Catholic Ireland dead? **Mod Warning in Post #563**
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Yes we do need to move on from the past, and ending RCC control of 90% of national schools which we, not it, pay for is a vital part of that, but so far no politician has the balls.
The sackless **** who just go along with the flow are the problem, they complain if the parish priest wants them to attend a few masses but still want the nice day out for their kids.
If you think the bible is a nice story book you're remarkably naive and/or have never read it. It's a truly vile work which endorses all sorts of horrors including slavery.
Life ain't always empty.
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I’ve said this on several occasions , but there NEVER was a famine in Ireland . Because the landed ( English ) gentry weren’t getting their rent from indentured tenants they exported the food to Liverpool and Wales .
The potato blight affected 13 counties along the west coast . The major agricultural areas ( Leinster and the golden vale of Munster were NOT affected . Beef , pork and yes potatoes were exported to Britain . I want to see Dubin port records but I think exports of food increased during the ‘ famine ‘ years
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Croke Park has nothing to do with this . It has been used for sell out football games , Rugby and soccer if I remember
You're sterching. to have something to be annoyed at
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Truly, you can say the most vile things about Catholicism on this site and your will never get a citation.
Judaism on the other hand.
Post edited by applehunter on0 -
You had nothing to be righteous about in that instance.
He was advocating Life, what was your issue with him?
He was advocating a good, life, what were you advocating?
You call it Choice, I call it, the Irish state will kill your child for you.
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We are fed this myth.
No hetrosexual man should be using contraception.
Men wan't to marry a virgin wife.
Post edited by applehunter on0 -
Truths you find uncomfortable.
Life ain't always empty.
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In the words of the great Irish-American Catholic, John McEnroe,
You cannot be serious
Life ain't always empty.
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My issue with him was shouting about his beliefs on.the subject in front of children.
No young child needs to be hearing about abortion.
I treated both sides the same way.
You know what's funny about the cavemen who don't want a woman to have a choice with what's going on with her body? They are now using scientists to say the fetus is alive, these same scientists are almost always non-believers but it's okay to believe their opinions on a fetus and say they are wrong about religion. Talk about hypocrisy.
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What vile things were said about Catholicism? All posts were accurate in my opinion.
All religions are made up including Judaism and Islam. After getting rid of priests we need to be careful not to let the mullahs in the back door.
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The 1950s just called - they want you back.
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Unfortunately we have the "bouncy castle" Catholics, too spineless to upset their idol worshipping parents
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Yet only you are bringing "should" into it, which belies the controlling nature of religion. It's ongoing need to tell people what they "Should" or "should not" do. If Catholic Ireland is indeed dead (trying to keep my posts on topic) then I would say a large part of the reason for that is this need to control peoples thoughts and actions. Or to push back against any kinds of progress like contraception or scientific advancements in realms like stem cell research.
Meanwhile the rest of us not infected by religion recognise that contraception is an OPTION. One that we can take or not take depending on our own goals and agendas and concerns. We do not have to shout at people about what they "Should" do. Rather we can inform and education people on their choices and show them that if their concern is sexually transmitted disease, or unwanted pregnancies, that contraception is a powerful and viable choice for them to make to mitigate those risks.
As for your last line, who declared you spokesperson for all men and what they "want"? I do not recognise your declaration about what men want in either myself or any men I know. Rather what I want(ed) in life, much the same as most men I have ever met, is to find a human being to make a romantic and lasting connection with, to choose to spend the rest of my/our/their lives with. Their sexual history, or lack of it, was not a concern. And a desire or a preference for "virginity" even less so. In fact I find the obsession with virginity to be creepy. At best.
Again if the question of the thread is the death of "Catholic Ireland" then perhaps this being out of touch with what people actually "want" and clinging to generalised false declarations of what people want or do not want.... has been a major factor in this. I have rarely, if ever, been struck by the feeling the Church moved with the times, or had the finger on the pulse of what it was the people actually want or think at any given time.
That does not seem to be true as I know I and others have said strident things about every religion going in the past, and to my knowledge no citation has ever been levelled against my user account in the 1000s of posts I have historically made. I have often been subjected to this "Fatwa envy" and being told that I would not say thinks about Mohammad and Islam that I say about Jesus and Christianity for example. Such users clearly have not read my post history given the quite detailed and varied things I have said about both.
The thing is that most people who complain they have been cited for saying something about some religion or the religious or some race or whatever.... fail to notice that it was not WHAT they said but HOW they said it that was the issue. I think you can say many "vile" (or, as some of us would say, true) things about catholicism. Or you can say "vile" things about Catholics themselves. The latter is more likely to get you cited. I myself operate under the rubric of "Respect the believer, but never the beleif". A mantra that appears to have protected me for years against these citations of which you speak.
