One sees why Mary Kenny gets grumpy mail
Mary Kenny must be somewhat impervious to criticism – she’s saying the same absurd things she said last time we took this ride – minus the hilarious gripe about gloomy atheist funerals, to be sure.
‘Atheist bus’* – blah blah –
I found the atheists’ coda “so relax and enjoy life” ludicrously implausible. I’ve never yet met an atheist with a sense of joie-de-vivre (unless, in the case of one well-known public atheist, a certain drunken cordiality) most of them seem to be miserable blighters. Read GK Chesterton’s great poem ‘The Ballad of the Sad Athiest’. It perfectly describes this kind of dreary and austere puritan.
I think I said this last time, but ho hum, I know my duty, I’ll just say it all over again – but in a high squeaky voice this time, by way of variety. What or whom Mary Kenny has or has not met is supremely beside the point. Mary Kenny does not get to conclude from whatever sample she personally has encountered, what all atheists are like. Besides which, Kenny so obviously has no sense of the need to check one’s own perceptions and biases that I don’t even trust her to know what kind of atheists she’s met – I don’t trust her to avoid the obvious error of remembering the glum atheists and forgetting the cheerful ones; in short, selection bias. One can’t even trust her to punctuate her own sentences (what happened after that parenthesis? a blackout?) so why should one trust her to sort her own memories with caution?
I still believe in freedom of speech and freedom of debate: although it is clear that if the militant atheists had their way, there would be no space whatsoever for Christians or other believers in the public realm.
Is it? Is that clear? Not to me, and Kenny (you won’t be surprised to learn) offers not a shred of a ghost of a reason to think it is. She just announces it, that’s all. She doesn’t remember meeting any sanguine atheists therefore all atheists are miserable blighters therefore they want to expel all believers from the public realm. QED.
I am convinced that this injection of atheism into the culture is directly responsible for the increase in drug-abuse, in crime and, most specifically, in the five-fold increase in suicide that we have seen in these islands over the last 25 years.
Kenny is convinced of a lot of things, on no apparent grounds whatever. She shouldn’t make a boast of it though.
A life without a spiritual sense of purpose, or the moral parameters set by the Ten Commandments — is a living hell.
Jesus god – the ten commandments. Please. Three about crawling to god; sabbath; parents; adultery; and four blindingly obvious minimal prohibitions: murder, lying, theft, and envy. Big fucking deal. Life without that stupid little list, more than half of which is either dead wrong or debatable, is a living hell? There’s not a word about cruelty; nothing about being generous or kind or (Karen Armstrong please note) compassionate; nothing about justice or rights or equality. Yet life without that narrow jejune superstitious unimaginative impoverished piece of crap is a living hell? It seems much more likely to me that a life limited to that grocery list as the sum total of morality would be – not necessarily a living hell but certainly a small airless thing.
Then she goes on to say – pleasantly – that atheists are the cause of parents who torture their babies to death. Back atcha, hon.
*Atheist bus? It’s a bus with an atheist ad on the side. Is it a theist bus when it has a theist ad on it? You don’t seem to see that phrase, so probably not. Yet another case of Special Rules for Atheism.
What degree of joi de vivre would make my opinions more or less valid? If Mary could be a little more precise it would be helpful.
As someone pointed out the last time Mary moaned that we don’t sufficiently illuminate her social life, maybe she should consider her own effect on the social transaction in question.
‘…no space whatsoever for Christians or other believers in the public realm.’
Missing the words ‘specially privileged’.
Living hell without the Ten Commandments? I can generally manage to avoid killing, stealing, bearing false witness, adultery and being mean to mum without any recourse to stone tablets. As for the rest, no-one’s business. Must be the most over-rated text ever.
Atheist bus?
Does that make the buses I keep wandering past on the way to work advertising Kevin Smith’s new film ‘porn buses’?
