off the shelf old books reviewed anew

The Four Horsemen, Dawkins Dennett Harris Hitchens, The Discussion That Sparked An Atheist Revolution. By Richard Dawkins, Daniel C Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. With a foreword by Stephen Fry. Published by Transworld Penguin Random House UK under the Bantam Press imprint in 2019.

During visits to a certain bookshop, I became accustomed to plucking this book off the shelves, retreating into a corner and arguing with it while I waited for the long fantasised about sensual sexual atapensual woman (When we made it, did you hear a bell ring?) to arrive.

The arguments between me and the book became so heated and I read so much of it that eventually I felt it was only fair to the shop owners that I should buy it.

The title seems to include the four guys names, although maybe that's just some PT Barnumesque fanfare billing, along with the grandiose claim that the verbiage at one of their dinner parties somehow provoked what they call an atheist revolution.

I'd prefer if they'd said "atheistic" revolution. It reads better. The implication from the present title is that they somehow provoked individual atheists generally into revolting against an unspecified something. Maybe they all became Christians.

A more accurate and comprehensive alteration to the sub title might read: The Self Promotionalism That Caused A Generation To Take Up Projectile Vomiting.

Seriously though.

The Foreword coyly specifies that the title derives from Alexander Dumas' Musketeers book, (There were three musketeers but never mind, Dartagnan sort of counts) and not from The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse in the Bible. Again I would have preferred if they'd derived their title from a non religious source, ie that it should be neither Biblical nor Alexander Dumasesque, instead picking from something evocative among the vast array of evocative classic atheistic texts which must surely have been written by non believers by now. Surely they could have found at least one. How about The Four Oncogenes Of The Noosphere. But of course medical terms have largely been formulated by Chrisitans in those hospitals they insist on providing to the human race. And Noosphere came from Viktor Frankl. And the science of genetics seems to have been founded by the monk Gregor Mendel. Oh dear.

But I'm quibbling.

The body of the book is a supposed transcript from the four atheistic horsemen's repartee during a dinner in 2007. The conversation is interesting but would have benefitted from an adversarial presence. As it is the four atheists simply affirm each other in their convictions and we don't learn much about anything. I think the text shows signs of being redacted at certain points which sort of spoils the notion that we're listening in to ideas and conversational sallies that began spontaneously by chance. The notion that this version of their conversation sparked a revolution is perhaps more faith based than we might expect.

The Foreword by Stephen Fry (great actor but a notorious dribbler vis a vis his intellectual rejection of the Deity) commands some attention. In a gush of compassion Mr Fry (He's written books of his own but I never bothered with them) writes:

"Flaubert's Coeure simple, the old servant Felicity on her knees, telling the rosary and looking up with reverent wonder at the stained glass window above the altar, is not ripe for scorn, but the dogma, relayed from the Vatican by the cardinal in his palace, dogma that keeps Felicity on her knees, the palace stocked with wine, and the populace plied with nonsensical edicts and eschatological threats... well that is fair and necessary game."

Unlike I daresay Stephen Fry (his TV trivia quiz show Qi is unwatchable) and Mr Flaubert (they should give him a quiz show), I have personally known Felicity's on their knees. They are the power in our communities and in our families and in our lives and oftentimes where goodness prevails in our nations. My understanding of the mystery they represent is that their power comes from the truth of God as proclaimed in the Bible and by the Catholic church. Opinions will differ I suppose.

Ho hum.

I was particularly taken by another passage of the Foreword in which Mr Fry (much too earnest to play Oscar Wilde in that famous stage version) in seeking to discredit all religions has a rather refreshing go at the Buddhists. Here's larks. Bear in mind in this imaginary dialogue he is transposing comments and actions from his own imagination and attributing them to imaginary fans or critics of Buddhism.

"Buddhism has a lot to teach us, you know. It's been shown to have real psychological and cognitive value."

"You mean like those Buddhist monks who helped the Burmese army ethnically cleanse the Rohingya to the point of genocide?"

"Oh but they weren't proper Buddhists."

Rumbunctious imaginary stuff.

I would contrast it with some of the actual conversation between Mr Fry's (He was excellent in Jeeves And Wooster) atheistic heroes as printed on page 93 of the same book.

HITCHENS: "No but I don't have a difference of opinion with the Jihadists."

HARRIS: "Well you do in terms of the legitimacy of their project."

