Catholic Ireland dead? **Mod Warning in Post #563**

Frank Bullitt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915046#Comment_121915046

That doesn't address your original claim at all.

Plus, I think religion does a very good job at explaining its existence, I just so happen to also believe it is junk, be that whatever religion that might be.

A form of religion will predate any reference to "transgenderism" by a few thousand years. There are cave paintings that reference symbols and animals that could infer a religious significance.

Shoog

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915072#Comment_121915072

That's an impossible claim to make.

Transgenderism is so consistent a part of human experience that there is absolutely no reason to believe that it isn't a biological certainty - a genetic expression. I have absolutely no reason to accept that it is a human invention - it is a biological fact.

downtheroad

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121911173#Comment_121911173

"wedding / funeral / baptism / communion / confirmation certainly"

Why certainly?

You are part of the problem.

Frank Bullitt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915090#Comment_121915090

Hold on, what is an impossible claim to make?

Religion has been evident in pretty much every version of civilization, wether that be cave drawings, burial grounds, temples. Wether you believe in religion or not, is has been part of human existence for tens of thousands of years.

As for your second point, with Transgenderism being such a new idea and term, there is no way to firmly know that that is what was recorded in the past, just like there are gaps in the claims of history, you also have gaps in your claim as well.

I am not saying it didn't happen or exist, but you are really taking a leap here with your claims.

yagan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915098#Comment_121915098

Isn't that more honest though?

In many Lutheran countries the local church also doubles as the community centre without anyone crying hypocrisy.

I think Irish Catholic is a different things to Roman Catholic.

A high Anglican service feels more RCC than the RCC!

Shoog

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915111#Comment_121915111

To state that transgenderism is has not existed throught human history is to assert it is not biologically based. I see no reason to accept any such assertion. I see no reason therefore to not claim it has always existed in human society which been a biological fact will always trump man fictional religions.

I can point to real physical examples of transgender people, I cannot point to any real physical gods.

eagle eye

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121914600#Comment_121914600

I included that in my post. How did you read one sentence and not the next?

Frank Bullitt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915290#Comment_121915290

You included a reference to you not talking about illegal acts (child abuse) but you never really addressed anything with that.

I know full well you would never say "Times are good, forget looking back and being annoyed about things." to a survivor of abuse at the hands of the church.

Frank Bullitt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915209#Comment_121915209

You are either misreading my posts or purposely making things up there.

I never said anything about pointing to real, physical gods. I was very clear in making a reference to religion, there is a difference with with what I said and what you think I said. Read the posts carefully next time.

I have also not said, at all, that transgenderism has not existed in human history. I was clearly stating (and I got this from the link you posted) that transgenderism only became a term in the 1950's/1960's, so there is plenty of debate for how it can be referred to in a historical context. How you can possibly say that it is fact that trans people existed thousands of years ago is misleading, was there evidence of brain structures that point to possible trans identifying people? Hormonal readings? Anything at all to do with genetics?

If by fact you are referring to gender dysphoria is recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), then yes you are correct but again, that falls into psychological factors, not biology.

This is all still a very active field of research, so how you can speak for humans thousands of years ago is confusing.

kowloonkev

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915090#Comment_121915090

You haven't at all answered Dr.Greenthumb's original point which never argued that transgenderism has not been a part of human experience, but rather the scientific fact that a man cannot be a woman and vice versa.

Also you said above "Transgenderism is so consistent a part of human experience that there is absolutely no reason to believe that it isn't a biological certainty..."

If being so "consistent a part of human experience " is all the evidence you need for transgenderism, then how can you have such polar views on religion, which is also very much a consistent part of human experience?

downtheroad

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915119#Comment_121915119

The full quote

"now out of my cousins of which there are around 15 across both families . Only 1 cousin along his wife and two kids go to mass…. Rest of us, wedding / funeral / baptism / communion / confirmation certainly, but otherwise not a sliver of interest…"

It is not more honest, it is the very definition of hypocrisy. "Not a sliver of interest" but will show up for the main events.

How would you feel about a family member who only spoke to you on your birthday and ignored you the other 364 days of the year?

It's the likes of that person who are keeping the catholic church on life support. If they stuck to their guns and didn't darken the church doors at all, the game would be up for the rcc here. But the poster wants the big day out, the photos on social media, and all the niceties that come with it, while saying they haven't "a sliver of interest".

What a hypocrite and a moron.

Iscreamkone

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915543#Comment_121915543

+100

I have a lot more respect for someone that says he believes in a god and brings his family to mass every week than the bouncy castle brigade.

Grayson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915098#Comment_121915098

Depends on how they mean it. If they're holding their own there it's one thing. But the last funeral I went to was my dads. I wasn't going to refuse to go to it because it was in a church. Same with weddings. I go to where the people are getting married, I don't choose the venue.

edit: Just remembered I was at an aunts funeral since then. That was in a church too.

downtheroad

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915565#Comment_121915565

Yes I took it to mean that they are attending those events for themselves or their children.

