Was anyone else out there in Bugland left as teary-eyed if not completely heartbroken as I was by the news last weekend that The Sydney Morning Herald columnist Parnell Palme McGuinness was ashamed to be an atheist?

Were you, dear Buggers who read her piece, equally moved, either mentally or is some way physically?

For those who didn’t read the column, your ranter-in-residence will try to summarise it for you but with this caveat. McGuinness for mine is the equal of Patrick White; she is often completely unfathomable.

She often gives me the impression that as a driver, she would invariably travel from A to B via Z.
That’s right, as a vehicle for her thoughts, her essays are often convoluted and confusing. Put bluntly, her essays make the Brisbane to Mount Glorious road look gun-barrel straight. And if she’s driving blindfolded on the her own information highway with nary a clue as to the destination, what chance to we have as her readers?

But we continue to read them because she’s a regular columnist – often with her own page and big picture in a major metropolitan daily – so clearly she’s a writer of quality who deserves to be taken seriously, right?

In fact, she is one of a number of celebrity columnists in our dailies at the moment and to fully understand their success, you probably have to go back to their roots – either familial or physical.

Moving on quickly, the nub of PPM’s latest article seems to be that as an intelligent young thing, she settled on atheism as a logical and sensible way to handle this amazing journey called life and was totally at peace with that process until what happened to some chap called Andrew Thorburn.

As she writes, Thorburn’s “ascension to and rapid descension from the CEOship of Essendon Football Club after it was discovered that he chairs a church which has expressed churchy beliefs. Perhaps it was prideful for Thorburn to try to hold both roles at once, but the crowing of the atheists as he gave up the football club was nothing short of vainglorious”.

Opines Ms McGuinness: “I long ago stopped feeling proud of myself for outsmarting religious doctrine. It has become evident upon deep introspection that I disbelieve consistently, wholly and unquestioningly. If there is a ‘‘god gene’’, as proposed by geneticist Dean Harmer, I do not possess it.

“Rationally, I should accept I can’t know if I’m right and try to be agnostic, but my universe is devoid of a deity. I am an atheist against all logic and I am ashamed of it.

“I am ashamed because the more we understand about how human societies grow, flourish and become altruistic, the clearer it becomes that religion plays a central role.”

I appreciate that some of you might need to take a break right now to collect your thoughts and change your underwear but for the others, let’s press on.

When PPM is in a roll and keen to concentrate on one main point, she clearly avoids facts.

Like the fact that Thorburn was apparently charged by the club to find that new CEO and found himself to the perfect candidate.

Like the fact that the club was stupid enough to appoint him, perhaps not knowing that Thorburn heads a church that thinks that what shirtlifters do to each other’s bottoms is absolutely disgusting and they and their smelly dicks will roast in hell for it!

Like ignoring the fact that if some religions with some rather outdated “churchy” beliefs have the right to express them, other sections of 21st Australian life have the equal right to reject them. And certainly the right not to give them well-paid jobs not suited one little bit to those beliefs.

To further suit her theme, PPM also assumes that those at a club that is supposedly totally committed to inclusivity and tolerance and a wider public audience must have all been vainglorous heathens for forcing him out after one day! Woke heathens most likely!

Of course, like all writers who think they can write well, PPM is always keen to let her readers know how clever and well-read she is by quoting writers even more important than her.

It’s why, if I’m ever asked to pen a deep think piece on the future of the domestic airline industry in Australia, I’ll be quoting not too many paragraphs in Captain W.E Johns, most likely from Biggles Flies Again and The Cruise of the Condor.

PPM aims must higher than that. Not long into her piece, apart from the Dean Harmer chap, she references the “late, great Christopher Hitchens, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, or Janen Ganesh, a superb modern-day sophist who writes in the Financial Times”.

But the main bloke whose brilliance she bows to is Joseph Henrich, professor and chair of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, who “describes religion as a ‘social technology’ that has helped humans scale up and build large, complex societies”.

Much of PPM’s article pays homage to Henrich’s view that a whole range of theist views has made western civilisation in particular the wonderful, caring, sharing, decent, chunk of planet earth it is today.

And who knows? He could very well be right. What else could possibly explain why Australia was lucky enough to have been blessed with not just one but two deeply religious prime ministers in Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison who steadfastly followed the basic tenet of Christianity: Do unto others any awful thing you can think of if there’s a vote in it?

By essay’s end, are we any more enlightened as to the source of PPM’s shame? We do at least know that while PPM is now ashamed to be an atheist, she remains a committed believer in non-believing. She’ll stubbornly stay an atheist but is now more aware of the need to show more humility and tolerance, attributes that your average atheist apparently lacks.

Your guess, dear readers, is as good as mine as to whether the shame she now feels if mainly because of how Thorburn was treated by heathens like her, or whether she’s had an epiphany and the works of Henrich should be compiled into the one true bible she would be prepared to ditch her atheism for and follow devotedly from now on.

I’ll leave you with her final paragraph, which I’m pretty confident will be of absolutely no fucking help at all. It’s why columns by Parnell Palme McGuinness never lead me to any enlightenment or logical cut-through and are far more likely to bring on a headache that calls for a Bex, a cuppa and a good lie down.

Take it away, PPM….

Which doesn’t mean we should all become believers – I certainly can’t. But it should lead us back to humility and tolerance. Prideful atheists are condemned to wander the worldwide web alone, illiterates searching in vain for the technology to connect.

Let’s repeat that last bit to let it truly sink in! Prideful atheists are condemned to wander the worldwide web alone, illiterates searching in vain for the technology to connect.

Really, folks! Could Patrick White have said it any better?

Don Gordon-Brown