Godbashers

Published: 04/09/2007

God Bashers
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

On Sunday I was on the last ever Heaven and Earth show on the BBC which, for nine years has been a gentle dale in the noisy world of modern television- pleasurable, tranquil, receptive, candid and at times profoundly revealing of the place of religion in today’s world. Not a programme for the rowdy and brash God bashers, obviously, in particular Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins who really are perilously close to losing their flawlessly rational heads as they fulminate like demented fire and brimstone preachers. I actually like Richard Dawkins a whole lot, but these days find him tiresome and at time infuriating even when I agree with some of his views. Such men know it all, they don’t listen and presume to judge and demean people they won’t ever understand. Radio 4’s John Humphreys has taken them on the fanatic atheists in a new book about faith and the human urge to believe. Some aspects of our nature are not susceptible to scientific enquiry, cannot be dissected, categorised and validated in terms that would satisfy the ‘rational’ disbelievers whose intellect is colossal but imagination puny.

There are no experiments and tests either to explain love, empathy, longing, the agony and ecstasy of the heart, the wild and wonderful creativity of the brain, artistic genius, that thing that happens to you when a full moon appears above the sea and is reflected in it. Sorry, but knowing the science of why the moon shines is irrelevant to the experience. 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.

I agree with Dawkins, the quieter A.C Grayling and humanists that religion can and does disable human aspiration and will; it can and does lead worshippers of various gods to a violent hatred of ‘outsiders’; it can and does debase women; it can and does create a religious autocracy; it can and does encourage appalling behaviour. Since 9/11 Islam, Judaism and Christianity have become overly and dangerously politicised. Too many people today have developed an intensified religious identity. I also believe strongly that public spaces and institutions to be wholly secular. An established church, state funded faith schools and increasing encroachment of religion into politics and policies are bad for us all, including the most devout of British citizens. Sixty years ago, the inspirational leaders of liberated India established a secular constitution without which the country would have been ripped apart by its many competing, received religions and frequent surges of superstition. The gods had to keep to their place in free India, but they remain vital to individuals and communities.

Having faith makes me humble and self questioning unlike the unbelievers who know they are always right. As Humphreys writes:’ 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’. To these zealots believers are ‘mostly naïve or stupid. Or at least , they are not as clever as atheists’. We are also inflammable, easily led, malevolent, sadomasochistic and a threat to the future of the planet. In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins proclaims that faith instruction to the young is worse than paedophile abuse, describes us as unclean carriers of pathogens and lethal infections. John Cornwell, the Cambridge ethicist, who has just penned an elegant riposte to the Dawkins rant points out that this was the imagery used by Nazis too, for whom their country was a healthy body invaded by multiplying, Jewish bacilli.

The hysterical imagery is objectionable. But much worse is the dishonesty. Militant atheists have never accepted that evil comes out of their camp as well as ours and good does too. Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao were driven to genocide not by religion but cold, cruel power. None of these men feared God. The churches kept alive resistance to dictatorships in South American republics at the worst of times; Apartheid used Christianity to justify racism but formidable opposition from within the church; Gandhi and Martin Luther King found strength to fight for what was right through God; faith gives Muslims hope in many of the most hopeless of states and for millions across the globe it may be the only defence against the spread of gross and dehumanizing materialism. Of the most awesome creations made my man, most were inspired by God- the pyramids, the blue mosque in Istanbul, the beautiful temples of India, St Pauls, and works of Michaelangelo.

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.

Published in The Independent