Is there anyway out ?

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118179845#Comment_118179845

Yeah, that makes perfect logical sense to me for anyone who just wants to leave.

Hotblack Desiato

Posters saying just don't have anything to do with the church. Grand. Until you have kids to enrol in school, and now that church has influence over your lives again.

JimmyVik

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118179962#Comment_118179962

Never caused us a problem.

Some things are only problems in your head.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118179962#Comment_118179962

What has that got to do with one getting a song and dance from them acknowledging that they have "left" the organisation?

magicbastarder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118179962#Comment_118179962

you're saying officially leaving the church fixes this problem?

it's a different issue.

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118180178#Comment_118180178

I was replying to posters who were saying just have nothing to do with the church... not so simple in Ireland when kids come along.

smacl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118180028#Comment_118180028

Did for us. School the eldest was in failed to manage to finish the honours maths curriculum for the leaving cert while still wasting a couple of hours a week on religion classes that no one had any interest in. Ended up getting her grinds privately, without which she would have missed out on her preferred college place. I've no issue with religion being taught in school, but it should be an extra curricular activity for those interested in dedicating time to it.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118179750#Comment_118179750

It does make a difference. Between sending a message publicly that society is rejecting them, not just being disinterested, to using their books to claim how many catholics are in areas, to just not want to be associated with them in any official manner.

As far as their publicly available records state, I am catholic. They can keep their records intact but should have to add an amendment that I never want to be considered as a catholic.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118179845#Comment_118179845

Unfortunately it's more about them having so much sway in politics, education, and even sport. So them keeping records that can "officially" be used to support their decisions is troublesome

Bannasidhe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118179560#Comment_118179560

Yes.

It would be an invaluable data set for social historians.

x number of people baptised in a given year/decade.

Track them.

How many are annotated as having left.

Avg age of those leaving.

Percentages of defectors at end period of study.

Compare with marriage records.

Compare with baptismal records/birth certs of any subsequent children.

Compare with census if available (wait til 22nd century to view current census')

Us historians would wet ourselves if presented with such easily accessible (and very important) information.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118181262#Comment_118181262

'tis always handy to look for easy excuses. If it's not religion it's blaming having to do Irish

Sure it's just another exam subject now anyway.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118179845#Comment_118179845

This. I'm pretty confident that it's always going to be the case that the great majority of people who leave the Catholic church cannot be arsed to write to the bishop about it, and seek to have the records note their departure. I think people should absolutely have the right to do that, and the church should keep the appropriate records, but it will still be the case that most people won't do it.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118179560#Comment_118179560

Not necessarily. There are reasons for wanting clarity and public acknowledgement of your non-Catholic status other than anti-church sentiment.

Plus, for a number of years there was a church-operated process by which you could register your "defection" from the Catholic church. You had to go through this process if you wanted your defection recognised by the church for certain canonical processes. But, despite the availability of the process and the canonical incentive to complete it (and an atheist/agnostic-led online campaign encouraging and supporting people to use the process) only tiny, tiny numbers ever used it. Somewhere in the archives of this board there is a post in which I analysed the available data and if the search facility wasn't so crapulous I would find it and link to it. But the gist of it was that the number of people going through the process was statistically not very different from zero - something like an average of one or two people per diocese per year (in Ireland - I didn't find figures for other countries). Obviously that bears no relationship at all to the numbers falling away from Catholicism in Ireland in that period, as disclosed in the census or inferred from other data (e.g. church weddings vs civil weddings). And the absolute numbers using the process were so small that changes in those numbers over a period of time would probably be statistically meaningless - a rise from two people using it in a year to three people using it the following year would be a 50% rise in registered defections, but it would tell you nothing meaningful.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118184037#Comment_118184037

Yet if so meaningless,why did they strip the option?

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118184190#Comment_118184190

Because nobody was using it, and this was causing them problems.