HITCHENS: "No, not really. There's nothing to argue about with that. I mean, there it's a simple matter. I want them to be extirpated. That's a purely primate response with me - recognising the need to destroy an enemy in order to ensure my own survival.I have no interest at all in what they think. We haven't yet come to your question about Islam, but I have no interest at all in what Jihadists think. I'm only interested in refining methods of destroying them. A task for which, by the way, one gets very little secular support."

HARRIS: "Yes that's notable."

HITCHENS: "Most atheists don't want this fight. The most important one is the one they want to shirk. They'd far rather go off and dump on Billy Graham. Because on that, they know there is no danger."

DENNETT: "I think that's because we find the idea of exterminating these people is abhorrent, and we think that besides, it will -"

HITCHENS: "No, I said extirpating."

DENNETT: "Extirpate."

HITCHENS: "Complete destruction of the Jihadist forces. Extermination, I think, applies more to a species."

Wow.

I would love to hear Stephen Fry analysing the nuances between extirpation and extermination. If you're extirpated does it hurt a bit less than if you're exterminated? The enigmas endure.

Hilariously the publishers of this Christopher Hitchens call for the extirpation of Jihadis, Penguin Ltd, are currently in uproar with their left wing staff for proposing to publish psychologist Jordan Peterson's current musings which whatever they do in questioning the assumptions of transgenderism and feminism, are unlikely to call for the extirpation of anyone.

For the record the Burmese expulsion of the Rohingya tribe in 2016 occurred after decades of Jihad and in the wake of a contemporary series of particularly vicious Jihad murders inflicted by Rohingya Jihadis on the non Muslim population of Burma. The Burmese finally said: "Right lads, no more Jihad here. You can take that stuff outside." They didn't extirpate or exterminate them. They expelled them. Anyone who has experienced the business end of Jihad can stand in judgement on the Burmese. Stephen Fry (accomplished as an author and as a performer on stage, television and in movies) and the pop singer Bob Geldoff (talentless)  have both condemned the Burmese in this matter. They have yet to comment on the Jihadis who played such a prominent role in igniting the tragedy.

I respect Christopher Hitchens' concern about the existential Them Or Us threat of Muslim Jihad to the human race. Who among us hasn't lost our head (figuratively) when considering the latest Jihad atrocity! But since Mr Fry (His TV comedy sketch show A Bit Of Fry And Laurie ran for seven years on the BBC but was an abject dud) is so offended by the Buddhists of Burma on account of their expulsion of the Rohingya, how on earth does he remain such an unquestioning fan of Mr Hitchens who is calling for the anihilation of Jihadists?

Or is anihilation a completely different concept from expirpation which in turn, if we are to place faith in our atheistic friends, is to be considered completely different from extermination?

Lemme tell ya folks, I'd much prefer to be expelled from somehwhere than have any of the other three things happen to me.

Anyhoo.

This is one part of the book where I suspect the text has been redacted. There's more right at the end when the topic recurs. One feels the published conversation has lacunas. The indiscretions are being left out. Perhaps extirpation was the thin end of the wedge.

There is a further point to be made about the fact that a professing atheist like Stephen Fry (His film Peter's Friends was a rip off of the Johnny Carson produced Big Chill, both movies nicely filmed and finely acted but a tad sleazoid) should jeer at that segment of the Burmese population which espouses Buddhism and justify his doing so via a tendentious interpretation of their purported treatment of the Rohingya tribe, yet make no mention of the murderous oppression and seventy year persecution that this same Buddhist populace in Burma has observably endured at the hands of, oh heavens, atheists no less, heavens to Murgatroyd, real life Marxian atheists installed as proxies by Soviet Russia in 1948 to govern there. The proxies long outlasted their puppet masters. Atheistic usurpation and domination of the people of Burma only ended in 2016 when the people's choice as leader Aung San Suu Kyi was allowed to play a significant role in the political life of the country. She'd been let out of jail in 2010.

The central conversation of The Four Horsemen is padded out with yawnsome essays from Dawkins, Dennett and Harris. The highpoint of these is when Mr Dawkins avails of the opportunity to introduce one of his favourite shibboleths.

"Turning then to theolgians overconfidence, admittedly few quite reach the heights scaled by the seventeenth century archbishop James Ussher, who was so sure of his biblical chronology that he gave the orgin of the universe a precise date: 22 October 4004 BC. Not 22 or 23 October but precisely on the evening of 22 October. Not September or November but definitely, with the immense authority of the Church, October. Not 4003 or 4005n, not somewhere around the fourth or fifth millennium BC but no doubt about it, 4004 BC. Others as I said are not quite so precise about it, but it is characteristic of theologians that they just make stuff up."

