Ian Warden | Getting our spiritual kicks out of sport

The heading, quoting UK celebrity comedian, celebrity atheist, presenter, screenwriter, and author, David Baddiel, was for a Guardian story about/interview with Baddiel triggered by his new book The God Desire.

Of course the notion of football being a religion of it filling a God-shaped hole is the observation of the way in which football fans famously get what seem very like spiritual kicks from their fandom.

Baddiel, a pommy, is thinking of round-balled football but of course here in Australia the same sorts of religiosities shine forth in other footballing denominations (and here I use that word advisedly). AFL fans, especially Melburnian ones, are famously "religious" in their fandom.

Here, lest I seem to be scoffing at this sort of religiously-zealous sports fandom, I own up to it having always been a big, blissfully irrational part of my own life.

I am hopelessly, tragically devoted to the perennially unsuccessful English football club whose matches I first attended when I was an urchin. I have a wardrobe bursting with the team's wearable merchandise and a rockery decorated with its official merchandise garden gnome.

Here in Canberra I have often been blissfully possessed by quasi-religious delirium while barracking for the CBR Brave ice hockey warriors.

So, yes, at the MCG I felt detached from the specific objects (the Richmond and Carlton clubs) of the colourfully-dressed, tribally-costumed, noisily-ranting fans while understanding perfectly the species of zeal that was gripping them.

Baddiel is an atheist and his brisk little 110-page The God Desire is what he calls "an absolutely slam-dunk argument" against the existence of God. He is, bless him, the only famous atheist I know who (like this columnist) is openly woebegone about his atheism and who (again like this columnist) openly wishes he was a believer.

"He'd love an omnipotent being to take a personal interest in his life," Baddiel's Guardian interviewer finds, "to assure him that he has more to look forward to than a meaningless death and a yawning infinity of extinction."

In this Baddiel differs attractively, humanly, from the megastars of atheism, ice-cold towering intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, who cerebrally scoff and chortle at the superstitious herd's need to believe in something comforting, to want to be cuddled by a cosmic parent.

"Baddiel very fervently wishes he was wrong," his Guardian interviewer diagnoses.

"The fact that belief in God is a readymade cure for the fear of death (and the sense of human insignificance, but mostly the fear of death) is the heart of his argument. It's exactly how badly we want God to exist, he suggests, that makes it a racing certainty we've made Him up. God is, so to speak, too good to be true.

"Baddiel sees the 'God desire' as manifesting itself in non-religious ways.

"Football fills a God-shaped hole," Baddiel thinks, "because it makes you feel connected to something besides yourself. It is, in a small way, eternal. If you've been going to Chelsea, as I have, for 40 years, you think how you've watched players come and go and die while you're still here. And I feel connected to the a priori idea of Chelsea and football, which is sort of beyond the here and now. It's identity, and it's tribalism, and it's opposition to other tribes. It feels very religious."

Perhaps all of us who are atheists but who go about our secular-looking interests and hobbies with a weird zeal are, consciously or subconsciously, trying to fill God-shaped holes?

And just in time for us as we are thinking (if only figuratively) about God's size and shape, along comes an exciting new book that looks, literally, at God's looks, at his physique.

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For her book God: An Anatomy, Francesca Stavrakopoulou (she is a professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient religion) has catalogued the anthropomorphic references to God in the Bible, from his feet to his scalp (even his genitals are discussed). She draws on the testimony of those who saw God and corroborates her findings with archaeological evidence and older mythology underlying the figure of Yahweh.

She finds that while the ancient scribes of the biblical texts imagined God as a man with an actual body over the course of centuries his body "gradually vanished" as, alas, scholars chose to think of him instead as something occult and abstract. This is why the hymns my generation warbled instructed us to think of him as "immortal, invisible ... hid from our eyes".

But now Stavrakopoulou is trying to humanise and restore him (and she is adamant that he is male) to us, so that he is the everyday deity in the room, at the shops, at the Raiders' game, perhaps on the tram.

So, readers, look out for him, perhaps using Stavrakopoulou's scholarly book as a kind of deity-identifying field guide.

It's likely, she calculates from her eye-witness sources, he will present as a quite well-built and virile-looking man (albeit perhaps a little fleshy and flushed from excesses of eating and drinking) with radiant and red-hued skin, a ruddy complexion, a long but carefully groomed beard and with hair that is curly, black and lustrous.

He takes naps (Stavrakopoulou has been keen to catalogue his engagingly human foibles as well as his body parts) and so if you see him asleep on the tram perhaps give him, the Supreme Being, a respectful nudge if you think he may miss his stop.