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

Yet only you are bringing "should" into it, which belies the controlling nature of religion. It's ongoing need to tell people what they "Should" or "should not" do. If Catholic Ireland is indeed dead (trying to keep my posts on topic) then I would say a large part of the reason for that is this need to control peoples thoughts and actions. Or to push back against any kinds of progress like contraception or scientific advancements in realms like stem cell research.

Meanwhile the rest of us not infected by religion recognise that contraception is an OPTION. One that we can take or not take depending on our own goals and agendas and concerns. We do not have to shout at people about what they "Should" do. Rather we can inform and education people on their choices and show them that if their concern is sexually transmitted disease, or unwanted pregnancies, that contraception is a powerful and viable choice for them to make to mitigate those risks.

As for your last line, who declared you spokesperson for all men and what they "want"? I do not recognise your declaration about what men want in either myself or any men I know. Rather what I want(ed) in life, much the same as most men I have ever met, is to find a human being to make a romantic and lasting connection with, to choose to spend the rest of my/our/their lives with. Their sexual history, or lack of it, was not a concern. And a desire or a preference for "virginity" even less so. In fact I find the obsession with virginity to be creepy. At best.

Again if the question of the thread is the death of "Catholic Ireland" then perhaps this being out of touch with what people actually "want" and clinging to generalised false declarations of what people want or do not want.... has been a major factor in this. I have rarely, if ever, been struck by the feeling the Church moved with the times, or had the finger on the pulse of what it was the people actually want or think at any given time.

That does not seem to be true as I know I and others have said strident things about every religion going in the past, and to my knowledge no citation has ever been levelled against my user account in the 1000s of posts I have historically made. I have often been subjected to this "Fatwa envy" and being told that I would not say thinks about Mohammad and Islam that I say about Jesus and Christianity for example. Such users clearly have not read my post history given the quite detailed and varied things I have said about both.

The thing is that most people who complain they have been cited for saying something about some religion or the religious or some race or whatever.... fail to notice that it was not WHAT they said but HOW they said it that was the issue. I think you can say many "vile" (or, as some of us would say, true) things about catholicism. Or you can say "vile" things about Catholics themselves. The latter is more likely to get you cited. I myself operate under the rubric of "Respect the believer, but never the beleif". A mantra that appears to have protected me for years against these citations of which you speak.

I think you can say many things about Judaism and I have done. Many of their beliefs strike me as being just as unsubstantiated nonsense as any Christian or Muslim beliefs. But that said, I do not subscribe to the notion that all beliefs and religions are equivilant. A fact you can test out yourself by asking as many people as you can who they would like their next door neighbour to be if they had to choose EITHER a fundamentalist Christian, a fundamentalist Muslim, a fundamentalist Jew, a fundamentalist Jain, or a fundamentalist Atheist. I can tell you anyone I have asked tend to either choose 54312 in that order or 45312. Even when they themselves are Christian. Your results may vary but I think it highlights something useful all the same.

But again the subject of this thread is whether Catholic Ireland is dead or dying. And I think whinging about citations or respect for beleifs is another nail in that coffin. I myself have massive respect of the Catholics who own what their church has done, admit it, and fight for change and progress in their organisation. I suspect more people like that would slow or even reverse the death of their Catholic Ireland.

Unfortunately when I go into a supermarket and I decide to call a pineapple a grape, I still get charged the price of a pineapple. Why? Because choosing what to call something, does not magically make it become that something. So you can take a "choice" and call it whatever you like. It will not magically make it true either.

By all means argue what you think "a good life" is. But despite years of debate on the issue I have not yet been shown a single argument to support the notion that the choice of abortion is either not "a good life" or is "murder" or "killing a child" or any of ther other emotive labels the anti-choice brigade used in lieu of actual arguments and discourse on the subject. They tried slogans during the referendum. It failed them. Badly. You need a new approach to this.

But if Catholic Ireland is dying then perhaps it is this judgementalism that fuels that death too? Shouting at people that their choice is murder or killing children, without actually substantiating such claims, is not likely to attract people to the faith. Or keep people in the faith coming back. In fact if my recollection of the Bible is correct, the Nazerene himself advocated representation of the faith as much as preaching it. By your fruits they shall know you.

If Catholic Ireland is dead therefore, who is killing it? It would seem to be many of the Catholics themselves, like your good self, who are doing it even if it is not your intention to do so. And the double standards that were highlighted in the anecdote you were replying to here. Where the user was applying the same standards to BOTH sides of the argument. While the preacher thanked him for applying that standard to the OTHER side, but got haughty and aggresive when that standard was applied to his OWN side. That is the kind of hypocracy that will kill your Catholic Ireland for you, is it not?