Oh. Make stuff up! You mean like the increasingly discredited String Theory? Or Quantum? Or Relativity? Or, hush now, dare I say it, Atheistic Darwinian Evolution?

It would have been fine good foolin, factually indisputable, and classy too, for Mr Dawkins to point out that James Ussher's estimate of the age of the universe was closer to the current estimate by scientists using Big Bang cosmology and the measurement of background radiation in the night sky, than any of the estimates which prevailed in modern science for a 150 years and on through the 1970s, 1980s and right up to, well, about yesterday.

So James Ussher, going on his own idiosyncratic reading of the Bible, was closer than all the modern scientific theorists.

By the measure of scientists themselves, he was less in error than all the scientists who came after him until now.

Hold the bus.

James Ussher said the universe was 6000 years old. Scientists were insisting up till yesterday that the universe was a brute fact, ie had always been there, or was billions multiplied by billions of years old.

The current theory which scientists advance is that the universe is between 8 and 24 billion years old. So James Ussher, lemme say it again, was closer with his 6000 year hokum, than Einstein and all the brilliant minds with their Steady States infinitely old or billion billion years old universe tosh.

The advantage of claiming the universe was infinitely or billions of billions of years  old for those scientists who claimed it, was that such a claim made a timeline for ye olde worlde Atheistic Darwinian Evolution notionally plausible. It can't have happened otherwise. The now debunked eternal or limitlessly ancient universe claim had temporarily made Darwinism seem plausible under certain rubriques, at least it did for primitive superstitious tribesmen like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and er, Stephen Fry (He wrote the Foreword remember, and claims to be suffering from a manic depressive bi polar disorder caused by imaginary flaws in his physicality rather than caused by observable things he has done throughout his life, ie reaping the thoroughly predictable whirlwind consequences of an existence based on depravity, drugs, sexual excess, pseudo pleasure, self worship, and atheism.  I mean I don't want to go casting no aspoyshuns.)

Their credibility for advocating Darwinism and perhaps even believing in it, has certainly been diminshed by the current 8 to 23 billion years best scientific estimate for the age of the universe.

And, oh come on, once more for the road, old mad self promoting 17th century Anglican Archbishop James Ussher, who claimed to have derived the exact age of the universe from the Bible, and who was never endorsed by the broader family of Christian believers (Hint: I'm talking about churches not founded by King Henry The Eighth to allow him to divorce his wife) in any of his claims, was yet vastly closer to the truth about the age of the universe than any modern scientists with all their instrumentation, telescopes and Quantum hocus pocus up until the current dating which is based on Big Bang cosmology and the measurement of background radiation in the night sky. How utterly wonderful. I think it's a hoot.

I treated The Four Horsemen book as an intellectual exercise, trying to see if I could convincingly answer or refute any of what was being asserted so uncritically.

Occasionally I inserted myself into the conversation resulting in imaginary rebuttals to their actual statements like the following.

DENNETT: "I want religion to be treated just the way we treat the pharmaceuticals and the oil industry. I'm not against pharmaceutical companies - I'm against some of the things they do."

JAMES HEALY: "Yes but in opposing some of the things the oil industry or pharmaceutical companies do, you're surely not questioning the existence of oil or the reality of pharmaceutical products, are you? In any case the oil industry and pharmaceutical companies to whose level you wish to drag religion, have never furnished the human race with literacy, numeracy, spirituality, hospitals, schools, the scientific method, wedding ceremonies, family values, the Commandment "Thou shalt not kill," the Commandment "Love thy neighbour as thyself," Commandment "Love God with all your mind, all your soul, all your heart and all your strength," the Commandment "Thou shalt not bear false witness," as well as literature, poetry, music, the university system and the good news of the gospel. Those things came via believers in God proclaiming the truth of the Bible."

HARRIS: "Every religious person makes the same criticism of other religions that we do. They reject the pseudo miracles and the pseudo claims and certainties of others. They see the confidence tricks in other people's faith."

JAMES: "Specifically within the Catholic church we regard other religions as containing some truth and as having sprung from the providential reality of man's search for God. Many of us of many faiths see God working in some way in all of us."

HITCHENS: "We don't desecrate. We would for the reasons given by Sophicles in Antigone have a natural resistence to profanity and desecration. We leave it to the pious to destroy churches, and burn synogogues or blow up each other's mosques."

