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17 December, 2023

The Last Supper by Philippe de Champaigne (1648)

The rational case for being a Christian

The New Atheist movement of the 2000s was “hugely successful”, says Ed West in The Spectator, even if Richard Dawkins and his cohort were “pushing at an open door”. The US, which had long bucked the wider Western trend towards secularism, rapidly lost its faith. Today, Americans under 40 are the first generation to have a Christian minority. The New Atheists got what they asked for, but as with so many revolutionaries, “they are despairing of the results”. The atomising effect has become “extreme”: the poor filled their “God-shaped hole” with drink and drugs; the rich with intolerant identity politics. 

The irony is that this same period coincided with a proliferation of studies “pointing to the benefits of religion”, on everything from child welfare to individual happiness and the suppression of anxiety. So a new intellectual movement sprang up in the 2010s making a simple point: whether or not religion is true, it’s useful, and Christianity has made the West unusually successful. Ideas of this kind have been around since at least the 18th century, probably longer, but the “New Theists”, as they might be called, have “social sciences to back them up”. Evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that since human beings are “essentially irrational”, it makes sense that irrational beliefs are the most powerful for promoting social cohesion. When “New Atheist icon” Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently declared herself a Christian – because an atheistic West lacks the tools to fight radical Islam – she got in trouble “not because she had adopted irrational beliefs”, but because her reasons for doing so were too rational. She’s right, though. If millions of people returned to the Church, “whatever they felt inside”, there would be enormous social benefits. It’s worth a try. 

THE ESTATE This Grade I listed manor house sits within a 545-acre private estate on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. The 16th-century residence has almost 9,000 sq ft of floor space with nine bedrooms, and two adjacent cottages each with an additional three bedrooms. The extensive farmland is currently let to agricultural tenants, while a mature 80-acre woodland at the property’s rear is perfect for hosting shoots. The picturesque village of Giggleswick is a 10-minute drive, with trains to London in three-and-a-half hours. £5.25m.

Laddie Boy with Mr and Mrs Harding in 1931. FPG/Keystone View Company/Archive Photos/Getty

The world’s first celebrity dog

The first meeting of Warren G Harding’s cabinet in 1921 was interrupted by a dog, says Duncan Fyfe in the FT: a fluffy, seven-month-old Airedale terrier, who was a gift from a friend. “This is an amazing dog!” the US president exclaimed, before cancelling the meeting to go and “run around with the puppy”, who he named Laddie Boy. To avoid the temptation to repeat this abnegation of duty, Harding had a “little chair made for Laddie Boy, so he could sit at the cabinet table too”. 

There was “nothing especially notable” about the pooch, but it was just after World War One and the nation was crying out for “fun stories of plucky dogs rather than tales of trench warfare”. Harding, a former news man, knew the press would lap up tales of a presidential pup. Before long, Laddie Boy’s escapades were headlining national newspapers – a welcome distraction from the “deeply criminal” goings-on in the cabinet. Harding may have been cynical, but he did “love Laddie Boy intensely”. He had 1,000 bronze sculptures made of the hound, and personally wrote magazine and newspaper articles from the dog’s point of view. When Harding died of heart failure in 1923, Laddie Boy “howled for days”. Mrs Harding gave him to a Secret Service agent named Harry Barker, for the simple reason that “his name was Barker, and the first lady liked to theme her bequeathments”.

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There are at least three organisations currently investigating the possibility of towing icebergs to warmer climes, says New Scientist, to be used as a source of drinking water in drought-stricken areas. This “isn’t as fanciful as it sounds”. Icebergs are already towed short distances to stop them colliding with oil rigs in the North Atlantic. And Ed Kean, a Canadian fisherman, has spent decades harvesting and melting the icy bodies. The resulting water is used in everything from cosmetics to beer, and, because it was frozen before human pollution existed, is purportedly among the cleanest on Earth. “Kean’s mother won’t drink anything else.” 

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The indefatigable Queen of Pop

Growing up, most women choose a celebrity older than themselves who becomes “a compass to navigate the path ahead”, says Janice Turner in The Times. For my mother’s cohort, it was the Queen; for younger women today, it’s Taylor Swift or Beyoncé. But for me, “it was always Madonna”. Despite being 65 and nearly dying earlier this year, the indefatigable Queen of Pop is midway through a world tour. She is on stage for over two hours each night, laced into her corset, “writhing around atop a glass box, then whizzing high above the O2 arena in a sort of bejewelled stairlift”.

What’s extraordinary is that after so many decades in the spotlight, she has never imploded. She never checked into rehab or went on a “drunken rampage” that she later blamed on her mental health. When she had bad boyfriends or husbands, she kicked them out, sometimes “paying them vast sums to go away”. Perhaps rarest of all, at a time when pop stars “parp out apologies for the slightest infraction”, she has never said sorry – not to the Catholic Church for the “sexy black Jesus” in the music video for Like a Prayer, nor to the social conservatives “appalled by her naked bottom” in her book Sex. It’s no picnic being an ageing female sex symbol: you either “die like Monroe or disappear like Bardot”. But as always, Madonna is blazing her own trail, ageing defiantly, and in full view of the men who have been telling her to “put it away, love” for three decades. “When I’m told not to do something, I only want to do it more,” she says, laughing. “Imagine if I co-operated now.”

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The man who sold the Eiffel Tower, twice

Victor Lustig was such an able conman that he sold the Eiffel Tower, says The Retrospectors podcast. Twice. In the 1920s, after reading about how expensive it was to maintain the 984-foot landmark, Lustig forged letters from the French government saying it wished to dismantle the structure and sell it as scrap. He then posed as a corrupt official and convened all the biggest scrap metal dealers in Paris to tell them about the (fake) plans, which he said were being kept hush-hush to avoid a scandal. One dealer, Andre Poisson, agreed to pay 70,000 francs (around £287,000 today) for the scrap – and Lustig made off with the money to Austria.

After a while, he realised no one had caught wind of the scam, and assumed Poisson had been too embarrassed to tell the police. So he went back to Paris the following year to try the same stunt again. This time his buyer smelled a rat and informed the authorities, forcing Lustig to flee to the US. He was eventually sent to Alcatraz, where he died in 1947. No one had believed him when he contracted pneumonia – he had already made 1,192 medical requests in an apparent effort to escape.

“With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.”
CS Lewis

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