Please, Prof Dawkins, can I be a quiet, passive atheist?
As a pacifist, and a coward, I'm really not looking for a fight. But argy bargy is brewing in the ideological playground, and rather than skulk off or adopt the scarf of the side most likely to emerge victorious, I propose we have a discussion first. What I'm actually saying is: I want to talk to you about God.
Whether by accident or intelligent design, Not Believing In God has been elevated to a creed all of its own, with its own gospels – The God Delusion, The End Of Faith, God Is Not Great – and O-come-all-ye-faithless proverbs, plastered on the sides of 800 buses nationwide earlier this year ("There's probably no God: stop worrying and enjoy your life"). The bus campaign, as inversely evangelical as any doorstepping Jehovah's Witness, was funded by donations to the tune of £140,000 – a clear sign that the secular are taking up alms.
I should declare if not an interest, then certainly an anomaly: I don't believe in God either. I sang O Jesus I Have Promised and learned cute Bible stories at school, but failed to make a meaningful metaphysical connection. At a base theological level, I'm with Dawkins. Bizarrely enough, I've even shared a variety bill with him: last Christmas's Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, an evening of comedy, music and science curated by Robin Ince and New Humanist magazine. It was literally secularism as a bit of fun, like new toilet book The Atheist's Guide To Christmas.
My worry is the growing militancy of the atheist lobby, which is where me and it part company. As far as I see it, not doing something is by definition a passive activity. If anything, my lack of faith is an absence, a void, a missing jigsaw piece, not a soapbox from which to convert others to my non-cause. I don't follow cricket either; but as long as cricket fans don't come round my house and threaten me with bats, we can bump along without incident. I certainly don't regard them as brainwashed numbskulls for their lifestyle choice. And yet, in The God Delusion, which I found compelling and repulsive in equal measure, Dawkins suggests that people "cling to religion" because "they have been let down by our educational system and don't realise that non-belief is even an option." In other words – idiots! – they're too thick to be atheists. This is fighting talk.
There seems to be a significant and meaningful crossover between the anti-God lobby and the pro-Science lobby, as if a faith in one is antithetical to a faith in the other – which leaves the majority of Christians who use hair dryers, read weather forecasts and take Ibuprofen in a vast grey area. But Dawkins' actual title at Oxford until 2008 was Professor for Public Understanding Of Science, a chair funded by a software executive and space tourist. Even his academic post had the whiff of propaganda about it.
Is the gun-toting "management" of the grey squirrel class war?
This year I have mostly become obsessed by the Mitford sisters, those intrepid darlings of the decadent Vile Bodies era who dallied at both poles of political extremism, Unity befriending Hitler, Jessica running away to fight Franco, while Pamela, a lesbian, became an expert in rearing chickens. Their collected correspondence, Letters Between Six Sisters, spans virtually the entire 20th century, touching on everything from appeasement to the Kennedy assassination.
But don't be hoodwinked by John Prescott's claim that we are all middle class now. I recently opened the Observer magazine and staring back at me was the objectionable 6th Baron Redesdale, a congenitally balding 41-year-old in checked shirt and hacking jacket, standing in one of his several hundred rural Northumberland acres and toothily guffawing for the camera as he held out a dead grey squirrel by its lifeless tail.
Equally, it's the grey squirrel's gig to be hardy and predator-free. Don't start waving the blunderbuss around like you own the place – even if, due to some hereditary accident, the paperwork says you do. It's like those simpletons who coo at a nice robin on their fencepost at Christmas but say they hate pigeons. The pigeon's most heinous crime is to thrive. Why? Because we stuff muffins and croissants into our mouths while we walk along the street and strew crumbs everywhere. To favour one bird or squirrel species over another, particularly on the basis of fur colour, is surely a form of racism.
At a decisive House of Lords debate in March 2006, one Lord Chorley warned of the grey menace, even now scurrying across Europe: "There are three colonies in Italy, at least one in the process of crossing the Alps. If they get to Germany there will be a complete invasion." It's an unsavoury mixture of incipient island paranoia ("They come over here, they take our dreys"), nostalgia for a lost, Baden-Powell era (It was the Scouts founder's inaugural camp in 1907 on Dorset's red squirrel stronghold Brownsea Island, which helped popularise Nutkin as a symbol of English heritage) and a macho trigger-happy bloodlust redolent of tiger shooting in the Raj. It could make class warriors of us all, even in a post-Obama utopia.
The killing joke is, it was the colonial toffs who brought grey squirrels over from America in the first place, as pets. And a pair escaped. Oh, and Baron Redesdale's name is Rupert Mitford: he's the great nephew of my six favourite aristocrats. Well, Unity's pal would have been proud of him.