JAMES: "The last time I checked, pious Joe Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro and their populace murdering church desecrating proxies in Ethiopia, Somalia, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru and elsewhere were all card carrying atheists who professed belief in Darwinism. So was Hitler by the way."

DAWKINS: "I want to live in a world where people think sceptically for themselves, look at evidence."

JAMES: "Should they think sceptically for themselves about atheism?"

Hours of endless fun. At times I tried to identify where the four horsemen might be wrong in their concrete assertions of fact. I came up with the following.

HITCHENS: "You Sam had a marvellous quotation in your blog from Francis Collins the genome pioneer, who said whilest moutaineering one day he was just overcome by the landscape and then went down on one knee and accepted Jesus Christ. A complete non sequitur."

HARRIS: "Exactly."

HITCHENS: "It's never even been suggested that Jesus Christ created that landscape."

JAMES: "Well we've only been saying it for 2000 years so you could hardly be expected to have noticed by now. As Saint John puts it in the first words of Chapter One of his gospel, 'In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and without him was not made anything that was made. In him was life and the life was the light of man. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came for testimony to bear witness to the light that all might believe through him. He was not the light but came to bear witness to the light. The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world, and the world was made through him, but the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born not of the will of the flesh but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, full of grace and truth. We have beheld his glory, glory as of the only son of the Father. (John bore witness to him and cried: 'This was He of whom I said, He who comes after me ranks before me for he existed ahead of me.' And from his fulness have we all received grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.'

DENNETT: "...There aren't any new tricks. These tricks have evolved over countless years."

HITCHENS: "And one could add the production of bogus special effects as well. One of the things that completely convicts religion of being fraudulent is the belief in the miraculous. The same people will say 'well Einstein felt a spiritual force in the universe' when what he said was that the whole point about it is that there are no miracles. There are no changes in the natural order, that's the miraculous thing. They're completely cynical about claiming him."

JAMES: "Einstein said that he specifically rejected atheism and stated explicitly in unmistakeable terms that he did not consider that he deserved to be numbered among those who call themselves atheists. It is more than a little cynical for you or for any atheist to claim him as their own. Speaking for myself, I have seen miracles."

DAWKINS:"... the predictions in Quantum theory experimentally are verified to the equivalent of predicting the width of North America to the width of one human hair... Whereas the mystery of the Trinity doesn't even try to make a prediction, let alone an accurate one."

JAMES: "The mystery of the Trinity predicts complete destruction for societies and individuals that deliberately turn their back on God. The Lord spoke about this himself according to the gospel witness Matthew. 'At the time of the end love in most hearts will grow cold.' There's also some quite nifty exposition on the topic in the book of Revelation which is all predictions all of the time... As for your tribute to the accuracy of Quantum theory, attributing the accuracy of our navigation systems or measuring devices to quantum theory is like attributing Edison's invention of the light bulb to De Broglie's theories on light. Edison did it through trial and error, not by immersing himself in arcane unprovable theories about the nature of things. And I'm not sure the concept of accuracy to the width of a human hair has any meaning with regard to the width of North America. How could one decide which hair's breadth clod of earth or outcrop of rock, or jutting reef, or blade of grass on the coast was where America began or ended and which wasn't? How could you say to the accuracy of a hair's breadth which bit of the clod to measure from? In any case I would insist that the purported fine accuracy of our instrumentation is based on practical trial and error along with ever more refined methods of engineering and practical technologies emerging from the educational and university systems incepted and made generally available by believing Christians and applied and utilised by workers, artisans, experimenters who have no notion about Quantum theory or its attendant Relativistic fooboon. I suspect it is true to say that our instrumentation, our machines, ships, cars, aeroplanes, the fruits of our labour and our technology were developed wholly or in large part independently through practical trial and error means and their efficacy is nothing to do with the theoretical fantasy world of Quantum into which most designers of such items never enter. I'm suggesting that the attribution of any invention that works to Quantum theory is a little piece of reverse engineering of reality on Mr Dawkins' part. I note that elsewhere it has been asserted among scientists that no one understands Quantum theory least of all those who say they do. If no one has ever understood it, no one has jolly well ever developed so much as a light bulb from it. In fact the fact that it is not coherent to understanding may mean it is incoherent as a theory, ie not true."

