would you say most priests actually believe in god?

Kylta wrote: »

I wrote this 18years ago.

The fiend behind the collar

I stand on the altar, to deliver a mass
I know people's trust just won't last
Jesus loves you, I do pray
With God's precious children, I will soon have my way
I am very sorry lord for the vows I took
I'm the pervert, thatyou overlooked
I make them kneel, I can make children bend
This urge I have I won't pretend
Forgive me father, I'm about to sin
To sodomise your children, I'm about to begin

I pray to the lord to set me free
Then more children I do see
A priest in God's house a reward for me
Anal butchery is all I see
The children scream and start to cry
God in heaven let me die
My reward for these disgusting crimes
A bishops position in the sunshine
With this mitre and this cape
More of God's children I get to rape
Nobody knows the damage I've done
In the name of the father and his holy son.


Guess if I wrote that in the middle ages. I'd be the number one draw on the auto de fe

That is very disturbingly good. I've only met two Priests in my life,one here and the other in the US.Both very much believed in God.Can't speak for the rest of them.

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.

beveragelady wrote: »

Love can exist without any god.

If you're going to give a god credit for rainbows and the wonders of nature and the perfection of a snowdrop then you have to give him credit for famine. Locusts, drought and desertification have the same origins as snowdrops.
Over the centuries politics and religion have been inextricable. War, another cause of famine, is so often fought over religion that it's not considered at all strange. Political regimes sought support and legitimacy from religious organisations and vice versa. This is the history of religion. Even now a coronation is a religious service, not a secular ceremony, implying that the monarch has been endorsed, if not chosen, by a god.

Remember it suits organised religion nicely to if the masses are hungry and desperate. It's no coincidence that when Ireland emerged from the grim eighties into the relative comfort of the nineties and the fluctuating wealth of the 21st C that we have simultaneously forced the church to loosen its hold on society. The church's stance on contraception in Africa despite the Aids epidemic tells you everything you need to know about its respect for the congregation. Keep 'em procreating, keep 'em hungry.

Interesting as this all is, it has zero bearing or relevance to the argument over whether or not there is a creator/god. Or is you point merely "if there is a God he must be a prick by my standards, therefore there's no God"?

beveragelady wrote: »

I think the cycle is being broken though. It's slow but it's happening. I've been to a number of secular 'naming ceremonies' or 'baby welcoming ceremonies' in recent years, so it's becoming more common to ditch the baptism.


My father was the second of eight children. His older sister was sent off to a convent and is a retired nun now. She's good fun and was a beloved teacher in her day. When my father was coming to the end of secondary school his father took him in for a chat. The options were to inherit the farm or become a priest. If he studied to become a priest his parents would help him as much as they could, financially. If he didn't choose either of those options he was going to have to finance his own education. My dad had no notion of living the rest of his life on that farm, but he had no money and very few options for earning. He got his act together and collected the price of the fare to London where he worked on building sites, saving every penny, so he'd be able to get a degree.

Every single chance he got during his years in college, he was on the boat to London to scrape together the finances to continue. His parents contributed nothing, none of the help they would have been prepared to offer if he had joined a seminary.

One after the other my Dad's brothers did the same thing after the same chat with their father. There are no priests in the family because my Dad helped to blaze a trail to third level on his own terms. I don't know if it's true but I'm told he was the first boy from his primary school ever to enter third level.

This is why Ireland was producing priests, and the increased availability of education is why we've all but stopped.

None of this anecdote, even if it were replicated widely, necessarily means that those who became priests didn't also believe in God.

timthumbni wrote: »

I’ve always been amazed at how big a hold the RC church had and still has over some people in Ireland.

For a people who are supposedly so feisty and rebellious it’s just seems bonkers that they were able to get away with the nonsense they did. A friend of mine had to go to marriage classes with the priest before he would do their wedding. I couldn’t stop laughing. What would a celibate catholic priest know about marriage exactly? It would be like stevie wonder playing darts.

Anyway my pal is an intelligent guy in general and would be an atheist. But still went through this bollocks. He said his family would disapprove if the priest wasn’t involved. It’s like a form of mass hysteria still exists that stops otherwise rational and intelligent adults from just saying balls to the whole thing.

In the Catholic Church marriage is a sacrement. Who is better placed than a priest to explain the religious nature of marriage. I dont think it's unreasonable for the church to ask people to attend a course about a religious ceremony and what it means before they go through with it.

I mean he didn't have to, he could have had some backbone instead of lying his way through the whole thing.