Census 2022: 10% reduction in Roman Catholic numbers

give me an example of the history you object to and tell me why its wrong and how it should be taught because i'm not getting much from that blanket assertion.

thanks.

Why would you want that to happen?

Because they’re taking a cut out of the membership fees, would seem to be the obvious answer? In any case it’s a tax, and the larger churches can afford to allow the State to collect the tax and take their cut; the smaller churches collect the tax themselves.

Have to hand it to the Germans it’s certainly a more efficient way of maintaining the Church than passing the baskets around at Sunday mass where they can only fit so many in the Church (not really an issue in Ireland tbf 😅).

I don’t mean this to be directed at you personally, it’s more a comment on that particular point, which comes up every year when the Census figures come out.

But what’s the difference between say the craw thumpy fcukwits who used name and shame and try and use public humiliation to coerce people into behaving as they wanted them to… and what you’re hoping to achieve?

Obviously you’re more polite in how you’re phrasing it, but I was talking about the point itself. Evidently it would appear to have the opposite of it’s intended effect, which would explain why, people even if they are non-religious, would still wish to associate themselves with the Church, as opposed to being associated with… well, y’know, people who behaved like they were an authority trying to coerce people into behaving a certain way by trying to humiliate them?

I know why logically, it should make sense, but in reality it doesn’t work, because people are put off by it.

Well the most obvious explanation is that people have their own ideas about what being Catholic means to them, and you have your own ideas about what being Catholic should mean to them. Obviously those are two very different standards, as demonstrated by the figures.

Well, maybe. On the other hand, in all European countries that have a church tax, many more people tick the box and pay the tax than go to church each Sunday. So I wouldn't rush to the assumption that Ireland would be different.

If you look at the results of the survey conducted by Irish Catholic Bishops at the time of the Eucharistic Congress.... it seems belief there even is a god has no bearing on whether someone identifies as Catholic either.

Given I naively thought this was a low bar to reach to qualify for the term, it begs the question who or what can't identify as Catholic at this point. But in a world where people like to identify as all kinds of things, it does not bear much worrying about.

Help me out here with a small area of ignorance I have. I am a legal ignoramous and know very little about law. However in my work I am often asked under GDPR to trawl through all the data that is in all our systems and entirely remove all records of a person who has requested it. They simply have to send an email to our GDPR email address and it is apparently incumbent upon us to entirely remove any and all records we have of that person.

Are we doing that because we are nice people or are we doing that because we are legally obliged to? If the latter, then why is the Church not expected to do the same if I were to write to them and under my right to be forgotten (or whatever it is called) ask them to remove all record of my having been baptised 45ish years ago?

You are one of the lucky ones. Unfortunately the experience of many other parents is not as good. Some parents for example find that opting their children out of religion is denied and they have to push for it. Others find they are told their child is opted out but basically this entails them still going to religion class but being left down the back of the class and effectively ignored. Others are told that there is no capacity to care for the children while they are opted out so you have to as parents come and take the child out of the school for that "hour". Which obviously many working parents can not do.

The "Teach dont preach" website covers a lot of this and offers ways for parents to move forward in various scenarions.

Actually if we want to be pedantic we could even go one step further than this. "Theism" does not so much mean the belief in a deity as the belief specifically in an interventionalist deity, or a belief in a set of doctrines related to a deity. So in that context "A-" and "-theism" put together into "atheism" means "Without a religion" or "Without a belief in an interventionalist god".

IF we truly wanted a word for a lack of belief in a god therefore the word we would want to coin would be "Adeism".

But as Mrs OBumble points out you will not get all dictionaries to agree on the definition of "atheism" at all. And quickly popping over to the atheism forum to find one of the many discussions on this topic would show quite a number of people who do not identify with the active belief definition at all. They identify as simply lacking any belief in a god.

For this reason and others, I myself tend not to identify as an atheist at all for this reason. I find absolutely no utility in defining myself by what I am NOT. There are so many millions of things I am not. There appears to be no point in picking 1 single thing of those millions and identifying myself by it. I am also not a racist. Why am I not going around calling myself aracist? I am also not a stamp collector. Do I have to tell people I am an a-philatelist too? It gets ludicrous fast.

