WITH an angry cry of “Mary Kenny, up yours!” a supporter of the Atheist Bus Campaign dug deep into his savings today and donated £3,000 to the cause.
Simon Bishop’s action was sparked by the outrage he felt when he a read a piece in the Irish Independent yesterday by the Catholic writer and journalist.
Mary Kenny
In the article, peppered with inaccuracies, Kenny wrote:
The advertising campaign has cost around £100,000. It was all started up by -predictably – Professor Richard Dawkins, the neo-Darwinist scientist and atheist campaigner. He put down a deposit of some £8,000, and the rest came from public contributions – mostly from readers of The Guardian newspaper, in which the campaign was publicised.
No, no, NO Ms Kenny! – the campaign was the brainchild of comedy writer Ariane Sherine who suggested the campaign in a piece written for the Guardian. It was then taken up by political blogger Jon Worth. Dawkins then gave his support to the campaign and agreed to match all donations up to a maximum of £5,500. And now, with Bishop’s latest contribution – earlier he donated £2,000 – the figure has reached a staggering £ 124,357.08. See full details here.
The very picture of Christian tolerance and joy: Stephen 'Birdshit' Green
But far worse than Kenny’s sloppy journalism is her attack on atheists, and her attempt to equate Britain’s ills with lack of belief:
… 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 … Militant atheists, in particular, are deeply unpleasant and caustically intolerant …
The late George Melly. Was this atheist's infectious joie-de-vivre a front for his "deeply unpleasant and caustically intolerant" nature?
… 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. A life without a spiritual sense of purpose, or the moral parameters set by the Ten Commandments is a living hell.
Then the woman dishonestly introduces the tragic case of Baby P into her argument to generate emotion (Kenny, as is pointed out on the Atheist Bus Campaign site, has no evidence to suggest that his killers didn’t believe in God, or that their religious beliefs (or lack of them) were a factor in the case in any way).
This post also points out that:
Mary Kenny is a Roman Catholic, so she’s on very shaky ground re the subject of child abuse. Catholic priests, anyone? Magdalene Laundries? Kenny seriously believes the world would be a better place if we all believed in God. 9/11, Mary? Iraq? The Middle East? The Balkans? Northern Ireland?
Among the first to slap down the egregious Kenny was Ciaran O’Ceallaigh. See his letter to the Independent here.
Hat Tip: Adam Tjaavk.
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
November 25th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
You can almost smell the fear, can’t you – these religious crackpots are running scared, knowing that their religion is failing.
The amazing thing is that she can get it so wrong, when the facts are easily accessible – if she’d just spent a moment thinking about it and looking stuff up…oh, sorry, she’s a catholic, what am I saying ??!!
Rog
November 25th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
The name under the female’s picture is ‘Mary Kelly’ – I was just wondering if that is satire too. If it is, I find it highly amusing.
Sorry =P.
November 25th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
To associate atheism with the tragic death of this baby is disgusting
November 25th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Oops! In this case, you spotted a genuine error, H Horror. We have now corrected it.
November 25th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
good article there. yeah i read Mary Kennys piece in the Irish Independent yesterday and it made me very angry..They actually ran the story under a photO of “Baby P” , which i thought was just reprehensible
November 26th, 2008 at 4:12 am
Vile woman.
November 26th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Any smear will do, and never mind the facts. Just wait for the usual fatuous Nazi analogies to come rolling out. Because before Kristallnacht and the Holocaust, there was Dr Goebbels’ infamous Munich tramcar campaign with the slogan ‘Chill out, guys, we’re all just human beings.’
Sad to think that Mary Kenny started out as an honourable feminist. Religion really screws you up.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
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/t.....571206.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?
November 26th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
To complain to the Irish Press Council and Press Ombudsman goto here.
http://www.pressombudsman.ie/v2/default.htm
what is this real news or catholic propaganda, I’m so sick of this crap
November 27th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
My “Up Yours” comment was removed by the Justgiving website. Thank you for documenting it here before that happened.