would you say most priests actually believe in god?

Btw the whole "evil exists, how can God exist, or how can he allow evil" has been a topic "critically thought" to death for centuries now, you're not the first to come up with it.... All old news.

ThewhiteJesus wrote: »

It’s not 24k a year, throw a house and car ect into the pot, they also choose to do this

You're right, they got their wages cut so it's less now.

Whatever way you spin it it's hardly a lucrative money spinner after spending 7 years studying.

Of course they chose it, I never said they didn't? My point is that you wouldn't choose it if you didn't believe in God

beveragelady wrote: »

There's a very good book by Will Storr called "The Heretics." It doesn't just deal with religion, it covers alien encounters, holocaust denial, imaginary diseases, that sort of thing. It's very entertaining and informative. What it repeatedly highlights is the tendency 'believers' have to claim absolute knowledge in the absence of evidence and to refuse to contemplate the implications of evidence that weakens their position. In fact they double down as more evidence is presented, adopting a firmer position in defiance of all logic.

The common thread I see is that these are all people who have hitched their wagon to a cause and it has become so important that to question it would be to question their own identity. Rather than examine the reality they're living in they keep playing along. This is not belief or faith, whatever you want to call it. It's a childlike willingness to comply.




You have descended to personal comments. What does that tell us about the strength and integrity of your arguments?

You're the one who hasn't engaged in any meaningful discussion, and instead denigrated those who believe in a God to "childlike" unthinkers, despite ample evidence in world history that people have critically engaged with the concept of God for thousands of years, many of whom emerge with a believe in a creator/God. You just can't accept that people can come to different conclusions that you, so you just repeatedly say, in different ways, that you are so smart, and anyone with a different conclusions or belief than you is "childlike".

When your argument boils down to you making the case that you are smarter than others then it is perfectly valid to engage with this underlying claim and say that you are not as smart as you think you are.

And to catagorise ontological reasoning as childlike is bizarre.

ThewhiteJesus wrote: »

I’m not spinning, you are.

It is a verifiable fact that priests in Ireland receive pay of an average of 24k. In Dublin, and elsewhere, this has been cut by a quarter.

How is this spinning?

Sure they get to live in a house and sometimes a car but it's a 24/7 job, and they can be moved on the whim of the Bishop.

No one is doing it for the cash! In fact today the average age of someone entering seminary is rising, with many leaving far more lucrative careers to study for the priesthood.

I have to say I find the two main arguments in this thread very unconvincing. People become priests because they are gay, or for the cash. Not buying it.

An argument that they are ordinary people who get super "brainwashed" into fervently believing the religion and hence become priests would be more persuasive.

Of course, many eastern orthodox priests are married, and a significant number of priests who were formerly Anglican are married...

One thing I’ve always noticed is you’ll run into people who were in college in the 1970s and were originally on the priesthood or nun path. It seems one or two were using it as a way to pay for university. Three people I’m thinking of became either very agnostic or are diehard atheist and are married, have kids, all great craic (two men one woman). The fourth moved to SF and is gay and similarly very non-religious.

It was just very expensive to get a degree if you had no money and it was a way to do it and opened doors. I think it was a bit like the way you see a lot of Americans who join the army to get educated and have little or no intention of being career military. Ireland’s education systems were equally inaccessible in the old days and the religious orders played the same role as the military might in the USA in terms of being able to access degrees and opportunity if you had no money.

Also I think you have to remember that we still have the vast majority of our schools in religious ownership, and in the old days they were extremely religious and were recruiting grounds for their sponsors.

Plenty of people were guided and pushed towards religious vocations by that system. I’ve talked to a few priests and nuns who just seemed to regret their choices.

I also know a few women of that era and older who were away to be nuns and typically left before it went too far. Again I think in a lot of cases it was seen as a sensible career option and pathway for some women who wanted to be teachers in particular and in aspects of nursing.

The one thing that struck me is that for women in the era before any notion of a women’s liberation movement in the 1960s (and really the 1970s in Ireland) being a nun was one of the few areas that you could wield real managerial power within organisations or political structures.

Nuns ran seriously big organisations like hospitals, schools, colleges and entire healthcare systems and were taken absolutely seriously, while “ordinary women” had few opportunities to ever be taken seriously in senior roles due to a culture of baked in, often very extreme sexism. I suspect that was a big draw for some as a way of achieving something.

Also in Ireland being a nun or a priest was a route into social service work and even, rather bizarrely particularly in Dublin (less so in Cork, as UCC is secular) areas like academic psychology before the 1980s were full of nuns and priests as they ran the institutions and the universities. I would suspect a lot of people who feel they want to work in socially beneficial services in modern times might become social workers, psychologists, follow career paths into medicine or nursing etc whereas in those days an element of that was linked to religious vocation. You still see traces of it through nursing in particular.

The most depressing story I heard was when I got talking to a Christian Brother. The guy would be dead a long time at this stage but it was when I was at the end of secondary school in about 2000 and he was maybe 80 back then.

I happened to ask him how he ended up as a Christian Brother and he was telling me how he wanted to play football. He was 13 and was basically on a path toward being a Brother from that point on. He wasn’t allowed meet girls. He was saying he had never had a girlfriend (or a boyfriend he actually half jokingly said that too) and he’d never kissed or hugged anyone his whole life - he seemed extremely bitter about it.

He also started saying how he had been beaten up a lot and treated like a skivvy spending years basically doing endless housework. I didn’t delve much into it but he certainly spent much of his life being under constant threat of serious physical abuse at the very least.

He went to school though and became a teacher but he had had no freedom whatsoever by the sounds of it. He was also telling me how he had only really begun to enjoy life in his 70s and 80s and was able to do more and the whole organisation was less oppressive since the scandals and power structures broke down. So he was off just being himself much more in his elderly years.

It was just a very sad story of a life regretted.