What I am is simply someone who does not subscribe to any beliefs that lack not just much, but ANY, arguments, evidence, data or reasoning to support them.

There is at this time, to my knowledge, percisely NO arguments, evidence, data or reasoning to lend even a modicum of credence to the claim that the existence or ongoing maintenance of our universe is the work of a non-human intelligent and intentional agent of any kind. I simply therefore dismiss such a claim as unsubstantiated at this time and move on without it. If anyone becomes aware of any such substantiation by all means let me know of it!

The Term "agnostic" is often used in this context. But I tend to avoid that one too because modern usage of the term differs quite markedly from how it was used when T.H. Huxley coined it. In fact the original meaning of the word means it was not a replacement to "atheist" or "theist" but supplementary to it. By the original meaning of the word you could just as easily be an "Agnostic Theist" as an "Agnostic Atheist".

However the more modern usage is more akin to being a "Fence Sitter" like "I do not believe one way or another if there is a god". So people rightly get confused between the two meanings. So I prefer to avoid both words entirely and identify myself with neither. Though I have no problem when someone else uses them to describe me in most contexts.

I guess it depends how pedantic we want to be in our answer. Actually we sometimes teach things in school that are not correct, but we do so with good reason. They are approximations of the truth designed to help students understand a concept rather than understand things that are actually true and correct. Useful fallacies if you will.

The Bohr Model of the atom would be the first example that jumps to mind.

You need to get some better legal advice about your GDPR obligations: In general, you are not required to remove factually correct information, eg Mr XYZ registered a whatever on the 10th day of February 1985. But it does depend on context and the risks involved.

You misunderstand me. I have no obligations of the sort and could not really care less. My company on rare occasion, at the request of our customers, asks me to purge the database of certain information. Since I do not know why they do this, I thought I would ask. And if there is any legal reason why they do this (if) then I wondered out loud as to whether that same reason should apply elsewhere. But clearly law is not my area of expertise by a long way.

Though I forgot to mention I live and work in Germany. Not sure if that makes any material difference though?

Though I must say telling me I need to get better information about it, having just asked for better information about it, is a bit defunt :) :)

One of the Boards forum users is teaching some of his local "problem" kids a few things and due to the specific content of what he is teaching them, he jokingly calls it a Jedi Acadamy. I wonder if any of those kids are represented in the Census as such. I bet at least one of them went for it.

Despite being, over the years, one of the more strident anti religion posters on the forum.... I think I would personally be saddened to see Churches knocked down to make apartments or houses. They can be quite beautiful buildings and, for better or worse, are a tie to our cultural and historic past.

What they do well however, as I can personally attest from places in Dublin, Kerry (other voices), London (union chapel) and Glasgow...... is make for really wonderful music venues. I saw Damien Rice and David Gray, back when they were good, in the Union Chapel in London for example. Wonderful gigs they were.

Ah I dunno. I guess I would personally want to look at it on a case by case basis were it up to me. (Which it clearly isn't). I have not seen them all so perhaps they are not ALL worth protecting and saving.

But as a generalisation I would hate to see beautiful buildings with historical significance be destroyed. Even if the historical significance is not a good one, or the beauty subjective. I mean you rarely find someone as anti religion as I have been over the years (an original founding member of Atheist Ireland and atheist.ie and all that) but I would feel it a loss.

But thankfully better people than us (I hope) are making such decisions and it's not our paygrade. I used to go out with a Kerry girl who worked in Conservation and planning and the like around Kerry and Cork. It can be often quite difficult to even minorly modify historic buildings let alone wholesale knock them down. Which I am sure is often a blessing as much as a curse (religiously informed language intentional with tongue in cheek).

I think it is because being Jewish is more cultral than religion. For example Christopher and Peter Hitchens "discovered" they were Jews quite late in their life. Apparently it passes down the family line on the mothers side or something. All too complex for me though so I probably got about 10 things wrong in this one paragraph :)