Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is having a go at those she refers to as 'the rowdy and brash God bashers'. As regular readers of normblog will know, I have my own quarrels with some of the ways in which the people she's talking about go on. But in light of her profession in this very column of humility and self-doubt, there are points she makes against us atheists that look like a bunch of arrogant and thoughtless noise. Like this, for example:
Faith is the light of the moon above and that light in the sea, reality and spirituality, both making you tremblingly conscious of forces vast and beyond words. Impertinent scientists cannot know what they speak of.Spare me: 'tremblingly', no less. But anyway, it's claiming for 'faith' features of the world and its effects on us that are available to people of no faith, in the sense she intends. You have to be of puny imagination, to borrow her own barb, not to be able to grasp that there are other ways of appreciating the wonders of nature than through God. Her claim of a monopoly for the religious in this respect is worth just as much - that is, as little - as the claim by certain militant atheists, a claim without evidence and indeed against much evidence, that nothing of the good or heroic deeds done by some people to help others is owed to the influence of religion. And then the humility thing:
Having faith makes me humble and self-questioning, unlike the unbelievers who know they are always right.The punctuation of the sentence allows that there might also be unbelievers who don't know they are always right. It could therefore have led Alibhai-Brown to the thought that there are other routes to humility and self-questioning than religious faith.