HITCHENS: "... John Cornwell, who's just written another attack on yourself Richard, actually, and who is an old friend of mine, a very brilliant guy, wrote one of the best studies of the Catholic church and fascism that has been published..."

JAMES: "John Cornwell's deliberately mendacious and slanderous book featured a doctored photograph on the cover falsely claiming to show Pope Pius the Twelfth emerging from a meeting with the Nazis in 1939. The title Hitler's Pope was emblazoned over the photo to reinforce the lie. The photo did not show what Mr Cornwell and his publishers pretended it showed. It was taken before Pius was Pope and before the Nazis came to power. It actually showed him as Papal ambassador emerging from a meeting with Germany's democratically elected President Hindenburg during the period of the Weimar Republic in 1927. Details in the photo had been blurred to make the soldiers' Weimar uniforms resemble Nazi uniforms. The slanderous title, the doctored photograph and the falsified caption represent a fair summation of John Cornwell's overall lack of basic integrity, his spitefulness and his dearth of credibility as exemplified in the book which Christopher Hitchens here calls one of the best ever studies on the Catholic Church and fascism. The Jewish historian Rabbi David Dalin has systematically refuted the slanders of Pope Pius the Twelfth contained in Mr Cornwell's book. Incidentally Einstein was interviewed by Time Magazine during World War Two and paid tribute to the heroism of the Catholic Church in resisting the Nazis and helping the Jews."

HITCHENS: "...The believer has to say not just that there is a God - the Deist position that there may be a mind at work in the universe, a position we can't disprove - but that they know that mind."

JAMES HEALY: "On the contrary, we say God has made himself known."

The four horsemen do threaten to become interesting at times but quickly shut each other down if one of them seems to be going off atheistic message.

For the most part they ruminate happily and self indulgently on egotistical fripperies such as being thought rude for telling believers in God that they've wasted their lives. At every turn, they smugly affirm to each other that believers are being kept in subjection by the church. Beyond the superficial, there is very little probing examination of any topic. There is no critical thinking.

The question is posed as to whether there is anything that makes them doubt their atheism. That's a fun question but we get very little genuine introspection on the matter.

Mr Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens provide the only nearly interesting answers but then qualify their answers out of existence. On page 81 Mr Dawkins seems to act as gatekeeper to curtail the topic and prevent the others from elaborating any views that might be considered pro religion. No insertions from me this time.

DAWKINS: "I think the closest is the idea that the fundamental constants of the universe are too good to be true. And that does seem to me to need some kind of explanation if it's true. Victor Stenger doesn't think it is true but many physicists do. It certainly doesn't in any way suggest to me a creative intelligence because you're still left with the problem of explaining where that came from. And a creative intelligence who is sufficiently creative and intelligent enough to fine tune the constants of the universe to give rise to us has got to be a lot more fine tuned himself than..."

HITCHENS: "... The only argument that I find at all attractive - and this is for faith as well as for Theism - is what I suppose I would call the apotropaic, when people say, 'All praise belongs to God for this. He's to be thanked for all this.' That is actually a form of modesty - it's a superstitious one. That's why I say apotropaic. But it's avoiding hubris. It's also for that reason obviously pre monotheistic. Religion does or can help people to avoid hubris, I think, morally and intellectually."

I'm a bit superstitious myself gentle travellers of the internet, but I don't for a second believe that Christopher Hitchens used the word apotropaic for any other reason than that he wanted us all to know he knew it. It's like me saying wibble.

Mr Dawkins shortly after this point appears to become concerned about the trend of the conversation and seems to be trying to prevent any further exposition on Hitchens' notion that religion actually does some good in helping people avoid hubris or on the notion that there are factors which cause atheists to doubt their own credo. He suddenly exclaims "no, no, no," when Daniel Dennett seems inclined to seriously address the topics further. Samuel Harris then takes Mr Dawkins queue and changes the topic to something more presumptuously sceptically inert.

DENNETT: "... wait a minute. I can give you several discoveries which would shake my faith right to the ground."

HITCHENS: "Rabbits in the Precambrian."

DAWKINS: "No, no, no."

HARRIS: "I'm looking for an argument not so much for the plausibility of religious belief but one that suggests what we're up to - criticising faith- is a bad thing."

DAWKINS: "Oh that's much easier. Somebody could come up with an argument that says that the world is a better place if everyone believed a falsehood."

And we're back on nice safe atheistic ground. We again see Dawkins as gate keeper curtailing Sam Harris himself later on when Mr Harris seems to be going off message circa page 111.

