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

Hawkeye123

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121873204#Comment_121873204

The bible consists of many books, some of which are parables and not actual events.

I do take your point but faith is usually supported by other things. When you told them your story you probably did so in jest? You probably didn't say I tell you most solemnly....

Of course if you had, that's how cults get started. But the four gospels give corroborating accounts and the other eight apostles witnessed most of what was claimed, so for it to be untrue, they would all have had to conspire to make it all up even to the point of death. I think only John died a natural death, they others were all put to death.

Also, take something like the apparition at Fatima. Non believers tend to put that down to mass delusion. But if the witnesses can all be deluded for believing, why can't you be deluded by not believing.

Of course an abundance of evidence would make belief easier but one of the challenges of Christianity is to do what is right because it is right. If proof was abundant, then our Christian duty would simply be a financial contract.

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121873537#Comment_121873537

I didn’t mean it was the cause of any bad things, people embraced catholicism but yet bad things happened. Throughout European history entire countries were convinced god was on their side or that they were fighting for god, even while fighting each other. But yet countless died on both sides, it was as if it didn’t matter.

For the record I don’t think religion is the cause of most wars; fighting over resources normally is, sometimes religion just acts as a dividing line.

cj maxx

Yes , religious Ireland is dead and buried . I remember Daddy saying that he gave a big donation at his father’s funeral , or something , as it was read out at mass . I’m glad the scandals happened because my aunt told me about an incident that happened in the late’30’s ‘40’s . She saw the priest riding (raping ) one of her classmates . The teacher had to have known it was happening too . She told her parents who promptly told her to keep quiet . Bear in mind that most people only had a primary education so the girl couldn’t have been more than 12 .

It’s not just catholic Ireland . I was at a CoI funeral a few years ago that 20 years ago would have been jammed but instead had a sparse attendance .

It’s good to see imo .

Now what needs to be done is putting compulsory orders on all religious schools to sell to the state . Who pays the bills ? , and wages of schools ? . The State as such should have ownership of them . Plus hospitals an other church owned but State run institutions .

eagle eye

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121873394#Comment_121873394

It wasn't his decision, it was me who made the decision. Only two.kids didn't make communion and my done has mentioned them twice to me she I asked him what people think and he told me other kids laugh at them. I'm happy with the decision I made. Confirmation will be totally his decision.

Neither me nor my wife are religious.

eagle eye

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121873549#Comment_121873549

Is there any proof that any of these people even existed?

Have any of the apparitions been caught on camera?

downtheroad

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121875769#Comment_121875769

Other kids laugh at them because their parents have a backbone. Interesting take.

Padre_Pio

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121875769#Comment_121875769

Can you do a confirmation if you have not taken communion?

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121875769#Comment_121875769

Great way to teach him the importance of taking his values from the herd and not actually thinking for himself.

Ash.J.Williams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121875793#Comment_121875793

There is no proof of any apparition , fact

Ash.J.Williams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121875769#Comment_121875769

Do the Catholic kids know they're the bad guys in this situation

Ash.J.Williams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/110279293#Comment_110279293

Individuals committed the crimes and the "Catholic Church " then became implicated by rewarding them with new jobs in new towns

Say for example the peedy priests were the attack squad at the regency Hotel and the Catholic Church are the getaway drivers , they are all equally involved

eagle eye

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121875811#Comment_121875811

I'm a parent, I do what's best for my child. Nothing to do with backbone. I'm afraid if nothing, I've actually never experienced fear in my life.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121875892#Comment_121875892

He's a child, I'm responsible for him. He's not old enough to make any decisions on anything yet. The most important thing for him right now is to have fun and develop relationships.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121875923#Comment_121875923

Bad guys. I'm wondering if you have kids? It appears you have no idea about young children.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121875832#Comment_121875832

I have no idea.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121875916#Comment_121875916

I know there isn't, was just posing the question to somebody who fully believes they happened.

