A sinister sorcery about Youtube's algorithms and how hymns can have you second-guessing

And so it is very reassuring when, very occasionally, these algorithms show a complete misunderstanding of who and what we are. Utterly infallible algorithms would be an uncanny and alarming thing.

And so, reassuring rapture! In recent days, YouTube algorithms have been getting me utterly, hopelessly wrong, by imagining I'm someone yearning to buy tickets for the entertainment of "Nigel Farage LIVE In Australia!".

As it happens, I can't think of anything more sickening, more contrary to my soul's desires, than listening to that malignantly slimy, gibbering, ultra-right, chum-of-Trump pommy, let alone paying to see him. And the very idea of paying a surcharge of $300 for something called "a one-on-one with Nigel" makes the flesh creep.

And who can they be, these un-Australian Australians so attracted to so loathsome a pommy (when Australia has ample loathsome public figures of its own) that they will pay money to be so shamefully, comprehensively Nigelled?

Will Peter Dutton (his extreme right-wingness comparable to Farange's) be publicly among them, or he will he obtain his own discreet one-on-one inspirational audience with Nigel?

Meanwhile, though, choosing not to go to a Farange event somehow imparts a warm, inner glow of principled joy. We are as much defined by what we refrain from doing as by what we choose to do. This is why it brings such bliss to not read John Howard's new book of memoirs, why one so looks forward to elections for the rapturous opportunity they give us to not vote for Liberals.

Similarly, every Spring I find it deeply fulfilling to not go to Floriade, Canberra's ghastly 'celebration' of Spring.

I go instead to nearby Black Mountain where at the same time that Floriade's artificial man-made gaudiness is underway, Australian native wildflowers, randomly planted by Nature, by God, and by Flora (the goddess of the flowering of plants) display their discreet, exquisite magnificence.

Can a Cambridge-educated Archbishop be wrong?

Because once upon-a-time I was an Anglican Christian I was able, watching the Queen's funeral, to join in singing the service's thunderingly wonderful hymns.

It was only later, coming back to earth, that I thought of the cognitive dissonance involved. One had been lustily and sincerely singing the praises of a God one is usually certain doesn't exist and is only a wishful-thinking manifestation of simple people's fears and superstitions.

Atheistic readers, if you found your usually firmly-based atheism wobbling a little during the funeral, during that sustained expression of Extreme Anglicanism, why was it so?

Perhaps it had something to do with the ways in which, for an intense hour, the existence of God and His heaven and the Christian's reward of everlasting life after death (especially if he or she has been a king or queen) were spoken and sung about with such absolute certainty. There was not a glimpse of a shadow of a doubt.

And (one marvelled at the time) if someone as splendidly-costumed and well-educated as the service's presiding Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (his Grace Justin Welby went to Eton and then to Cambridge) believes in these mystical things, then who am I to say he's wrong?

READ MORE IAN WARDEN:

Mighty Anglican hymns, too, contribute mightily to the Christian spells cast by a service as grand as this. Sung emotions are so much more gripping than spoken ones, and then when a hymn is thundered by a mighty organ and trumpeted by angel trumpeters, there is an illusion that it must have come direct from Heaven.

And so this was for some of us an occasion of powerful and strange persuasiveness.

Then, later, while one lay awake wondering what it was one had just seen and felt, all that lovely, hallucinogenic Christian delirium slowly ebbed away, leaving the temporarily-uplifted atheist plonked back down where he was before.

We see him beached (rather like a beached whale) on the bleak and unhappy beach of his non-belief where he can no longer kid himself that Jesus wants him for a sunbeam.

Beached and unbelieving he knows that Archbishops and C of E royal families are deluding themselves about everlasting life - that their elite lives and our common ones are nothing more than Shakespeare's "brief candle" that is soon snuffed out, for ever and ever.

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