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

Catholic Ireland is alive and well. I've even had my kid go to first holy communion so as not to be an outsider.

I'm not religious but I can see the many who go to church every Sunday.

As regards homophobia and things like that, they are not as prevelant as they once were. Most people except the right wing deeply religious have moved with the times. I'm not sure but I don't think the catholic church go on about gay people being sinners anymore.

Hopefully.

Personally I think Irish Catholic identity has a lot to with political identity, being Catholic means not Protestant and therefore not British. The more Catholic you are, the more Irish you are.

All the scandals that happened in Ireland didn't just impact faith, but I think trust in the institutions that were supposedly the moral guidance for the country. In my opinion once religion starts to go beyond the personal and community it gets too murky, trying to tie an entire country to a religion is messy. As a country Ireland tied itself to Catholicism, but yet suffered hardships (mass unemployment, mass emigration and the you know what).

I was thinking recently of a neighbour who lost a child in a traffic accident, the priest was called to help console her and offer comfort etc. Now I'm sure through out their career the priest had to deal with a lot of that, taking on roles that most people couldn't deal with. Decent priests had a thankless job, they were probably more the face/outlet for the abuse scandals than the people who should have been.

tldr: keep it small and personal

That particular reason for going to first communion pretty much proves that the church is an empty shell, with no substance. Or maybe your kid heard about the fundraising aspect of first communion?

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 .

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

Have any of the apparitions been caught on camera?

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

There is no proof of any apparition , fact

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

^ 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.

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

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

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"

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

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.

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.

I was chatting with an antiques dealer last week, we have a boot loads worth of holy statues from clearing out the mother in laws place, the usual virgin mary, st joseph etc..

Anyhow they they have no problem selling on virgin mary's, the rest not so much so and it's mostly to young families.

For me such statues just give me bad memories of violent religious order members, but for generations removed from that I guess they see it more of a general culture thing.

About as reliable as 'UFO' photos from the 70s.

Been to a few american catholic services and the holy joe and mary songs are still there.Must depend on the diocese/parish/church