Hawkeye123

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121875793#Comment_121875793

Is there any reason to doubt the existence of the apostles themselves. What people doubt is what the apostles said. There is a lot of evidence that they existed. Their writings, that fact that the church exists. The history of the early church. I mean twelve men preaching the same gospel over a vast area, 2000 years ago. What are the odds of that. St Thomas went as far as India. St Mathew went to Spain. St Peter went to Rome. St John and propably our Lady went to Greece. Another apostle went to Ethiopia. I think one of the apostles went to Syria and so on. There are records of their executions. Also, I know St Mathew is entombed in a basilica in Spain. I think St Peter is entombed in Rome. The burial places of other apostles may also be known, I am not sure.

No, there is only testamony that the aparitions happened. Testamonies of miracle cures and so on. In yesterday`s gospel, it said faith draws good people toward the truth and the light but the wicked prefer to operate in the shadows. I am not saying you are wicked but it is a point to ponder if you decide to examine your beliefs. Are you beliefs influenced by your motives? One thing I have noticed very strongly here on boards is that people`s beliefs very often align with their wishes. Also, I read recently that a very rear phenomenon can cause the sort of solar activity witnesses claim to have observed at Fatima. It has to do with sun flares combined with something else, like very strong winds in the upper atmosphere. That of course does not diminish the miracle in any way because a) how could the children have known something was going to happen and b) the other miracles that went with it. People were cured. Mud/clothing became instantly dry, etc

randd1

Catholic Ireland is pretty much dead. And good riddance to it. A state should only be a secular entity that allows for religious freedom, it should not be religiously orientated or religiously driven, and the sooner we remove all aspects of religious influence on society, the better.

Besides, religion is just fairy-tales for adults, nothing regarding governance should be based on it.

Not that there isn't some value in it, you can't lay out the bad about religion without admitting the good, and there's plenty good in it. I would see the positive side religion as something like Star Wars in artistic terms or team sports or other such cultural phenomena. Like Christianity, it's a story that gives some people enjoyment and happiness, and occasionally inspires in others their artistic or charitable self, or help people feel part of a community. Just because it's a fairy-tale, doesn't mean it doesn't have value.

taxAHcruel

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121878488#Comment_121878488

^ Perhaps more accurate to say is that people SAY that there was people "cured" and mud instantly "dried". That does not mean any of those things actually happened. You are saying those things happened. There is no reason it seems to think they actually did.

Getting people to say such things happened is actually remarkably easy. Especially if you then feed those clams through the human effect of "chinese whispers". The claims become more fantastical over time. And especially if you are working with groups rather than individuals.

The indian rope trick is a classic example of this. People claim to have seen the trick performed even though at times the people they claim performed it say they never did. Or the 1991 Cork City gig by Nirvana when they visited Ireland which has so many people claiming to have been there and seen it when in reality just 20 people were said to have actually been there during their slot.

I myself do a lot of illusion magic and mentalism magic. I do pretty ok at it. A hobby I have brought to a pretty professional level standard. But what is always interesting is how impressive my skills are after the fact. When people retrospectively talk about what I did and what they saw me do. It's invariably many times more amazing than anything I actually did. And this is quite common too in mind reading and "mediums" and "psychics" too. They will make vague guesses about something and the next day the Mark will claim they made 100% accurate statements. You vaguely claim that their dead grandmother was somewhere in their 80s, and the next day they say things like "He knew my grandmother was exactly 87 when she died!".

As for being "wicked" well this is Charlatan 101 stuff really. Making the Mark feel like non belief or skepticism is indicative of some failure or character flaw on their part. The Bible itself says "The fool says in his heart there is no God.”. This is echoed in adverts that tell you "You'll be a fool to miss it". Religions and other nonsense work pretty much the same as advertising in that very often they are not selling you the product - but selling you an image of yourself in relation to that product. So they absolutely will cast subscribers to their shill in a positive light and "other" the rest as being in some way lacking, flawed, damaged, or morally compromised.