HARRIS: "... our neglect of this area as atheists at times makes even our craziest opponents seem wiser than we are. And it take someone like Say'yid Qutb who is as crazy as it gets - he was Osama Bin Laden's favourite philospher. He came out to Greeley, Colorado, around 1950 and spent a year in America and noticed that his American hosts were spending all their time gossiping about movie stars and trimming their hedges and coveting each others' automobiles, and he came to believe that America, or the West, was so trivial in its preoccupations and so materialistic, that it had to be destroyed. Now this shouldn't be construed as my giving any credence to his worldview, but he had a point. There is something trivial and horrible about the day to day fascinations of most people, most of the time. There is a difference between using your attention wisely in a meaningful way, and perpetual distraction. And tradtiionally only religion has tried to enunciate that difference. And I think that's a lapse in our..."

DAWKINS: "I think you've made that point and we've accepted it Sam. Going back to the thing about whether we'd like to see churches empty: I think I would like to see churches empty. What I wouldn't like to see however is ignorance of the Bible."

How generous of him! I suppose the company of dining atheists' sudden recognition and then momentary fixation on the notion of religion helping people to avoid hubris, irked Mr Dawkins so much that he felt it necessary to preempt it in the essay he has published with the conversation, and which he has placed in the book ahead of the conversation even though it was written long after, years after, the meal was digested, the others had gone home and Christopher Hitchens had died. The essay is called The Hubris Of Religion. A flavour of the essay is contained in it's risible thesis by which I mean the line: "Scientists know when they don't know the answer. But they also know when they do..." Even an atheist might breathe a fervent Gawdelpus at that one.

Let us return to The Four Horsemen and their conversation that sparked an atheist revolution. Dinner is proceeding.

There's a lovely touch of ludicrousness late in the night when Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins claim to believe that Michaelangelo might have been an atheist and that if he'd been commissioned by non religious authorities to decorate a museum he would have painted something just as magnificent as the Sistine chapel. Christopher Hitchens demurs gently, perhaps not wanting to offend his new friends.

I couldn't help wondering why then we have still no great atheistic Michaelangelo, not in the ranks of Soviet artists, not among the Hitlerites, not among the commissioned Piss artists of Great Britain, not in our own era with Europe and America top heavy with atheists, why not one? Why? Why are there no great atheistic poems? No great atheistic literature? No great atheistic art works? Why, why, why? Why not one brilliantly creative atheist?

Because creation is God's work. And those who deny him, create nothing.

The caveat I suppose is that even I have to admit that there has been one great atheistic poem.

I wrote it myself a quarter of a century ago when the conformist clowns at the Irish Times ran an article asking: "Why can't the Catholic Church attract great minds?"

I gave them the most ferociously atheistic poem of a generation.

It is called Party Piece

It says:

"we are all dying more or less

in body and in spirit

slaves to a process

not bitter or malign

but limitless

each moment each decade

unrolls in the shadow of the scythe

we laugh cry caress

doomed enough for ones so blithe

blithe enough for ones so doomed

revellers on a runaway train

exultant into the night"

But it's not completely atheistic because there is wit in it. Wit can lead to joy. And joy is of the Lord. So there is hope in my hopeless poem. And you have to take the poem in the context of my other writings which refute it. And you have to remember: Even when I'm evoking despair better than it's ever been done before, I don't believe in atheism at all. I only dared to go there because God is good. I evoked hopelessness in order to defy it. Never to surrender to it or endorse it.

But enough of great art. Let us return to Messrs Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris (et Fry).

Let us return to the book under review and close with a curious scene in which Sam Harris to Christopher Hitchens bemusement, says that witchcraft has died out.

HARRIS: ".. yet witchcraft has vanished almost without exception. I mean you can find certain communities where..."

HITCHENS: "Not at all. Not at all. Witchcraft is completely ineradicable and spreads like weeds, often under animists and Christians."

DENNETT: "Not in the Western world."

HARRIS: "I mean frank witchcraft. The witchcraft of the evil eye, and instead of medicine you have..."

HITCHENS: "You think you've got rid of that?"

HARRIS: "Fundamentally we've got rid of that. Yes."

DAWKINS: "In any case, don't you want to get rid of it?"

HITCHENS: "There's currently a campaign to get Wiccans registered to be buried in Arlington cemetary."

All the way through their book, I'd been wondering how these famously sceptical fellows would cope if they encountered a black magician.

Now I'm wondering which of them it was.