Some people have all the fun
Those atheists – what are you gonna do – they’re such a pain. They’re almost as bad as earmarks, or fruit flies, or pally terrorists, or socialists. Atheists are such dreary depressing dismal boring tedious gits that – you’ll hardly believe me when I tell you this – even their funerals are no fun. Can you believe it? Now that takes some doing, to turn a funeral into a gloomy occasion. I could see it if it were weddings or dinner parties or trips to Paris, but funerals? That’s pathetic. When you think what the funerals thrown by normal people are like – well it just makes you sorry for atheists, that’s all. Normal believing people have the best funerals – great music, brilliant food, dazzling wine, dancing till dawn, sex, conversation, prizes, jokes, a ferris wheel – there’s just nothing better. So the fact that atheists manage to turn them into dismal occasions is just half-funny, half-sad. It’s because atheists are so tightly wound, apparently.
Far from relaxing and enjoying life, most atheists I have encountered are gloomy blighters with a depressing and nihilistic message that there is no purpose to life so where’s the point of anything? They so often fall into the category defined by GK Chesterton: “Those that do not have the faith/Will not have the fun.” You only have to attend one of their dreary humanist funerals to see that – I am never going to another of those, just to be made miserable.
Well no; quite; naturally not. It would be simply foolish to keep going to dreary atheist funerals when you could be going to riotous theist ones instead. I can’t wait for my next funeral; I do love a good time.
That’s bizarre.
I’ve been to (too) many funerals, and I can say that far and away the most fun, was the humanist one for my aunt.
She was a great woman, with many loving friends, who enjoyed life to the full, and we all got a chance to celebrate her life together. From musical performances of her favourite works (including singalongs), to reminiscing about happy memories by her family and friends. Best funeral ever.
Religious funerals are turgid, depressing affairs by comparison.
The depressing thing is that Ophelia’s summary is 100% complete and accurate. Yes folks, that’s the sum total of the point of the ‘article’.
Oh wait, it would only be depressing if anyone took this sort of cotton wool seriously, and based on the comments the piece is getting, that aint happening.
‘Most of the non-believers I’ve encountered are gloomy blighters with a depressing message that there is no purpose to life’.
And even if this were true, what bearing does that have on the question of whether or not there is a God?
Let’s not also forget the incredibly gloomy religious notion that ‘this world’ is just a testing ground in which we prove our worthiness for not joining the majority of the world’s population throughout history in being sent into eternal torment after death.
‘I have no problem with London’s buses carrying the slogan “There is probably no God”; although I would admire the bravery of the advertisers more if they added “or Allah”.’
Last time I checked, atheists had no more time for Christian rubbish than Muslim rubbish, so what would be the point of that?
‘Does it not say in St Paul: “Come, let us reason together”?’
Yes, and does Paul not also condemn homosexuality, tell women to shut up in church, and promote all manner of superstitious nonsense?
By the way, why has The Guardian suddenly become a propaganda outlet for wishy washy sentimental watered down pseudo-theological tripe?
Can we take Mary Kenny seriously? After all, her piece reads like: ‘This is the way atheist funerals must be, since this is what they believe.’ Has she really met an atheist? Looks to me that she has given them pretty wide birth.
Edmund Standing. Your question about the Guardian looks a lot like one I asked the other day when we were talking about Nesrine Malik’s CiF piece on killing apostates. There’s disagreement on the point amongst Muslim scholars, so that’s alright then.
Does anyone know the stats? Does this kind of stuff get the Guardian online more hits?
‘In short, let us have discourse and debate about these matters of faith and non-faith. Does it not say in St Paul: “Come, let us reason together”?’ [Mary Kenny, Guardian,24:10:08]
I suspect that the alleged saint, Saul the Tentmaker, said something along the line of, ‘Let us reason together, OR ELSE!’
“Can we take Mary Kenny seriously?”
Given that this is someone whose previous contributions to the national debate includes a long and surprisingly vigorous article about how great fur coats are –
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/jan/19/animalwelfare.clothes
– I would say probably not.
—
http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com
…further to that point, Kenny also has a maddeningly silly piece about antidepressants which includes pearls of Stoic wisdom such as:
“Life sometimes is sad. You will experience grief, melancholy, depression and failure. There isn’t a pill to cure the human condition. Sometimes you just have to be brave. And as you grow older, you have to be braver, for there are many more reasons for sadness.”
Article
Yes, it’s those atheists who are the gloomy blighters.
Tingey, why don’t you ask her?
http://www.mary-kenny.com/feedback.htm
I emailed her about her article. She was friendly and polite, but her ‘argument’ didn’t get any better.
Re: “gloomy blighter”
I read that Mary Kenny was a founder member of the Irish feminist movement, though she has since rejected her radical past. Well, it seems to me that when she took off her ‘radical’ coat she subsequently replaced it with an alien ‘gloomy blither’ one instead.
She would be laughed out of every ‘wake’ in Ireland with usage of language of that ilk.
“most atheists I have encountered are gloomy blighters with a depressing and nihilistic message that there is no purpose to life so where’s the point of anything?”
Mary Kelly should strongly consider whether this is the effect she has not only on atheists but on every poor unfortunate soul she corners at parties.
Perhaps Mary Kenny only meets gloomy atheists because all the cheerful ones see her coming and think “looks like no fun at all” and bugger off?