Outright claiming - or merely just suggesting vaguely - that people who are not buying into your bullshit are fools, wicked, evil, motivated by bad agenda and so forth is simply standard 101 practice by many charlatans.

eagle eye

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121878488#Comment_121878488

There is no proof they existed. The stories could have been written to make you believe they all existed. This would all have been done to create a powerful force to control the population.

There are lads with the 'cure' all over the country, many of them are not religious. Faith isn't just a religious thing. So if you have faith that a healer will cure you then it may work.

As you say there is no video or even picture proof of any apparitions. Why is that? Is it because people are imagining things?

Remember the moving statues? That was ridiculous.

Hawkeye123

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121878648#Comment_121878648

Well if we apply the same criteria to all of history, you could just as easily say the whole thing is made up. Alexandra the great, the Roman empire, the golden age of exploration ... etc. None of that stuff happened, it was all just made up and you can`t prove it wasn`t. Sure you can claim white people in America proves the age of exploration happened but who is to say the truth is not that the whites wer the there first and the injuns invaded and that`s how the injuns got there. Who is to say the colleseum in more than a couple of hundred years old and any depiction before then is fake.

whisky_galore

Once the so-called "boomer" generation is gone it'll be effectively dead in the native population. Maybe Travellers, the Polish/Polish Irish and Nigerian/Nigerian Irish at a push may shore up numbers but I doubt it. They won't be able to get new priests, can't get more than a handful as it is. That'll accelerate church closures in isolated rural areas and duplicate churches in urban centres which will be sold off and demolished or repurposed.

The nuns and other religious orders will die out and what is left of the church will be effectively be pen pushers managing assets, mainly property, selling or renting them out to keep remaining churches going.

The RCC has had its day in the sun, it shat on it's own doorstep, broke the trust of the people and has only itself to blame.

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121881831#Comment_121881831

Hmmm, so the injuns invaded and wiped out the mound builders?

taxAHcruel

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121881831#Comment_121881831

Well yes and no. All history is essentially a degree of guess work. We have to contend with texts and sources that were created to deceive and support a narrative. We have to contend with concepts like "The victor in conflicts write the history books". And more.

It is helpful to think of all history as not being true or false - but as landing on a continuum between likely to be true and likely to be false. And where it falls on that continuum depends on how much individual and corroborating substance the claim has behind it. If a historical source exists in isolation and seems to tell us something about history then this is less substance than if that source is corroborated by a multitude of other texts and archeology and so forth.

Even then a certain degree of caution has to be exercised as fiction and fantasy are often set against a background of the real. If our society fell and 1000s of years from now historians found texts of our fiction - much of that fiction would appear to be confirmed by archeology. James Bond for example visited many buildings and locations and even people that very much did exist in real life. Future historians will have to contend with the fact that things we know to be fiction today appear to be confirmed by places and facts contained within that fiction.

So the existence of the Roman Empire - to use your example - is not just something we base on a single text but on a wealth of corroborating texts and archeology. Is it possible that no such Empire ever actually existed? Sure it is. Is that likely? Not really.

Compare that to - say - the claim that a human was sacrificed, confirmed dead, and then came back to life and was walking around three days later. Not just him either - as his resurrection was not all that special given that - at the time it is also claimed the graves opened a quite a number of dead people got up and were walking around. And that much of the claims about this resurrected special dead guy just happen to overlap with, and plagiarize, many legends and folk tales that already existed in that area of the world at that time. The likelihood of the claims and descriptions of events within this Biblical text being in any way true seems astoundingly low. Even if some of the people and places related to the text - or writing the text - are confirmed to have existed.

The text - whether you view it as a single book or a small collection of books - that claims these things is not corroborated external to that text. While you would think a large number of confirmed dead people walking about and dropping in on loved ones might result in some level of being noticed and recorded at the time - there is little to nothing suggesting anything of the sort ever happened.