I think you can say many things about Judaism and I have done. Many of their beliefs strike me as being just as unsubstantiated nonsense as any Christian or Muslim beliefs. But that said, I do not subscribe to the notion that all beliefs and religions are equivilant. A fact you can test out yourself by asking as many people as you can who they would like their next door neighbour to be if they had to choose EITHER a fundamentalist Christian, a fundamentalist Muslim, a fundamentalist Jew, a fundamentalist Jain, or a fundamentalist Atheist. I can tell you anyone I have asked tend to either choose 54312 in that order or 45312. Even when they themselves are Christian. Your results may vary but I think it highlights something useful all the same.
But again the subject of this thread is whether Catholic Ireland is dead or dying. And I think whinging about citations or respect for beleifs is another nail in that coffin. I myself have massive respect of the Catholics who own what their church has done, admit it, and fight for change and progress in their organisation. I suspect more people like that would slow or even reverse the death of their Catholic Ireland.
Unfortunately when I go into a supermarket and I decide to call a pineapple a grape, I still get charged the price of a pineapple. Why? Because choosing what to call something, does not magically make it become that something. So you can take a "choice" and call it whatever you like. It will not magically make it true either.
By all means argue what you think "a good life" is. But despite years of debate on the issue I have not yet been shown a single argument to support the notion that the choice of abortion is either not "a good life" or is "murder" or "killing a child" or any of ther other emotive labels the anti-choice brigade used in lieu of actual arguments and discourse on the subject. They tried slogans during the referendum. It failed them. Badly. You need a new approach to this.
But if Catholic Ireland is dying then perhaps it is this judgementalism that fuels that death too? Shouting at people that their choice is murder or killing children, without actually substantiating such claims, is not likely to attract people to the faith. Or keep people in the faith coming back. In fact if my recollection of the Bible is correct, the Nazerene himself advocated representation of the faith as much as preaching it. By your fruits they shall know you.
If Catholic Ireland is dead therefore, who is killing it? It would seem to be many of the Catholics themselves, like your good self, who are doing it even if it is not your intention to do so. And the double standards that were highlighted in the anecdote you were replying to here. Where the user was applying the same standards to BOTH sides of the argument. While the preacher thanked him for applying that standard to the OTHER side, but got haughty and aggresive when that standard was applied to his OWN side. That is the kind of hypocracy that will kill your Catholic Ireland for you, is it not?
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That's not what they said. But I read an interesting article years ago. It looked at the number of priests whi abused children Vs the total number if priests and found that there wasn't actually a higher number of priests who offended. A priest no no more likely to be an abuser than anyone else.
The problem is that the church hid them. They moved them around. they hid evidence. They didn't turn them over to authorities. So the offending priests kept offending and the number of victims grew.
The problem wasn't that there were more priests offending, it's that the organisation was rotten. The organisation put their reputation over the safety of the people they were supposed to be protecting. That's the reason why the church shouldn't be in charge of schools or hospitals. They have failed time and time again to provide proper oversight. They are not accountable to anyone but themselves. And they always put the church first over everyone else. And they're still doing it. They're still refusing to pay compensation to their victims.
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I partly agree with you here. I think it is too simplistic and base to simply see believers in religion as "simple". One simply has to notice that in the history of our species some of our most brilliant top minds have also been prone to religious or religion like thinking. Isaac Newton was one of, if not the, top minds our species ever produced for example. And he made wonderful contributions to our science and mathematics as a result.
His mind subscribed to some seriously unsubstantiated nonsense too however.
To me saying that people who are religious are "simple" is a bit like saying that anyone who catches the common cold is "unhealthy" or that a building that has locusts must be "dirty". Quite the contrary. Locusts and other vermin are often attracted to cleaner buildings. While many infections of bacteria and virus prefer healthy hosts.
The fact that a healthy mind can be infected with a religious memetic virus is no more surprising than a healthy athlete being infected by a genetic virus.
The important thing to remember is that a belief is not made more or less true based on how intelligent or stupid the believer is. It is entirely independent of that. I do not see religious belief as a "stupid" or "simple" belief. I see it as an entirely unsubstantiated one. And the intelligence of a believer, or the number of believers, does not substantiation make.
All that said I have been ENDLESSLY fascinated for 30+ years now by the claim, like the one you make above, that belief is a "choice". I genuinely wonder what that must feel like, to be able to CHOOSE what you believe. I literally can't. Belief or lack of belief in a claim is not something I "choose". It is something that involuntarily HAPPENS to me given the presence (or lack of) evidence. I no more "choose" what I believe than I "choose" to travel downwards when I step off a ledge. In both cases I fall helplessly and entirely out of my power or control.
I do not choose not to believe there is a god or gods. I simply can not believe there is one given the not slight, but COMPLETE lack of any arguments, evidence, data or reasoning suggesting there is such. Were such substantiation provided to me I would helplessly start believing. Choice at no point comes into it for me. And I am fascinated by the people who claim that for them, it does.