I partly agree with you here. I think it is too simplistic and base to simply see believers in religion as "simple". One simply has to notice that in the history of our species some of our most brilliant top minds have also been prone to religious or religion like thinking. Isaac Newton was one of, if not the, top minds our species ever produced for example. And he made wonderful contributions to our science and mathematics as a result.

His mind subscribed to some seriously unsubstantiated nonsense too however.

To me saying that people who are religious are "simple" is a bit like saying that anyone who catches the common cold is "unhealthy" or that a building that has locusts must be "dirty". Quite the contrary. Locusts and other vermin are often attracted to cleaner buildings. While many infections of bacteria and virus prefer healthy hosts.

The fact that a healthy mind can be infected with a religious memetic virus is no more surprising than a healthy athlete being infected by a genetic virus.

The important thing to remember is that a belief is not made more or less true based on how intelligent or stupid the believer is. It is entirely independent of that. I do not see religious belief as a "stupid" or "simple" belief. I see it as an entirely unsubstantiated one. And the intelligence of a believer, or the number of believers, does not substantiation make.

All that said I have been ENDLESSLY fascinated for 30+ years now by the claim, like the one you make above, that belief is a "choice". I genuinely wonder what that must feel like, to be able to CHOOSE what you believe. I literally can't. Belief or lack of belief in a claim is not something I "choose". It is something that involuntarily HAPPENS to me given the presence (or lack of) evidence. I no more "choose" what I believe than I "choose" to travel downwards when I step off a ledge. In both cases I fall helplessly and entirely out of my power or control.

I do not choose not to believe there is a god or gods. I simply can not believe there is one given the not slight, but COMPLETE lack of any arguments, evidence, data or reasoning suggesting there is such. Were such substantiation provided to me I would helplessly start believing. Choice at no point comes into it for me. And I am fascinated by the people who claim that for them, it does.

While I agreed with you a bit above, I entirely disagree with you here. Beliefs do not require, nor deserve, respect. In fact I very much subscribe to the quote that said "I respect you too much as a person, to respect your unfounded beliefs". I believe in respecting people, not their beliefs. I also believe in the notion that attacks on, or ridicule of, beliefs is not the same as an attack or ridicule of the believer. They are entirely separate things. You are not your beliefs. If you feel yourself synonymous with your beliefs so you take offence vicariously on their behalf then so be it, but I see it as an error.

Beliefs should not be respected. They should be torn apart and subjected to the deepest of intellectual and philosophical rigor.

That's just the thing. Not all fundamentalists are the same. At all. Deep fundamentalist Muslims have flown planes into buildings. Deep fundamentalist Jains sweep the ground before them as they walk, for fear they might kill an insect. The most stident atheists that most people have heard of do little more than write books, while some fundamentalist Christians blow up abortion clinics or attack doctors who perform abortions. That is not remotely the same. At all.

The more fundementalist you become as, say, a muslim the more potential you have for actions that harm others. It does not automatically mean you will cause harm of course. That has to be understood. But the potential goes way up. While the more fundamentalist you become as a Jain the less likely you are to hurt anyone or anything. Hell some of them drink their water and breath through cheese cloth simply to minimise the possibility they might injest something living. That is how against pain and violence they are. They are not, for example, throwing homosexuals off rooftops.

I can not fathom therefore how you come to the conclusion that "all fundamentalists are the same". They really aren't. Beliefs matter. And the differences between beliefs matter. At least in so far as beliefs translate into potential real world action and activity. Generally what people believe religiously does NOT matter because most people realise faith is a private matter and keep their faith to themselves. I have zero issue with such people myself. Their unsubstantiated beliefs do not affect me at all. Nor are atheists automatically good people either. There have been awful ones. But there is nothing IN atheism that promotes anything awful. They were awful independant of atheism. And many people are awful independent of their religion. But the fact remains that fundamental interpretations of religious texts can potentially lead to great harm. Fundamentalist reading od Richard Dawkins? Not so much.

In fact it strikes me as quite comical that you are asking people to "respect others" yet you so willingly and readily throw such people into the same box as if they are all the same. That is the opposite of respect to my mind. Recognising the differences between people is respect, and not sweeping them all with the same brush merely because they share ONE single attribute. Like being Fundamentalist in their beliefs. Respect is seeing people as individuals and realising that one single attribute they might have alone is not enough to box them as identical to all other people who have that attribute. That's how things like Racism happen. Thinking that because someone is, for example, black they must be the same as everyone else who is black.

So no, someone being merely fundamentalist tells you little to nothing about them. When you find out what they are particularly fundamentalist IN however you can start to differentiate who they are likely to be from fundamentalists of other stripes. And if I had to choose between a deeply fundamentalist Jain and a deeply fundamentalist Muslim as a potential neighbour, without knowing anything else about them.... I am picking the Jain every time and there are very few people I suspect who would need to ask me why.