ALL IS AESTHETICS:

Lie back and think of Jesus: After seven decades as an atheist, Fay Weldon has found God. But has she stopped believing in women? She tells Stuart Jeffries why they should stop complaining, be nicer to men and forget about orgasms (Stuart Jeffries, September 5, 2006, The Guardian)

It's all gone a little Vicar of Dibley. There is a postcard on Fay Weldon's kitchen wall featuring a bearded gent and the caption: "Jesus is coming. Look busy!" We are in Shaftesbury, the Dorset town bucolically engirdled by the Vale of Blackmore. Through the window there is a view of the tower of George Gilbert Scott's 1841 Holy Trinity Church. It wouldn't be a surprise if Dawn French popped in wearing a dog collar and set about a plate of KitKats. Weldon tells me that, even though she was raised an atheist, in the past three or four years she has been going to church. In her eighth decade, she has even submitted to being baptised.

Why bother? "It's a sort of formalisation and a discipline to do with the gritting of the teeth and the putting up with boredom and nonsense," she says. "You don't go to church for intellectual gratification - you go because it pleases your aesthetic sensibilities."

The Rationalist dream died when Hume demonstrated that it was an aesthetic failure

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 5, 2006 12:00 AM