To be fair, perhaps Mary finds atheist funerals gloomy simply because they are *atheistic* – or more precisely because they make no references to the possibility of seeing the deceased in any afterlife.
It’s a pretty hollow argument for religion though – it boils down to “we should pretend to ourselves that there’s a God who’ll reward us in a future life because, well, it would be nice if it were true.”
Clearly, Mrs. Kenny is not privy to my funeral arrangements. I plan to set aside money in my will for the express purpose of renting a hall, hiring a DJ and a few bartenders, and funding a wet bar for all my surviving friends and loved ones. But if I don’t go suddenly and I’m feeling well enough for it, I’ll have the party first so I can enjoy it!
To be fair, if that’s what Mary Kenny meant, she should have said that. She didn’t say that – she said that atheists don’t relax and enjoy life, that they’re gloomy blighters, that they won’t have ‘the fun,’ and that they have dreary funerals. The ‘no afterlife’ explanation is possible, but she did a terrible job of saying that if that’s what she meant. And anyway, I have it on good authority that church funerals are no more joyous than atheist ones. I suspect that very few people really believe they will be reunited with the deceased in a few years or decades. Lots hope it, but I suspect that few thoroughly believe it.
Strippers at funerals are a common feature in Taiwan.
malcolm.mclean@stonebow.otago.ac.nz
Perhaps Mary Kenny should take the first flight out, from her adopted country, to the next funeral. It would, I am sure, be a good excuse to get away from all those gloomy atheist blighters.
No-one seems to have explored the possibility Kenny’s not very bright.
This was my retort on that thread:
“I just buried my father at a humanist funeral two weeks ago and it had more elegance and humility than any of your empty arcane rituals ever could. Believe me, I’ve been to a few Catholic ones too. Where the priest made appalling gaffes about the deceased because he was too arrogant to listen to the family. Where the dreary, patronising sermonising went on and on for hours until people were ready to drop out of a choking arid boredom that merely compounded their grief. Give me my father’s October woodland burial, the sun streaming through the autumn leaves, the tranquility, the brief words, carefully chosen, meaningful, poignant, utterly moving, spoken with dignity by those closest; the couple of poems that were read were so apropos. It was the worst day of my life, but give me that funeral over your rituals, your irrelevant, careless, bombastic, belief in a non-existent “God”, any day.”
Hateful, dense old cow that she is..
No-one seems to have explored the possibility Kenny’s not very bright.
This was my retort on that thread:
“I just buried my father at a humanist funeral two weeks ago and it had more elegance and humility than any of your empty arcane rituals ever could. Believe me, I’ve been to a few Catholic ones too. Where the priest made appalling gaffes about the deceased because he was too arrogant to listen to the family. Where the dreary, patronising sermonising went on and on for hours until people were ready to drop out of a choking arid boredom that merely compounded their grief. Give me my father’s October woodland burial, the sun streaming through the autumn leaves, the tranquility, the brief words, carefully chosen, meaningful, poignant, utterly moving, spoken with dignity by those closest; the couple of poems that were read were so apropos. It was the worst day of my life, but give me that funeral over your rituals, your irrelevant, careless, bombastic, belief in a non-existent “God”, any day.”
Hateful, dense old cow that she is..
Oops. Bloody F5 function keys…
She can’t even get her Chesterton right — she’s mangled both the meaning and the scansion.
Sorry, Nick.
Thanks Ophelia, it’s been quite hard. Although I have never read much of any intelligence come from Kenny’s hand, I had expected more. Like I say, it must be some kind of marketing imperative the church currently have; it can’t be mere individual stupidity. Can it ?
Churchy people do seem to be consistently idiotic – or at least to say consistently idiotic things – in a way that keeps surprising me. Oh come on, I keep thinking – that’s so obviously absurd – you can’t really believe that. In short, I don’t know what it is; it baffles me.
Maybe that bafflement is the point. Maybe that’s it. It’s the sheer obsession with not-knowing that some people have, they just have to associate with… well.. a tradition… a bunch of other people they feel comfortable with… despite their best instincts… it often appears to be a frisson within religious people… they look as if they know, then spend the rest of the evening circling with their angels trying to actually – really – answer your question. Then they smile as if they knew before stones were invented. Whatever. My dad wanted to be a Bishop until he did a few years in the army. Thence atheism for him. Me ? I never knew God, so I just wanted evidence. Is that really too much to ask ?
Actually, no fuck it I’ll say it. I’m surrounded in my extended family by both Methodists and High Church, and some strict Catholic in extended family, and the one significant thing any of those fuckers never want to talk about is religion. They can’t stand it. They either just “KNOW” without explanation, or instead, just act like savant fecking four year olds about the whole caper. They patronise like fuck if you want to discuss it, no matter how nicely or politely you posit things… what a fucking wind up the lot of them. There, said it. It’s a fucking racket. For people who lack guts and/or brains.
Dear oh dear. Families eh. Never mind; think of me as a distant cousin.
“I don’t know what it is; it baffles me.”
It’s the drop of the hard stuff – namely the holy water that does it. Makes ’em all into proper eejits, begob!
(slurping me papal poitin.) Anyone fancy a drop, Slainte! ;0!
You, ‘specially, Nick, now pray tell me, while ye are at all this fecking business – when did you make your last confession – I mean the one before the last one on B&W?
May god be with ye always, Slainte!
Oops. Thanks both for your none too judgemental responses there, couldn’t find my off-switch… %-) Won’t do it again, promise. Slainte!