Commercial principle lost in the wash?

These packets of Fairy dishwasher tablets are on sale at Poundland in St George’s Street for £7. ‘Ang on a minute...£7? Doesn’t this violate the shop’s single commercial principle, which appears in big letters over the door, that everything is £1...?

At a pub quiz in Canterbury last week the following question was asked: “What South American dance shares its name with a fruity soft drink?” One team gave the answer: Fanta.

This reminds me of a webpage I once chanced upon – the worst and most bizarre answers ever given on Family Fortunes. Here are a few: Name a bird with a long neck – Naomi Campbell. Name something a blind person might use – a sword. Name something that flies that doesn’t have an engine – a bicycle with wings. Name something you might take to the beach – turkey.

On Friday, it was revealed that Sky Sports had witnessed a 19% year-onyear fall in viewing figures for football. The Daily Mail’s sports diarist Charles Sale wrote: “This has been put down to factors including illegal streaming of matches, a hot summer and the rival attraction of the Olympics.” There might be another factor: The sheer number of Premiership matches now broadcast, anything up to six from a Friday to a Monday. When I first subscribed to Sky in the 1990s, it was purely to watch England’s winter cricket tours and the football. There were two matches, one on Sunday afternoon and one on Monday night, and my housemates and I made sure we watched every one. But now many of the matches leave us uninspired. The offering on Sunday was a case in point. Sky’s “Super Sunday” consisted of Middlesbrough v Watford and Southampton v Burnley. I can’t see those filling Canterbury’s sports pubs.

The shop I call Waterstone’s 2 in Rose Lane has just had a fabulous makeover. It feels fresh, airy and welcoming. As with any bookshop, the first section I head to is history. On a second floor shelf I discovered, sitting by side, two books by Simon Jenkins – England’s Thousand Best Churches and his new book, England’s Cathedrals.

In an article timed to coincide with the publication this month, Jenkins writes that “the garden is blooming” for the 42 Anglican cathedrals.

Indeed, it is little more than a month since Canterbury Cathedral celebrated the completion of its latest restoration work – a £2.5m project to save the structure around the Great South Window.

Jenkins explains that England’s “big six cathedrals”, of which Canterbury is one, are now self-sufficient and make no claim on central funds.

Moreover, while attendances at parish churches remain stubbornly low, a fact reported in the Kentish Gazette over the summer, they are climbing at cathedrals. Allied to this is a growth in the number of tourists visiting.

Good news, right? Well, not for one group of people it isn’t: Militant atheists. You must know at least one, or have come across one at a party.

They’re so self-satisfyingly immersed in their own atheism that they can turn any conversation which contains even the most fleeting mention of religiosity into a bore-fest of flatulent outpourings about faith being the source of all evil and how they pray for nothing short of its ultimate demise.

Forgetting that one of my best friends is such a person, I quoted Simon Jenkins’ report that cathedral attendances are going up.

He responded angrily that he could not “believe that this is possibly true”. Sensing where this was heading, I shut up.

But as I meandered home from the pub through Canterbury’s streets, every now and then glimpsing the cathedral illuminated against the night sky, my friend’s words bounced around my mind. I had, it appears, blasphemed against his conviction that Christianity is surely bound to wither and die.

More to the point, it is plain to anyone who bothers to think about it that militant atheism shares many characteristics with religious faith. It has its own prophets, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens and the biologist Richard Dawkins being the most prominent. Dawkins’ 2006 book The God Delusion could easily count as the militants’ bible.

It has its own priesthood which proselytises relentlessly and its own noisy evangelists.

Much as I admire his comedy, Ricky Gervais is one of the worst with his tedious Twitter tirades against belief in God. Honestly, what sort of pathetic saddo feels the need to publicly pat himself on the back for his belligerent atheism?

It even has its own hysterical fist-pounding fanatical preachers. Take this from On Being, a 2011 book by Oxford chemist Peter Atkins: “The only chilling thought among all this persiflageous disputation is the possibility that powerful Born Agains, with their fingers close not to swords but nuclear buttons, will conspire to bring about Armageddon and thereby, at the expense of civilization, murderously verify their ludicrous but professedly sincerely held beliefs.”

In other words, Christians are actually planning to blow the world up. It’s proper fire and brimstone stuff.

Militant atheists have their own heresies and their own articles of faith. Indeed, it has so clearly mutated into a system of belief that the philosopher Alain de Botton suggested atheists need their own temples.

In 2007, while he was Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams published a scholarly yet immensely readable book about Fyodor Dostoevsky, examining the role of faith in the writer’s work.

One section is particularly perceptive on the subject of religion in the 21st century: “The current rash of books hostile to religious faith will one day be an interesting subject for sociological analysis. They constantly suggest a view of religion which, if taken seriously, would also evacuate a number of other human systems of meaning, including quite a lot of what we unreflectively think of as science. That is, they treat religious belief almost as a solitary aberration in a field of human rationality; a set of groundless beliefs about matters of fact resting on – at best – faulty or weak argumentation.”

In addition, it is clear that militant atheists are oblivious to two facts: Firstly, that they have simply created their own gods – giving them names like science, reason, politics – to whom they have invested the extraordinary power to transform the world and even mankind itself. In order to worship these gods they construct happy-clappy churches based on abstractions like equality, compassion, multiculturalism and humanitarianism.

Secondly, that these concepts are simply contemporary reworkings of ideas which can be traced back to the teachings of Jesus himself and his most important disciples such as St Paul. As Dr Williams points out, these concepts cannot be examined in isolation from their religious origins.

Like me, you don’t have to be a Christian to recognise the import and majesty of faith. We live in a city with one of the greatest buildings in the world, home to the greatest religion there is.

Christianity – its followers, its buildings, its words – has much to inspire and teach in areas of life that science and politics flatly fail to reach.

A visit to the cathedral or a church might be just the thing to broaden the horizons and expand the mind. If not, there are a couple of appealing books by the same author on the top floor of Waterstone’s in Rose Lane.

£7 – in Poundland!