We all do attend weddings and funerals in churches, myself included. Rcc weddings are falling in numbers year on year thankfully. The personal and modern ceremonies held at the venue are so much more enjoyable than listening to St pauls letter to the corinthians followed by a 45 minute cross country drive from church to venue.

eagle eye

I do gate collections at my local church for two sports organisations.

Thirty years ago there were four masses on a Sunday and one on a Saturday night. Saturday was a quiet mass with a less than half full church, 8am on Sunday was similar. 10am was near a full church, 11am similar and 12 noon was jammed packed out the doors.

Now there's three, one on Saturday which is packed, on at 9.30 am which is close to full and one at 11.30 which is jam packed.

It's a big church, seats circa 1250 'souls' 😁

I'd guess you had about 4.4k going back then. Now it's about 3.2k is my guess so going by that they've lost a little over 25% of mass goers. There's still a lot of them left.

downtheroad

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915738#Comment_121915738

Out of curiosity, where in Ireland is the church? Urban or rural? And is it the only church for miles?

I'm in Dublin,within a 1km radius if my house are 6 catholic churches, double that if you go out another km or 2. The population is dense enough but anecdotally speaking the churches don't sound anywhere near as busy as yours (admittedly I dont attend so am not sure of what attendance numbers actually are).

nozzferrahhtoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915738#Comment_121915738

Yes defintely some areas see more fall off than others. Both in Ireland and around the world.

I live in a small town in Germany at the moment. When I first moved here 15 years ago there was two churches here. A few German priests. And mass was quite frequent and in German. Which is good because in small towns like this less people by far speak English than in cities like Frankfurt.

Since then however one of the churches has been closed entirely and turned into a kind of extra Town hall. A church in a neighbouring town was closed entirely and amalgamated into our towns remaining church. The remaining church does a LOT less services and masses. All the priests were let go entirely and one single cheaper to pay priest from Africa who speaks only his native language and English was brought in to replace them all. And now therefore all masses being offered are in English which has further pushed down the number of bums on seats.

So to say that attendence and penetration HERE has fallen off would be an understatement. But in general I'd say experience varies all over the country/world.

Shoog

I lived in rural Ireland for 25 years and when we first arrived the church was packed every weekend. A good neighbour friend would troop his whole family down regular as clockwork every Sunday morning. That started to tailoff about a decade ago and to my knowledge none of them now go. This is a very traditional family.

I think what really finished it for them was when the priest told them they were having a house mass which they were going to have to pay for. They are an untidy house so this put huge stress in the wife to clean up and decorate to the point that she went into hospital with a suspected heart attack. They wanted to cancel the mass but the priest insisted they reschedule. That's when they started to stop attending mass.

whisky_galore

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915790#Comment_121915790

This was/is a rural thing, the "station" mass in the house.

It was a source of pride for many years but now people are opting out, the older ones most likely to be on board aren't able bodied enough to prepare a house for guests and the younger crowd aren't bothered with having a bunch of virtual strangers traipsing into their house and feeding them.

kowloonkev

I always found it interesting that more people didn't simply convert to another denomination. They can't all have suddenly started despising the Catholic church and stopped believing in God at the same time.

Iscreamkone

Before I was born my folks lost their first born (3 month old) to cot death.

The priest asked my mother if she thought it was because she hadn’t been “churched”.

Obviously, this priest was a c**t. But sure they’re not all bad.

One eyed Jack

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121910520#Comment_121910520

The harm in it is for others who do not share the believers faith (or non-believers absence thereof). The harm comes from some believers demanding that other people who do not share their beliefs act in accordance with their beliefs.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121910571#Comment_121910571

Generally speaking, their faith doesn’t do the believer any harm whatsoever. It’s the harm they inflict on others as a consequence of their beliefs, is where the harm is done. Religion is no more about controlling an individuals thought and behaviours than any other ideology, and the difference between that, and abuse, is the degree to which the believer attempts to inflict their ideas upon other people.

There is no justification for abuse; there are however, many justifications for religion (or any other ideology you’d care to think of), if you want to put it in those terms - primarily it’s ability to offer social order and organisation of civilisation, which is how societies have evolved indeed since the dawn of man. If by ‘basis in fact’ you mean a biological basis in human beings which facilitates religion, or indeed facilitates gender, then there is evidence of a biological basis for both, though the relationship between genetics, cognitive function and environmental conditions which influence them is unclear and still poorly understood by current science. This won’t always be the case however as more research is being conducted constantly:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-born-to-be-religious/

This bit gave me a chuckle 😁

An important question is how these clustered traits might relate to choices in real life or at least to real life as it is modeled in the lab. In a study I conducted in 2005 at the Université Catholique of Louvain in Belgium with Isabelle Pichon, we asked Belgian participants how they would react in several situations in which they could choose to either offer help or not. Here is one scenario: you are trying to catch a train when you see a person whose suitcase flies open and from which the contents scatter. Do you stop to help? We assigned our subjects randomly to one of two conditions. In one, the person needing help was a friend, family member or colleague. In the other, the person requiring assistance was unknown. Our findings were intriguing: the more religious the participants, the more they expressed willingness to help the familiar individual but not the stranger. Spiritual subjects, however, did not distinguish between known and unknown people. They were equally willing to help in both cases.