The deal was, you wouldn't be regarded as a non-Catholic for certain purposes to do with church marriage laws unless you went through this formal process. The idea was to provide clarity about who was a Catholic, and who was not, so that people would get the appropriate treatment under the relevant canon laws. (Hey, the church is a bureacracy and, like all bureacracies, they think that providing a form for people to fill out will solve lots of problems.)

But because nobody could be arsed to go through the process a great many people who, in truth, had left the church continued to be treated under the relevant canon laws as if they were Catholic, and they found this was producing unrealistic and inappropriate results.

So, after about five years or so they dropped the formal process and went back to the older practice in which, if they need to make a judgment about whether you are a Catholic or not, they do that by looking at the evidence of your connection with or estrangement from the church, rather than by looking at what forms you have filled out.

smacl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118184028#Comment_118184028

I disagree entirely. A school that is failing to cover the core curriculum is failing its students and should clearly be looking to re-evaluate its use of resources in order to deliver the education it is mandated to provide. Religion is not like Irish as Irish is also part of the core curriculum. This is pretty basic stuff.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118184548#Comment_118184548

Did you ever consider that either she just wasn't up to it herself without additional one-to-one help? Extra classroom hours can only do so much. It's all well and good to have a very self centred approach but it doesn't really work in practice once others have to be taken into consideration. You want your daughter to take one less exam subject (Religion) and for the maths teacher to take those hours as extra hours. Well that is all well and good. but what about when your neighbour's daughter is struggling with honours English and she finds French (or some other subject your daughter likes and scores well on) not interesting at all and demands that the school stop teaching French and use those extra hours to teach more English. And so on and so on.

It is all pretty basic stuff. The world doesn't revolve around you or your daughter - as much as you think it should. Some people aren't able to see outside their own little world - which ironically, teaching about different religions and cultures might help with

If "society" dispensed with some subjects so that every "core" subject had an extra hour a week, well it might improve the standard of, say, mathematics taught overall but it isn't really going to affect your daughter's relative performance all that much. She may struggle even more. Because with increased hours they will have increased topics which will necesarily be more advanced (e.g for A levels the students do more abstract algebra such as a bit of group theory which used to be introduced only a rarely used option on LC). There are maths students who currently get A's an B's. Those have to be taken into account as well.

Hotblack Desiato

They have a curriculum to cover, the school failed to cover the curriculum, which part of that are you failing to understand?

Bannasidhe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118184029#Comment_118184029

Which in and of itself would inform the data a historian would consider.

For example - was there a greater number of noted defections following a clerical scandal?

Is there an average age of defectors?

I have to say I find the objections to parish registers being amended quite strange, adding the words "defected on dd/mm/yr" would cover it.

And using the 'historical record is sacrosanct' argument doesn't hold water. Records are constantly being amended.

Yester

We need one of you young atheist's to go undercover. Join the priesthood and work your way up through the ranks until you become pope. Then you can open the floodgates for all the atheist's to officially leave.

smacl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118184741#Comment_118184741

You seem to be missing the basics here. In order to be examined in a subject you have to have been taught the entirety of what you can be examined on, the school failed to do this, preferring instead to teach religion. You can't answer questions on material you have never been taught in the first instance. Religion wasn't an exam subject at that point in time, and for the vast majority of leaving cert students still isn't. I'm all for broadening our children's education once the school can cover the curriculum they are mandated to teach.

It would seem you're writing from the UK as you're referring to A levels where the number of subjects taught is a fraction of what we have on the Irish curriculum and religion does not feature. In terms of relative performance, it clearly makes sense to compare results of those students who have been taught the entirety of the curriculum they're being examined on versus those who have not.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118184980#Comment_118184980

You seem to be missing the basics yourself. Every school would have been the same so it was a level playing field. Even if one school didn't do religion - what was it, 1 or 2 classes per week - then you'd have to decide what classes got those extra hours. You want maths because your daughter is weaker in that but maybe someone else wants English or someone else wants French because they want to study it at third level. And good luck telling all the maths teachers they have to teach more hours per week compared to the Geography counterparts🤣

I don't have to be writing from the UK to know that they have exams called A-levels. For the A-levels they take less subjects, but they go more into depth in each subject. That is the point. It isn't the special Olympics where everyone gets a gold medal - there has to be some determination of ability and performance. They aren't going to have LC maths where everyone has to do a few sums and subtractions of 3 digit numbers so that everyone gets an "A". If they decrease the number of subjects, and increase the hours spent on each subject, they will increase the topics covered in each subject.

