But not to worry, God will eventually bring things about to our benefit, while at the same testing us. There’s no snow in Iraq when their Santa Claus arrives, but he makes it just the same. In almost all cases, these oarfish are dead or dying, as it’s a warning sign that they are quite literally out of their depth and in trouble. Clearly Spinoza and Hume are revolutionary in so far as they are prepared to talk about the possibility of God without religion, or gesture at the notion of no God at all. Every religion has got its own method or ritual that is to be performed when trying to make contact to your “God, Spiritual Being, angels” etc. In some of these religions they talk about meditation. What Zuckerman finds is that most of the people who live in these countries are not explicit campaigning atheists, and many of them may well say that they do sort of believe in some sort of God, somewhere, somehow. The first one, called Society Without God, is by a sociologist called Phil Zuckerman and is a study of a very particular phenomenon: religion in Scandinavia today. And this is a very interesting phenomenon, because throughout most of history, including the period in which Spinoza and Hume were writing, it was generally held, and is still held by a lot of religious people, especially Christian and Islamic fundamentalists, that a society of atheists must be an evil and unhappy place.

Because, if you believe, as Hitchens and Dawkins and I believe, that religion was invented by people, then to hate religion is to hate people. And I also think that Hitchens is too quick to attribute harm in human history to religion, whereas I think that religion has also had a lot of good effects. What Zuckerman found about the Scandinavians is not that they are atheists in the mould of Dawkins and Hitchens but that they just couldn’t care one way or another. And here we are sitting in your apartment in New York. So here is very convincing proof that it is perfectly okay not to be a believer. And yet here is the really striking thing. Boy, now where are you going with that thing? What is the state of your life like right now? However you want to measure a society’s health-whether it is literal, physical health, social welfare, education, happiness, living standards, life expectancy-these countries are at the top. It focuses on Denmark and Sweden, the two countries in which Zuckerman lived whilst working on the book. And it was in fact just at the beginning of the 18th century when Pierre Bayle, a famous French Enlightenment thinker, wrote a book which was ostensibly about comets, but which was in fact about all sorts of things, especially this.

Well I wouldn’t on a philosophical reading list, but I think that if you’re interested in the relation between religion and secularism today, this book is essential. Perhaps, but I think that has more to do with the long dark winters than the absence of religious devotion. The most substantial Protestant denomination in Northern Ireland, the Presbyterians, makes up more than one-fifth of the population. Yes, they can be more open, because they won’t be hanged for it. To protect ancient monuments, Rome banned eating or drinking around many popular tourist spots, starting in 2012. Anyone caught chowing down or sipping a drink at sites like the Trevi Fountain or the Colosseum can face a fine of up to $650. Bond says that as a military man, Pilate would have had limited experience and training in diplomacy or governance, something Roman authorities may not have deemed necessary for an unimportant outpost like Judea. Hebrew taxes also largely consisted of animals, produce and the like – the “first fruits” of an agrarian society. More than three hundred years later we do actually have the sort of society he hypothesised, at least in Scandinavia. And as an unbeliever myself, I think that technique is a much more effective way of showing religious people the error of their ways…

Obviously there are some religious people there, but the proportion is much smaller than anywhere else. But I do think that it strays very much into misanthropy. I think it’s the best of the bunch of the recent atheist books, and I sympathize with most of its conclusions. It’s not as if there’s a Satan out there who created religion and who’s doing all these bad things. Once out of prison, Malcolm X quickly established himself as the Nation of Islam’s most articulate and successful spokesman. He thought that what the human mind could divine one way or another was very limited. Not at all. Bayle was writing about comets in order to talk about superstition and the idea of divine portents. Yes, the next three books I’ve chosen to talk about are all contemporary: one published just a few weeks ago, one last year, and one a few years before that. So shall we talk about America? One of the anomalies in this discussion is America. The term is used by Augustine of Hippo in his On the Trinity, for example in discussion of the Son’s obedience to God the Father: deo patri deus filius obediens.