Census 2022: 10% reduction in Roman Catholic numbers

My arse, you are trying to rewrite history with that kind of garbage.

Just ignore the crimes against humanity committed by the Catholic Church throughout history in the name of God, get real.

I am "picking holes" in the concept that there is ANY useful link to be made between religiousity and longevity other than the most vague of correlations. Even your own hand-wavey not really commital kind of links.

There simply is no evidence on offer for this at all.... least of all in the links you just provided (for the reasons I laid out in my longer post above) that there is any such "tendency" or link. The studies do not at all appear to say what you think they do. And what they DO say is based on some pretty awful data sources and interpretations (which again, I laid out in detail above).

Rather what there more likely is... is third factor reasons which give the ILLUSION that religiosity is in any way actually linked to longevity. When there is likely no actual link of any kind whatsoever.

Your statement, no matter how meticulously and intentionally you think you worded it, appears to be unsubstantiated at this time.

In my younger days I collected "transubstatiated" hosts and performed a number of experiements on them. I even wrote a blog post on it which garnered me a brief but impressive number of death threats here: https://atheist.ie/2011/02/bringing-the-scientific-method-to-magic-crackers/

The occasional death threat still trickles in. I'm not proud :)

What I noticed while doing this work however was that "Catholics" broadly fell into three very different categories of belief on the matter. And none of the people in these three categories.... when I pressed them on it.... were at all sure why they believed what they believed.... or whether their belief was in line with actual catholic teaching or not. Nor did many of them care either way.

The three categories were:

1) People who believe a very real physical change came over the crackers during the ceremonies.

2) People who believed a "spiritual" (and hence convieniently undetectable) change occured.

3) People who believed no change on any level occured, but that it was ceremonial and symbolic only.

But the concept of what makes a catholic a "Catholic" or not is not an argument I tend to get into. Because several people, including one regular who showed up on this thread, just say if they define themselves that way then who is anyone else to say otherwise? (Said person, predictably enough, is also on the "Define yourself as any gender you want and its against your human rights to be refused to compete in sport against that gender" type of camp).

But the fact is even the Bishops.... who we might consider somewhat arbiters on the subject if ANYONE is to be..... do not particularly care what you are so long as you do define yourself as Catholic. Sure it keeps their numbers up I guess.

But at the Bishops conference in Ireland a survey of catholics was done and at no point did the Bishops (to my recollection, I might be wrong here) suggest NOT calling any of these people Catholics.

Despite the fact that only 79% of catholics believe in life after death / Heaven. Only around 75% believe in the concept of sin. Just less than 90% believe in God. And when you break that figure down only 57% of catholics believe in the catholic conception of god. The rest believe in some sort of "life force" or don't know what they believe. And in some areas of Ireland almost 25% of Catholics believe in re-incarnation and about one fifth do not believe in hell.  

So these people appear to be all over the place really. But who are we, if even the Bishops don't bother, to call them "Catholic" or not. Let them off calling themselves whatever gets them through their day with their hobby of choice.

Aren't you the guy who refused to believe the nuns put dead babies into a sewerage system in the Tuam mother and baby home?

Name a 200 year organisation with a cleaner record, let alone a 2000 year old record. Anyway, you digressing. Bumble was talking about shared values. It is true that society is changing and it could be becoming more atomised. This may be due to geographically distant social media relationships vs neighbourly relationship, new work places that tend to be more specialised rather than large shared factory or farm work but it may also be due to diversity in religious beliefs. Diversity has some advantages but it also has disadvantages.

The main thing I recall is that you have extremely blinkered views when it comes to the Roman church. Blindfolded even. There is a way to verify your stance, the thread is still there. We'll know the truth soon enough, the director has been appointed to oversee the exhumation and decent burial.

Nice try at a red herring there. But try harder.

How does diverging away from a religious dogma have its disadvantages?

Maybe a form of cultural catholicism, based on history and tradition etc.

You call me blinkered, but you clearly are unfamiliar with the reports and forensic archaeology. No we don't know the truth soon enough. You cannot find a cause of death with bones if an illness is an acute infectious disease and non trauma. You can't establish if the site was a wastewater system, if it was broken up by the builders in the 1970s as has been suggested. Nor will it tell us who buried them and why the the doctor (Dr Costello), who was on retainer for the council ignored the high mortality rate.

Obfuscate, deny, rinse and repeat.

We know that the rates of infectious disease in these homes was much worse than the worst, most overcrowded, most poverty-stricken slums of the time.

Yet the nuns were being paid by the local authority, by family contributions (otherwise it was off to the laundry with you), baby sales, and of course profits from the laundries themselves. Private businesses in the same industry were profitable despite having to pay their workers, which of course the nuns didn't.

Why were the burials not properly recorded in accordance with the law?

We know the chamber, where at least some of the unaccounted for babies were deposited, was a former cesspit which was disused since the home was connected to mains sewers. This is clearly documented on contemporary maps.

Who buried them? Those who controlled the site and had been responsible for their "care", who else?

The doctor was far from the only medical so-called "professional" who was happy to help cover up the church's dirty secrets.

What are you insinuating about what the builders might or might not have done in the 1970s and what is the relevance of that long after the home had closed and burials ceased?

Well scattering ashes isn't the same as sticking a body in a random unmarked piece of ground. Unless maybe you carried out the cremation in your backyard 🙄, the body has been disposed of in a regulated, recorded fashion by a suitably qualified professional. Ashes are not a body.

There is overwhelming evidence of illegal adoptions to America, this was baby selling.

No one ever claimed the concrete structure was connected to a mains sewer. A cesspit, by definition, is not. It receives sewage and is periodically emptied. It was marked as "cesspit" on 1920s maps.

For whatever reason the builders did not build on the area where the chamber is and the surrounding land currently planned to be excavated. Somebody knew something untoward was there.

Are you hoping the not-unfavourable testimony of a few survivors will whitewash the testimony of others who suffered there? or the many others who never lived long enough to have a voice and even in death were treated with no dignity or respect? That's not going to work.

You’ve made my point for me there. And it’s the classic “yeah we are bad but so are they!” approach that just doesn’t cut the mustard. That does nothing to forgive or forget what the RCC have done over the years, it should be continually held accountable for this actions, especially when it proclaims to be a force for good, when it just isn’t.

Maybe some religions stop short of things like that and don’t restrict human rights on their believers. Generally all religion (to me) is more restrictive and sinister in that it favours faith over reason, and in-spite of the lack of evidence there is for any god or creator or mystical power. There is none, never has been.

"But Sir the other boys were doing it too" didn't cut the mustard back in school and doesn't now.

Even religions which have a "peace and love" image in the West are bloody vicious when they want to be - Hindu nationalism in India leading to massacres, Buddhists massacring Rohingya in Burma.

"Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire

So are you saying that transgender people do not exist, or that schools should teach that they do not exist?

The person favouring faith over reason is clearly yourself.

Rubbish response as expected.