Ash.J.Williams

i buy a lot of music equipment and any reviews of gear from the USA all mention playing at church, last week i met an american musician in work who plays at church, proper musicianship proper music, if we had that mentality here years ago instead of the old timey mary and helen murdering hymns and strangling an church organ they might have held on a little

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121881831#Comment_121881831

Have you heard about fossils? Or DNA?

Come on, man.

Grayson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121881831#Comment_121881831

That's referred to as pyrrhonian skepticism. It's complete doubt in just about everything. How do I know you're real? is this keyboard real? maybe I'm just dreaming everything. Am I even real?

However we do tend to accept certain things as fact. And we do tend to demand certain levels of proof for things.

I know that the Irish civil war happened. It was witnesses by loads of people. It was written about as it occurred. It was passed on through oral histories and there's even photo's and some film. Thousands of historians have gone through the records.

Likewise the holocaust happened. there's so much overwhelming evidence that we know it happened. There's some details that are still missing. We may never know the exact number of victims but we know the rough ballpark. We can say X amount were definitely killed and because of missing records we don't know the rest but we can make educated guesses. That's why one historian may say 6 million and another will say it's closer to 6.5. So even though we can't say the exact number we can say it's millions and still be 100% accurate when we say millions.

I mention that to show an example of when we can know something is true without knowing some of the exact details.

When it comes to the bible there's very little that can be proven. Most old testament figures have literally no historical proof of their existence. You have as much chance of proofing that Moses existed as you have of proving Cu Cuchulainn existed.

With Jesus we know he existed because contemporary sources reference his existence. But beyond knowing that he existed and that the romans executed him, we have nothing. Remember there were feck all Christians. Even a hundred years after Jesus's death there were still less than 10k in the entire world. And these were groups separate from each other. There were loads of sects. It's the reason there were so many early versions of the gospels. And all these sects had differences in how they practiced and worshiped. Later they gathered what they could together and argued about what was true and what wasn't. And eventually this formed the new testament. But this was hundreds of years after Jesus's death.

Remember, if we knew that jesus existed and did what the bible said he did, there's be no need for faith. We'd all know it. We could roll out the historical records and say "look, that happened. It was real"

whisky_galore

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121882029#Comment_121882029

I had heard from Australian friends that their church services are proper craic with non traditional church music, but the RCC by not getting with the times (LGBTQ, gatekeeping peoples' private lives) has made itself toxic to younger people and that's before we even delve into its recent history of hiding and moving around sex offenders.

Ash.J.Williams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121882262#Comment_121882262

Ha just to be clear yes the whole homaphobia and paedo hiding is worse then the shite music 😀😀

eagle eye

The Paedo stuff was despicable. Instead of reporting them to the law they protected them. Those that hid what they were at should have got jail.

Nothing to do with this but I firmly believe the minimum sentence for a paedo or rapist should be when the victim says they have recovered from the ordeal they went through. In nearly every case that would mean life in prison.

Grayson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121882676#Comment_121882676

And it was literally everywhere. My school is listed in this although I have no idea which priest they were talking about. So there's a good chance I was taught by an abusive priest and I have no idea who he was.

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/education/2023/05/25/sexual-abuse-allegations-made-against-priests-in-19-catholic-diocesan-colleges-throughout-state/

xzanti

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121875793#Comment_121875793

I consider myself a fairly sceptical person regarding a lot of things. But the events at Garabandal in the 1960s are pretty convincing.

Lots of footage of the young girls experiencing unexplainable phenomena.

csirl

Catholic Ireland is far from dead. It still runs and "owns" most of our schools and hospitals - even though the taxpayer pays for them!

In some ways these church controlled institutions have gotten worse - the pool of people who make up the Boards and senior management is a lot smaller and generally more extremist catholic than the past.

Hawkeye123

If pyrrhonian skepticism can be applied to history, it can be applied to matters of faith.