sausage squad up the blue end

I didn't attribute the Irish Independent article I linked to a couple of posts back to anyone in particular, because the web version didn't carry a by-line. It appears, however, that the culprit was Irish journalist Mary Kenny. A very similar article appeared in The Guardian last week, similar even down to the re-use of words - "gloomy blighters" this time. I'm not sure whether that's better or worse than "miserable blighters". In any case the word "blighters" always reminds me of the Reverend Charlie "Drooper" Hyper-Squawk Smith and his chums. But I digress.

If anything the Guardian article shades the Irish Independent one for sheer mind-boggling stupidity - largely because of this paragraph, which I think I may get framed and mounted somewhere:

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.

Yeah, those humanist funerals are so dreary. Unlike those church ones - I went to the church funeral of a couple of family members a couple of weeks ago, and I can tell you I laughed my fucking tits off. We were literally rolling in the aisles pissing ourselves, spraying silly string around, throwing custard pies, the lot.

The opening sentence is worthy of note, as well:

As I believe in freedom of opinion – as well as God – 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".

This is an increasingly common response by Christians to any perceived slight on Christianity - the assertion that the perpetrator of the slight wouldn't dare to make a similar statement about Islam for fear of getting his hands cut off, or an commercial jetliner flown into his face, or something like that, usually with a note of wistful regret that Christians aren't allowed to do all that stuff. So common, in fact, that it's acquired its own epithet: fatwa envy. Which I think is rather apt. I first encountered the phrase in the wake of the Pharyngula crackergate episode, but it seems to have spread since then.