I come from a family that is reasonably religious. Not oppressively now, but my parents have always gone to mass, adhered relatively strictly to Catholic teaching and my father in particular talks regularly about the after life. In fairness to them they always left it up to me what I believed in or rather don’t believe in.
I’ve never been bothered to be interested in any of it. I stopped going to mass at 13. I think there are some positive benefits to being a religious person, especially in the event of the death of a loved one, but it holds no attraction for me, because I don’t believe any of it. I don’t believe in an after life, I don’t believe the body and blood of Christ are present at communion. I ridicule it. If they are, does that make people who receive communion cannibals? Does it make priests vampires?
I find the teaching of the Catholic Church in particular to be shit. Protestantism in general seems a little bit more sensible, but then it has even crazier people on its fringes than Catholicism, Calvinists and Free Presbyterians who believe in predestination. It’s like a religious version of the Tipperary birthright. If I was forced to choose a religion it would probably be Buddhism. But there’s no way I’d ever renounce my Catholicism. I could not do it.
Religion to me has caused way more trouble in history than it has had positive effects. Although I can separate faith from that. But religion to me has been mainly a tool of racial and ethnic segregation. I hate this fact but still can’t let it but cloud my prejudices somewhat.
It irritates me when I see sportspeople point to the sky after something so trivial as a sporting success. And then we see religious people like Mickey Harte and Nevin Spence and his family either have a family member die or dying themselves.
Yet I’m a contradiction, in that even though I think it’s hocus pocus, I bless myself any time I’m on a plane taking off. If I was dying I’d probably look for a priest to anoint me.
I truly believe that a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
I also believe in “The Force” but thats another days work…
A mixture of inertia, guilt and ethno-nationalist determinism. I’m a feckless Irish Catholic humanist and I’ll die a feckless Irish Catholic humanist. But I’m an urban sophisticate feckless Irish Catholic humanist.
I have zero faith as such, i attend funerals & weddings etc but i do not regularly attend mass. I agree that religion is the biggest cause of conflict there is worldwide and thus can’t abide it.
But i do respect peoples right to believe in religion.
A lot of my friends would be similar in not being regular mass goers or believers but still had no problem getting married in churches. The same story applies when it comes to christening children.
Have many lads on here being married in a registry office as opposed to churches because they don’t believe in the Church?