A temperate remonstrance
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has a few very gentle words to say to her friends in the atheist community – the
rowdy and brash God bashers [who] fulminate like demented fire-and-brimstone preachers [and who] know it all, don’t listen, and presume to judge people they won’t ever understand…the fanatic atheists…the “rational” disbelievers, whose intellect is colossal but imagination puny.
You know the ones, right? Quite unlike saintly Alibhai-Brown, they are; she says so herself.
Having faith makes me humble and self-questioning, unlike the unbelievers who know they are always right.
Ah yes – obviously – here she is humbly questioning herself all over the place. What would she sound like if she were arrogant and dogmatic, I wonder?
To these zealots, believers are mostly naive or stupid…The hysterical imagery is objectionable. But much worse is the dishonesty.
Oh, gosh, Yasmin, I know what you mean. All that hysteria and dishonesty; it’s quite shocking.
Fundamentalist atheists want to replace old religions with their own. To them all previous prophets were false. Their fervour makes them as blind and uncompromising as those following the religions they detest. Science gave them no immunity – they too are infected by the virus of faith. Only, they would say, theirs is the only true path, and all other roads lead to damnation. Of course.
Oooookay. Whatever you say. Humility and self-questioning on your side, fundamantalist religion and blind fervour and faith and damnation on our side. Well demonstrated.
I was really quite taken with the John Humphrys quote too, which Yazza doesn’t seem to notice (why would she?!) the bizarre circularity of:
“I have fallen into the habit of asking almost everyone I meet if they believe in God. And here is an interesting thing: it was only the atheists who seemed absolutely certain.”
Ya don’t say, John!
I think there’s a clue here..
“On Sunday, I was on the last ever Heaven and Earth show on the BBC”. Have you seen this programme ? Unendingly anodyne. Alibhai-B is perhaps touting for a new job then, and the Independent – a UK tabloid aimed specifically at middle class kids wishing to brow-beat their parents – is happy to dosh out on her atheist strawman doggerel. Recommendation: ignore.
She can kiss my shiny metal ass!
This article was the most sickening load of tripe I’ve read in a long time, and just for once I sympathise with G Tingey’s wish to use the forbidden word, because none of what it says bears much relationship to reality.
“disbelievers, whose intellect is colossal but imagination puny”
Put Mr. T next to her and he’d implode.
My imagination is the reason I do not believe. Once I started imagining eternity, I questioned the afterlife. Once I started imagining the world beyond my own experience, I started questioning the necessity and/or goodness of God.
“Having faith makes me humble and self-questioning, unlike the unbelievers who know they are always right.”
Humble enough to write a newspaper column promoting her own views and denigrating those of others in the strongest terms, self-questioning enough to know that those she is against are absolutely wrong and she is absolutely right.
She is setting off my lackwit intolerance.
“Bite my shiny metal ass.” is really what you meant.
This is the second time in as many days that I’ve read the claim that Dawkins says that religious indoctrination is ” worse than paedophile abuse”. Given that Dawkins explitly says the opposite I’m wondering if there’s some sort of script that his detractors are reading from. (Which might explain the mysterious – and hysterical – connection between “paedophile abuse” and “Jewish bacilli”.)
By the way, when it comes to the uses of mouths on the posterior region I’m fine with whatever floats your boat (demented zealot that I am).
OK, I realise now that that the bacilli thing is a reference to the idea of religion as a virus. But even in that light the passage remains a non sequitur. Maybe it’s some new form of liturgy – reciting “The Ten Errors of Dawkins” or some such.
The whole damn article is a non sequitur. It’s as if Y A-B set out to give a paradigm of the word for the use of people studying common fallacies.
I usually like Yazzer who I think is an honest and well-meaning writer. But she does lack proportion/humour. You really are putting on the Kick Me Quick hat if you describe yourself as “humble and self-questioning”.