several arms, a dog’s head, and a scorpion tail) when threatened. The metaphor for the loss of control of one’s body is striking.

A chronic illness is like undergoing a personal alien invasion. The tumor that was recently discovered in my father’s throat could be the seedling of a malevolent entity. It consumes half the calories that he puts into his body, growing stronger as he grows weaker. This, combined with a nervous disorder, has left him bowlegged and tiny. Every time I see him, I recognize him less; the changes in his character suggest possession. This process is tragic, but entirely natural. Cancer is the body’s way of placing time limits on our mind’s habitation. If we all lived to 150, we would be a walking mass of tumors not unlike the creature that slithers into shot in the last reel of The Thing.

For others, the horrors of Alien and The Thing provoke a subconscious response. For me they are a trip down memory lane. When I was thirteen, I contracted an appalling case of eczema that required hospital treatment and lasted for five years. Isolated with my own carcass, I found the most bizarre and terrifying things taking place. I discovered that the skin can bleed without breaking, that sores can blister and hatch, that it is possible to scratch to the bone. Doctor after doctor unwrapped my bandages and recoiled in horror, without a clue what to do. My legs were encased in cotton wool and I began every morning with a bath of antibiotics and salt. O, how I spent so much time rubbing salt into my body – desperately trying to dry up and dust off the ooze. I was a “thing” all right: a larva jammed in metamorphosis. Oddly, the disease never touched my face. I suspect it understood that if it did, I might elicit sympathy from other human beings and someone might actually try to help. Hidden beneath the neck line, it was free to feed uninterrupted.

I am sure that it is significant that this condition arose during puberty. It convinced me that sex and physical decay are intrinsically linked. It left me with a profound revulsion for the human form – perhaps because the hours spent mapping it in hospital made me aware of its every imperfection, its every potential for disaster. Today, I am a physical Dualist. I earnestly believe that the body and soul are not only separate, but at war with one another. The soul’s quest for transcendence is constantly disrupted by the body’s sensual needs. The only way to achieve salvation is to starve the body and free the mind. Of course, living as we do in a material reality, that is impossible. So, unable to completely liberate myself, I live a dual existence between mental exercise and physical degradation. Once in a while I give my body free reign and permit it excess. When it is done “wandering the world seeking the ruin of souls”, I punish it with purgation. The best cure for a hangover is prayer and green tea.

I am a survivor of eczema. Around 18, it suddenly went away. Incredibly, I have no scars and haven’t suffered with it since. Always, there is the lingering fear that it will return; every small itch could be the beginning of a long campaign. But the experience has taught me that the body is intrinsically treacherous. Treacherous, but still a part of me: something to be negotiated with, or placated.

Watching The Alien, I was struck by the conviction that me and the “toothy one”, if given a chance, could get on rather well. I’m sure it wouldn’t want to eat me (I’m all skin and bone) and I’d make a terrible father for its little facehugger (I’d always be out with my mates getting drunk). So, instead it might tolerate me as the chronicler of its exploits. By writing about the beast, maybe I could pacify it and even own it – just as I have done on this blog post by writing about my eczema. I can imagine myself crossed-legged on its icky nest floor; one hand tapping away at the keyboard, the other tickling the gelatinous space between its numerous chins. Sci-fi yin and yang.