And do those constantly writing about how terribly unhappy those poor miserable atheists are sound like the life and soul of the party? To steal a line from them (and from popular song) Judge not, lest ye be judged…
I will be the first to reveal that I don’t know Mary Kenny and haven’t partied with her. So who knows what kind of social animal she might be.
But, from the two fine comments of hers that I’ve read, I must say that she likely has the kind of life where she meets few atheists. If I ran into her at a party, and she detected the heathen unbeliever in me, and began telling me about gloomy funerals, live as hell w/o the ten commandments, tortured babies, well, I’d move away quickly w/o introducing myself. So she would not have met me, and hence would have lost, no, driven away, the chance to meet an atheist w/that certain je-ne-sais-quoi, avec le joie-de-vivre.
So, even though she may believe in freedom of speech, it sounds like she may be skilled at repelling those who might speak to her, what with her view that we are miserable blighters.
Here’s a challenge for you all. Can anyone find anything bearing Mary Kenny’s name which is informative, witty, and well-argued? (Even one of the above will do)?
—
neuroskeptic
Perhaps Mary should become acquainted with an article entitled, “Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side,’” from The Times, September 27, 2005, by Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent. The subhead reads, “Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article571206.ece
Gledhill reports on a study which compiles information from a range of mainstream researchers and which sports an impressive bibliography. It compares the social performance of relatively secular countries with the US, where the majority deem themselves “religious” and believe in a creator rather than evolution. The US, by far the most religious of all the Western industrialized countries, turns out to fail, in some cases spectacularly, in all areas of study.
But then, if this kind of evidence diverges from Mary’s personal experience, surely it must be in error, right?
I am an almost incurably cheerful atheist. But, based on what I’ve seen from the woman, I’m pretty sure that twenty minutes in Mary Kenny’s company would cure me of it, at least temporarily.
Atheism leads to child abuse?
So all those Nigerian Christians who persecute child witches are secretly atheists?
All those catholic priests who raped choir boys were actually atheists?
If anything the correlation seems to go in precisely the opposite direction.
Cam has solved the puzzle: atheists get depressed in company of Kenny, & that’s why Kenny only gets to see us depressed (she does not see depressed zealots, as zealots couldn’t be bothered by Kenny’s depressing nature: they are spiritual I believe. It’s like being on Prozac. You are immune to depressing people, but it tends to make you depressing to others, which is why no zealot ever contradicts our Kenny: they are immune amongst them and see the non-immune as depressed.)
Do I get a Nobel prize now? Out of some strange compassion I’m willing to share the praise with Cam – if I can keep the money with an express purpose of saving it from the claws of the charitable.
Just to let you all know (Ophelia already does). After Kenny’s previous version of this article was published on Comment is Free, I engaged in a series of email exchanges with her. The woman simply will not listen – I debunked her ‘arguments’, such that they are, and she has simply repeated them, as though we never had the discussions.
Kenny KNOWS she is writing crap, but is so deluded by – and desperate to hold onto – her religious beliefs that she will carry on trotting it out regardless.
I don’t know about her personal background, but she is obsessed with despairing young people and suicide. It’s sad if she’s had tragic experiences of youth suicide or depression, but that’s no excuse to blindly ignore reasonable counterarguments to bland and ridiculously simplistic claims about atheists and atheism.
Edmund. Mary Kenny was a founder of the Irish feminist movement, and in 1971 was campaigning for condoms to be available (they were illegal). She has since renounced her feminism, with some force, and taken to proseltysing religion instead. I don’t recall reading one single article by her that isn’t pure untenable hogwash, but at least she’s done feminism a favour by getting off the bandwagon. I should imagine that all this attempted baiting of atheists is a way of trying to get back at her one-time feminists/lefty pals. I shouldn’t inmagine they’re that worried. I mean, she just comes over as a deeply smug, silly old bat most of the time, almost a parody when you hear her speak.
JoB: “Cam has solved the puzzle: atheists get depressed in company of Kenny”
Yes I thought that was the most likely explanation as well.
