More CiF Twaddle

In the wake of the Atheist bus campaign, we get a steaming pile of horse manure from a theist on CiF, Mary Kenny.

The coda in the London bus secularist message “so relax and enjoy life” strikes me as bunkum rather on a par with beauty cream claims, and for the same reasons: it does not accord with my experience.

While I am an atheist, I did not take part in the campaign. I am indifferent to it and saw no particular need to campaign. I don’t believe (not sure I ever did) and that, as far as I am concerned is that. I expect theists to desist from proselytising at me and I’ll leave them alone. I did find it interesting to read some of the more hysterical exchanges over at the Devil’s from some of the theists. One does wonder, sometimes, just how big, brave and omnipotent this god of theirs is, given the reaction to a fairly innocuous message, but that’s another discussion – and not one I want to get into here.

Kenny is indulging in pure bunkum – of the kind she accuses of others. I really don’t know what experience she has been having, but she needs to get out more:

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.

Er, it was a funeral, it wasn’t supposed to be fun, you lackwit. The last Christian funeral I went to was full of miserable people, too. I wonder why?

When taking a motorcycle around the sweeping hairpin bends of the Cirque de Navacelles or the Corniche de Cevennes with an ear-to-ear grin on my face, when walking alone on a desolate hillside or sitting in my garden with nothing more to accompany me than the lazy afternoon sun and the sound of next door’s poultry, when chasing butterflies to photograph them; when, frankly, I do anything that gives me pleasure, I am doing as any other ordinary person is; I’m enjoying life. Belief or the lack thereof has nothing to do with it. Kenny is doing as too many do; she is bunching a diverse set of people under one banner; that of their lack of belief. And, that, frankly, is pure, one hundred percent, twenty four carat bunkum. It takes a particular kind of foolishness to characterise people by something that they don’t believe in. But, then writing for CiF does tend to indicate foolishness…

I don’t need the comfort of religion and its pseudo-certainties to enable me to enjoy myself. Indeed, all those I have come across who similarly lack belief in deities share my sense of fun. Lacking belief in life after death, only having this life, we believe in living it to the full.