We can make further distinctions among types of religiosity. In collaboration with my graduate student Joanna Blogowska, we replicated the suitcase scenario with Polish participants in a study published in 2011. We added a second study, in which we examined the willingness to help either a student in need or a feminist student in the same situation. It turned out that participants who were high on religious fundamentalism were not very willing to help unknown people or a feminist, an individual whom they perceived as threatening to their values. They did, however, frequently offer to help either a close acquaintance or a student in need. The participants who were high in fundamentalism assisted individuals in those latter two categories 66 percent of the time versus exactly half of the time for feminists and strangers. In other words, those viewed as outsiders were least likely to receive a helping hand from more conservative believers.

I’m sceptical that had anything to do with the degree of their religiosity, and more to do with the fact that the student was a feminist. There’s a general aversion in society towards feminists of all flavours 😂

Shoog

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915982#Comment_121915982

If you spent your life paying lip service to something you were indoctrinated into as a child, its really not such a big step to just let it go. Miss one mass and no consequences - next thing you know its a year between masses and then none at all. Most people are not heavily invested in the RCC its just the thing your parents made you do.

Shoog

When I got married back in 1998 almost everyone was getting married in church as a default position. I was a pagan at the time and so decided we would have a pagan wedding with a sort of mini-festival format. Everyone who attended seemed to have a great time and all of the children who were there apart from two have since sited our wedding as an inspiration for their own and had none church weddings on a festival format. The two who got married in a church really valued the traditional aspects and the fact that it gave them a great set of photos to look back on. So in a single generation almost everyone has abandoned the last bastion of Church ceremonial for doing what makes them feel good about themselves.

When the church loses the franchise on births, deaths and marriages it really is a dead institution.

Isthisthingon?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915738#Comment_121915738

it was very similar in our local church - although I no longer live in the area.

Saturday night mass, half to 2/3rds full.

8.30 - a quarter full

10.30 - half full

11.30 & 12.30 virtually full. I was an altar boy for about 5 or 6 years so would often do head counts to pass the time.

fast forward 30 odd years and One of the sunday masses was scrapped and I would often take my late parents to the 12.30 mass, which was at best a quarter full. Our church was big too- built in 69 so one of those concrete behemoths. Think I has 4,000 capacity or so.

Manys a time in later years i would look around the crowd ( the altar is in the middle of church and the pews were around it) - and would often be the youngest person there - I was in my late 30's !

One eyed Jack

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915982#Comment_121915982

They’d simply no reason to convert to another denomination, because they didn’t equate the Faith with the abuse which was committed and covered up by some members and the Hierarchy of the organisation. The damage had already been done by the abusers, but it was the attempted cover-up and dismissal which led to a small number of people imagining they could defect from the Church (they couldn’t):

https://www.thejournal.ie/church-defection-website-suspends-service-over-legal-vagueness-33784-Oct2010/

But it also led to the Hierarchy no longer being considered a valid moral authority in Irish society. People who had long stopped giving a fcuk in private, were now free to declare their absence of giving a fcuk for the Hierarchy’s authority in public. Nobody was too bothered then, and there aren’t still too many are bothered by their ownership and control of national primary and secondary schools and third-level educational institutions and their continued involvement in Irish social life such as the GAA, Rugby and Scouting organisations. That last one being the subject of more recent controversy -

https://www.lawsociety.ie/gazette/top-stories/2020/05-may/scouting-paedophile-ring-preyed---on-kids-and-facilitated-abuse

Isthisthingon?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121916002#Comment_121916002

That was an incredibly insensitive thing for anyone to say, let alone a priest. I dare say though that at the time you would get someone somewhere pointing out that it was indeed the policy of the church - some throw back to Vatican 2 dogma. Regardless he didn't have to bring it up. I seem to recall only one zealot of a parish priest in our old church, the old school ranting and raving from the pulpit. All the others were very kind and compassionate men who served their community and were missed greatly when they were moved or indeed died. It is no surprise that people turned away from the church thought when you had a priest like the one you're folks encountered.

Mrs OBumble

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121916134#Comment_121916134

Weddings are not the key indicator of the church's place in the national psyche. Funerals are.

The Catholic Church in Ireland is rapidly getting to the point of not having enough priests available to provide the number of church funerals being requested. This will come as quite a shock to some people.

yagan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121916602#Comment_121916602

In a lot of Dioceses there's now more parishes than there are priests. The examiner had a piece in February about how in Kerry there are 41 priests for 53 parishes.

As you mention funerals are a much more accurate gauge of the churches place as they'll be far more concerned about getting left something in wills. I won't be surprised if the RCC offer an upfront payment option to ensure that the payee gets a priest at their funeral.

Shoog

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121916752#Comment_121916752

Insurance against hell.