Kenny: “A life without a spiritual sense of purpose, or the moral parameters set by the Ten Commandments — is a living hell.”
A sense of purpose is good, but it need not be spiritual, and what has that to do with not making graven images?
Kenny exemplifies two current trends in atheophobia (fnarr):
1. The claim that atheists must logically deny the possibility of purpose and happiness along with the existence of God because theists believe that He is their cause. Any atheists not living lives of misery, baseness and futility are not “embracing” the “true” “meaning” of atheism.
2. The accidental admission two thirds of the way through any given article on the subject that the author’s terror of atheism is a product of their own crisis of faith. And that how terrible atheism must therefore be made to seem is proportionate to their agony of doubt. “A living hell” for example.
Yes, I agree with Dirigible on the ‘graven images’ front. I know someone who spends most of her professional life making graven images and she doesn’t seem to be experienceing a living hell at all. In fact, I quite envy her.
As an aside, it is nice to see ‘jejune’ getting an outing in its proper sense.
What Claire said as well as what Cam said. Kenny either drives atheists away or puts them in a bad mood the instant they meet her. I happen to know that conversation with Claire tends to be laced with hilarity and raucous laughter, and I think Kenny has only herself to blame if she meets no amusing atheists.
dirigible,
“A sense of purpose is good.” I guess some senses of purposes or good but I would not settle for ‘a’, nor would I want to impose some sense of purpose: it has little to do with feeling good and most people with such senses wind up depressed because they reach it or because it is unreachable.
On your 2.: spot on!, as they need to believe this hogwash they also need a scary outlook for when they’d stop at believing it. If not they’d inspect a bit closer what they believe in, that would drive them to the conclusion it is hogwash.
JoB – I may have conceded too much to the terms of debate as framed by Kenny in my point about sense of purpose. But I do suspect that many people need to feel they are part of something more than themselves. That said, you are right that some purposes will cause either their holder or other people harm. And purpose certainly shouldn’t be imposed.
Teleological monomania, whether for the rapture, the revolution or the singularity, isn’t a good idea.
In January the “atheist bus” arrives in Belfast with full fanfare. Nonetheless, in 1971 Mary Kenny travelled with Nell McCafferty, June Levine and other Irish feminists on the so-called “Contraceptive Train” from Dublin to Belfast to buy condoms, that were illegal in Ireland.
I daresay MK wont be travelling from London to take part in all the fun. She is very hypocritical – she reminds me of another journalist called Breda O’ Brien.
“There is probably no God. So relax and enjoy life.”
hahaha, nice one! Have a sauna!
Gosh, the bus will in all likelihood be setting a lot of minds thinking in the North of Irland. Some will most likely be wondering, what the hell have they been fighting for, all these blessed years, when there is probably no God.
Someone once asked that nice Catholic, Graham Greene, if he was happy. His response: “Not really. Who is?” Which I think about every time this discussion comes up.
Accusing the other side of being “unhappy” is an old, old tradition–I did a blog post a long time ago, featuring nineteenth-century Protestants arguing that Catholics were all unhappy, Catholics arguing that Protestants are all unhappy, Christians arguing that Jews are all unhappy…
That’s really interesting…because we’ve just taken considerable trouble to argue (in the book) that human rights don’t necessarily make people happier or even as happy as they were without them and that it doesn’t damn well matter. Not an easy thing to argue, but it had to be done!
“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. – George Bernard Shaw”
dirigible,
“many people need to feel they are part of something more than themselves”
I can do you one much better than that: people cannot help it – feeling part of something more than themselves. That is however not a reason for purposes; it’s just the way we are. We need others for speaking and without this ability to be communicating with others we are not at all human.
Ophelia, no doubt your argument will be a good one, but, why would human rights make people happier: that’s not why the thing is there. On the other hand if we would all observe these rights: there’s no doubt we would eliminate unhappiness peaks. Redistribution of happiness, … maybe something the One can run with on his second term campaign ;-)
JoB, quite. What we’re doing is dealing with anticipated objections.