While I agreed with you a bit above, I entirely disagree with you here. Beliefs do not require, nor deserve, respect. In fact I very much subscribe to the quote that said "I respect you too much as a person, to respect your unfounded beliefs". I believe in respecting people, not their beliefs. I also believe in the notion that attacks on, or ridicule of, beliefs is not the same as an attack or ridicule of the believer. They are entirely separate things. You are not your beliefs. If you feel yourself synonymous with your beliefs so you take offence vicariously on their behalf then so be it, but I see it as an error.
Beliefs should not be respected. They should be torn apart and subjected to the deepest of intellectual and philosophical rigor.
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I'm sorry but on the 'wgo would you prefer to live beside? Alll fundamentalists are the same, I'd equally hate to live beside all. It's a ridiculous question and the answers you get may be based on the fact that you are atheist and they are in their minds appeasing you.
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See there you go showing no respect for others, it makes you just as unreasonable as them.
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Converting every church to a mosque that’s only going to go one way and fast.
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That's just the thing. Not all fundamentalists are the same. At all. Deep fundamentalist Muslims have flown planes into buildings. Deep fundamentalist Jains sweep the ground before them as they walk, for fear they might kill an insect. The most stident atheists that most people have heard of do little more than write books, while some fundamentalist Christians blow up abortion clinics or attack doctors who perform abortions. That is not remotely the same. At all.
The more fundementalist you become as, say, a muslim the more potential you have for actions that harm others. It does not automatically mean you will cause harm of course. That has to be understood. But the potential goes way up. While the more fundamentalist you become as a Jain the less likely you are to hurt anyone or anything. Hell some of them drink their water and breath through cheese cloth simply to minimise the possibility they might injest something living. That is how against pain and violence they are. They are not, for example, throwing homosexuals off rooftops.
I can not fathom therefore how you come to the conclusion that "all fundamentalists are the same". They really aren't. Beliefs matter. And the differences between beliefs matter. At least in so far as beliefs translate into potential real world action and activity. Generally what people believe religiously does NOT matter because most people realise faith is a private matter and keep their faith to themselves. I have zero issue with such people myself. Their unsubstantiated beliefs do not affect me at all. Nor are atheists automatically good people either. There have been awful ones. But there is nothing IN atheism that promotes anything awful. They were awful independant of atheism. And many people are awful independent of their religion. But the fact remains that fundamental interpretations of religious texts can potentially lead to great harm. Fundamentalist reading od Richard Dawkins? Not so much.
In fact it strikes me as quite comical that you are asking people to "respect others" yet you so willingly and readily throw such people into the same box as if they are all the same. That is the opposite of respect to my mind. Recognising the differences between people is respect, and not sweeping them all with the same brush merely because they share ONE single attribute. Like being Fundamentalist in their beliefs. Respect is seeing people as individuals and realising that one single attribute they might have alone is not enough to box them as identical to all other people who have that attribute. That's how things like Racism happen. Thinking that because someone is, for example, black they must be the same as everyone else who is black.
So no, someone being merely fundamentalist tells you little to nothing about them. When you find out what they are particularly fundamentalist IN however you can start to differentiate who they are likely to be from fundamentalists of other stripes. And if I had to choose between a deeply fundamentalist Jain and a deeply fundamentalist Muslim as a potential neighbour, without knowing anything else about them.... I am picking the Jain every time and there are very few people I suspect who would need to ask me why.
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As unreasonable as them?
I haven’t raped anyone or tried to make everyone in the country go by my rules, which were made up by a few lads back in the day.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to call out religions as being dangerous hocus pocus.
I would not let my children near a church or its priests and I don’t spare the horses in letting them know why.
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There is a spectrum of belief. From one end you have people who believe there might be something and on the other side you have people who believe rigidly in strict dogma.
And even amoungst the people who believe rigidly in dogma there can be "Intelligent" people. I put intelligent in quotations because I'm using it to imply they are what we would consider traditionally intelligent. I know of a girl with an honors degree in genetics who also believes in creationism and that evolution is a lie. She was raised evangelical and so no matter how much she studied, it didn't change her mind.
And that's because people are complicated. they can be both "Intelligent" and "Stupid" at the same time. People can hold two opposing views. We're not completely rational.
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Indeed. I think for example the fallacy of "Confirmation bias" is very powerful in the human mind. And highly intelligent people can be better at Confirmation bias than people with less intellectual endowment. Because for Confirmation Bias you need to be able to take in data, see patterns, fit together ideas and thoughts. An active and intelligent mind can therefore be much MORE prone to confirmation bias than a "stupider" one.
