One of the most extraordinary pieces of true dialogue in the play is from a series of letters between Wagner and Nietzsche’s physician, Dr Eiser. Remarkably, Wagner wrote to him, saying that “In assessing Nietzsche’s condition I have long been reminded of identical experiences with young men of great ability. Seeing them laid low by similar symptoms, I discovered all too certainly that these were the effects of masturbation.”

It’s a caricature of arguments that may derive from faith traditions to assume that they always and only take the form of dogmatic assertion or invocation of scripture or revelation. There are rich traditions of reason-giving moral discourse internal to the various faith traditions. Of course it’s true that some adherents of religious faiths offer dogmatic assertion rather than reasoned argument, but that’s not unique to those who come from faith traditions. They have no monopoly on dogma. Public discourse is rife with dogmatic assertions, unreasoned assertions, that come from purely secular sources.

Throughout the twentieth century, moral philosophers have done their best to push the question of moral change off the intellectual agenda. If you look back to Principia Ethica, which appeared in 1903, you will find G.E. Moore taking it for granted that ethics is concerned with a single unanalysable object called “the good”, which is the only thing we can ever really mean when we talk about “goodness”. There could be no progress in morality as such, apart from throwing out any historical flotsam and jetsam that might have made its way into the clear waters of ethical intuition. Genuine ethics did not have a history, in Moore’s opinion; only pseudo-ethics did

The philosopher of that time, whatever his inclination for physics or astronomy, is not comparable to our modern-day scientific expert: he remains a hybrid individual, uniting in a single person elements that can today appear heterogeneous.

New genomic technologies provide more robust, discriminating and reproducible methods of assigning biological identity than anything that has previously been available. Given the extent to which these technologies are becoming embedded in everyday life, it seems inevitable that they will come to play an increasingly important role in the way we construct our individual and collective identities

I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.

What is beyond the pale of a pluralist society is a state-directed frontal attack on the evidence for religious beliefs considered as grounds for religious identity, rather than considered as grounds for scientific argument, for example. Religious commitment is not something which pupils should be expected to defend in terms of generally acceptable reasons for belief.

One of the paradoxes of the Culture War is that opposites conspire with each other against the rest of us. We are offered an impoverished, narrow conception of reason and knowledge, proposing a stark choice to the rest of us: approach life’s important questions through science, or turn to religion. This was a false choice two hundred years ago, and it remains so today.

Much of the adverse reaction to the New Atheism is ill-founded. It displays a foolish sentimentalisation of religious faith, and often a failure to appreciate the real-world problem of religion’s persistence. Critics of forthright atheism display a naivety about religion’s ongoing power and influence in the public sphere, all too obvious even in Western democracies.

The Cross, for Zizek, reveals God facing up to his own impotence, but further, because God is Christ, the crucifixion demonstrates a gesture of atheism, or asG.K. Chesterton put it “God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”

Many experiences in life appear to us as very good when we remember oranticipate them, but quite ordinary or downright bad in the moment. Most people will cite parenting as a marvellous, transcendent life adventure. But most of the day-to-day tasks of childrearing are mundane at best, disgusting at worst: changing diapers, wiping up spills, shuttling little ones from activity to activity, and bailing them out of jail.