Relatively speaking, it won't greatly affect a student's relative performance. Someone who struggles with the current curriculum is actually likely to struggle even more if both the hours and the topics are doubled. Topics which are currently covered at a first year undergraduate level would necessarily have to be brought forward and introduced at LC level. Those topics start to get abstract.

Suppose your kid is on the local GAA panel but can't get off the bench. The team trains 2 nights per week. They then move to 3 nights per week. The team standard will probably go up but it probably won't on its own turn your child from a benchwarmer to the best player on the team.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118185034#Comment_118185034

That's nonsense, absolutely nonsense.

A school not covering the curriculum is wholly to blame for not giving their pupils equal opportunity, as other schools.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118185114#Comment_118185114

I anticipated from the few other posts that I read on this thread that many would not be able to understand simple logic.

There are so many completely self-centred people who don't see reality. You can't expect to have a bespoke system to exist to serve precisely, and adapt exactly to, your own peculiarities.

Hotblack Desiato

Parents who expect teachers to cover the curriculum properly are being peculiar now?

Go on, keep digging!

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118185226#Comment_118185226

Doing plenty of digging yourself. Who are you blaming now - the specific teacher for that class? Or the school management? Or the school's ethos? Or the department of Education? Or the Pope for not holding a press conference announcing that they took "Hotblack Desiato" off this mythical all-powerful list of Catholics they keep. If your kid is the bottom of the class then that is unfortunate but there will be kids in the same class doing well and banging out those A's. They have the same teacher and same school. So go figure.

There does appear to be a certain type who get a bee in their bonnet about these things alright. Rather than looking around for some boogeyman to blame for whatever failings - why not spend some of that energy on their own personal development? If they are worried that their child's teacher is useless, do something about it. Maybe even get them to a better school. Or help the child with the subject they are struggling with rather than the parent wasting their time obsessing about whether their name is still on some internal list for some club they have no interest in being a member of anymore.

The thread title is "Is there a way out" of the Church. I'll answer that for you. "Yeah, just ignore them and stop going". And while you are at it, allow others who don't want to do that to do so in peace.

Bannasidhe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118185123#Comment_118185123

MOD NOTE

It would be appreciated if you could address other posters with civility. It is simple logic that resorting to insults is a sign of a weak argument. Sadly, some people are too self-centred to see that reality

Just a side note: It's mental that you can not immediately see who is a mod, or not.

Donald Trump

It is difficult to explain things to people who default to resorting to such strawmen as

A school not covering the curriculum is wholly to blame for not giving their pupils equal opportunity, as other schools.

That is the real sign of a weak argument. The previous poster was moaning about religion being taught in any school - not that their daughter's particular school was spending too much time on it compared to other schools.

You can't have it both ways. Either schools are broadly equal in terms of what they do or they aren't. If they are equal then there is no excuse because the bottom child will still be at the bottom relative to the others if all receive either increased or decreased resources across the board.

If your local school is an outlier and spending only 1 hour a week on maths then who is the fool for choosing that school for their child and then moaning about it? In reality those outliers do not exist. You can have a bad teacher but what is in some logbook somewhere has no relevance to that, as much as you might like to think it has.

Donald Trump

BTW, for the benefit of the poster who appeared to get their knickers in a twister over the use of the word "peculiarities", sometimes words have different meanings. It is possible to discern the meaning from the context.

In this case peculiarity can also mean

a feature that only belongs to one particular person, thing, place, etc.

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/peculiarity

I hadn't realised when I was responding to the post earlier that they maybe just didn't understand the other usage of the word. Given that I used the word "bespoke" in the same sentence I assumed it was obvious.