Which is why people who study genetics and biology and evolution deeply can still go creationist. Because if you get the notion there is an intelligent hand behind it all, you can find a wealth of confirmation bias to fuel that notion. That's why we need methodologies like Science to help curtail the effect of things like Confirmation Bias and the other fallacies.
I used to often refer to the 23ists. A small movement but significant enough that a whole Jim Carey movie was made about them. They had a notion that the number 23 was everywhere and was evidence of some global world order controlling all things. The thing is.... it works. If you go looking for the number 23 you will find it. Everywhere. And the more intelligent and better at mathematics you are the more you will find it and confirm it and be maybe convinced by it.
Problem is, it works for pretty much any other number too. But confirmation bias tends not to make you notice that. In fact I have been assured by a couple of mathematicians.... though I have no idea why as I did not understand it myself.... that in general not only does it work for all numbers but works specifically well for prime numbers. I myself keep finding the number 27 popping up in my awareness over and over again. I do not think it means anything, though whether thats because I am too smart, or too dumb, is anyone's guess :)
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Is the tale of St Patrick hearing the Irish call him , an early example of narcissistic propaganda?
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As to the matter of choice, Irish people have little choice in refusing religious indoctrination for their vunerable minors. Its drummed into children at an age when they have no defenses against it. Very few Irish people who have been through this indoctrination will not seek absolution on their death beds for fear of the hell they were told about as a vulnerable child.
You have the choice to reject Christianity as adult - but the dangerous mind worms that the teachers and priests plant in the child's brain are there to stay.
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All atheists are haters.
How does that sound to you?
You are a hater but most of us are not.
Generalising makes you just like a christian fundamentalist.
There a lot more good people than there are disgusting, evil animals and those who protected them. It's well below .01% of the church that were involved in anything like that.
I said you were just as unreasonable as strong Catholics, now you've shown you are just like a Christian fundamentalist.
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You ask how "all atheists are haters" sounds? Well I can only speak for me but it sounds to me like a useful conversation opener. Rather than screech at you that it's a hateful comment or a generalisation, my tendency would be to explore it and say "Ok lets look and see if that's true or what makes you think that!"
We could start by looking at what atheists believe or do not believe. In fact there is nothing atheists particularly beleive because the word is a collective description of one single thing they do NOT believe.
So as such the "all atheists are haters" comment is on weak ground. Because straight away you can see there is no unifying belief or idea that unites them. Only that they LACK one belief or idea.
We could then continue by looking at what unifies them and seek anything inside that unification that can lead to being hateful. But ooops there is nothing there either! There is nothing about the sentence "I see no reason to think there is a god" that leads to "I must therefore hate you". Does that mean that atheists CANT hate? Of course not. But nothing about atheist means they will, or that they are all hateful.
Now let us contrast that to the sentence "All Christians are haters". Again I do not think that sentence is ultimately true OR useful. But having said that we CAN do the same excercise to see if the sentence is in any way supported. And we WILL find that unlike atheism there is at least some support for the notion there.
Why? Well consider things like the Bible. It specifically says in the Bible that "the fool has said in their heart there is no god". Straight away therefore belief in the Christian text is already from the outset "othering" the non believer and degrading them with phrases like "fool". Unlike atheism therefore there is specific text, ideas and beliefs we can point to to at least support the notion that they are "haters".
All that said, as you saw in my previous post, I consider it foolish to generalise TOO much. Rather I talk in potentials. I do not think a fundamentalist Muslim is automatically going to be a hateful or violent person. But as you saw above what I DO say is the potential for such a person to be hateful and violent.... given the doctrines and beliefs and texts.... is vastly higher than the potential for a fundamentalist Jain. And as such I find the idea that "all fundamentalists are the same" to be not just wrong, but comically wrong coming from a person insisting we treat people with respect and not generalise!!!
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Your opinion doesn’t bother me because it’s incorrect.
Of course you have a right to your opinion - I have a right to value that opinion as being of zero value.
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Crikey, you are suggesting that only religious people can be sociopaths?
Islamic fundamentalists are not murderets. The people who commit terrorist attacks are evil and use religion to brainwash others into doing their bidding for them.
The same applies to all those you mention in all religions. To suggest that there are less atheists who commit murders is ridiculous.
When I said I'd hate to live beside any fundamentalists no matter what their beliefs I was talking about having to put up with their crap. A former friend whose an atheist sent his kids to a boarding school which doesn't teach religion because he'd rather do that than have them attend a local school which does.
To me that's insane and unfair to his children. They have the right to grow up like every other child and experience everything they do. It's up to them to make their own mind up on things as they grow and become more educated and experienced in the world. As a parent you should let them experience everything but never take a view for or against what they believe.
When I expressed those views my former friend became verbally abusive and that was the end of our friendship.
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Keep digging that hole for yourself. You are proof that there are horrible fundamentalist atheists.
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