Category: Religion

According to Irish Times columnist John Waters the electorate’s Monster Loony tendency is coming to the fore in the current presidential election campaign(Irish Times).

Irish people, Waters tells us:

Have lately become politically reckless, perhaps even a little mad.

It’s likely Waters is somewhat tongue in cheek here but his comments on the subject of madness are interesting because, in my opinion, his own sanity is under threat from the disease of religion.

In an article in the Irish Catholic (Sep. 15th) Waters makes the bizarre suggestion that if paedophilia did not exist in the Catholic Church certain sections of the media would now be campaigning to have pedophilia legalised.

They (the media) don’t regard paedophilia as a serious matter at all. If clerical abuse did not exist in the Church, I greatly suspect that we would by now have a campaign to legalise pedophilia from these quarters.

This latest lurch into religious madness stems from the media reaction to the Senator Norris affair. In Waters’ religiously damaged brain the whole matter is a giant conspiracy to do down his beloved Catholic Church.

Waters’ thesis is simple (in every sense of that word).

The media should have treated the (very minor) Norris affair with the same strength and condemnation as they treat the ongoing Catholic Church child abuse holocaust involving the rape and torture of countless thousands of innocent children.

To bolster his insane argument Waters refers to a short-lived and bizarre movement of the 1970s that campaigned for the legalization of paedophilia.

Was it the case that the thrust for acceptance of paedophilia was stymied only by the emergence of the clerical abuse scandals in the Church, which the Left saw as an opportunity to destroy the authority of the Church?

This statement indicates a mind that has begun to lose the ability to reason. It is, quite literally, a mad statement.

I wonder if the Irish Times management have noticed Mr. Waters’ madness?

One of the most annoying aspects of any debate on religion is the tendency of believers to wander off into deep theological undergrowth where they find safe refuge from honesty and common sense.

The best method for flushing out believers from this theological undergrowth is to ask short, simple question and then sit back and watch them wriggle on the spit of their own irrationality.

A debate on Today with Pat Kenny between Michael Nugent, Chair of Atheist Ireland and Miguel DeArce, Geneticist and believer provided us with an excellent example how effective this strategy can be.

Towards the end of the debate the question of which animals possessed souls was being discussed when Michael Nugent went in for the kill.

Nugent: Does a cat have a soul?

DeArce: Cats have cat souls.

(Remember; this man is a scientist who lectures in Trinity).

Nugent: Do cats go to heaven?

DeArce: That is a silly question.

Nugent: Why is it a silly question?

DeArce: Because, er, er – What is heaven?

Nugent: You’re the one who says it exists. If you believe it exists; do cats go to it?

DeAcre: To me heaven is the vision of god and a cat would not gain anything from seeing god because he hasn’t got the apparatus intellectually and so forth to enjoy the vision of god.

(At this stage both myself and my cat were on the floor in fits of laughter).

By just focusing on and demanding an answer to a simple question Nugent prevented the discussion from wandering off into the undergrowth of theological definitions of heaven and by so doing he exposed the absolute absurdity of religious belief.

I can feel it in my bones, it’s stirring in my bowels, the relentless tapping of the keyboard is like a beating drum in my brain.

Somebody, somewhere out there is feverishly working on a sermon warning us that the UK riots were caused by evil secularists and depraved atheists.

That the love of material things has finally brought about the deserved downfall of a sinful species.

It could be David Quinn, John Waters, Breda O’Brien or Mary Kenny – Take your pick.

Tapping away, getting the message out that the end of days is near, that the road to perdition has run its course.

Return to the one true god all you evil ones before it’s too late, before you’re thrown into the fires of Hell for all eternity.

We’re doomed I tell you, all doomed.

Letter in this week’s Irish Catholic.

A ridiculous assertion

Dear Editor,

Your columnist Mary Kenny is a well established, well respected journalist and author.

It is therefore unlikely that her ridiculous and totally untrue assertion that atheism is nothing more than an off-shoot of Communism is a result of ignorance or bad research.

It is therefore reasonable to conclude that she has allowed her strong religious beliefs to cloud her journalistic professionalism.

Yours etc.
Anthony Sheridan

The World Atheist Convention took place in Dublin on June 3-5 last. By all accounts, it was a very successful affair.

Predictably, however, not everybody was happy to see so many atheists gather in ‘Catholic’ Ireland.

Catholic militant, Mary Kenny, writing in the Irish Catholic, makes the ridiculous claim that atheism is nothing more than an offshoot of Communism.

People of this cast of mind have been around for a long time. The only real difference between now and 50 or 80 years ago is that they have changed their category. They used to be called, and to call themselves, communists.

Her article, reproduced below, is a good example of the damaging power of religion to convince humans that the irrational is rational.

Atheisim is just another `Ism’

Mary Kenny

9 Jun 2011

It is a measure of how much Ireland has changed from its traditional image that Dublin could be the location for an international conference of atheists, as it was last weekend. And that the gathering passed uncontroversially.

I’m all for tolerance of everyone’s viewpoint, providing it is not a threat to public safety, so if the atheists’ pow-wow passed off almost unremarked, so what?

It is claimed that atheism in Ireland is growing, and that some 250,000 people are now Irish atheists, although some in that group call themselves agnostics, some humanists, some secularists. So there is a fuzzing of the definition.

An atheist is someone who says there is no Deity and no supernatural life whatsoever: there is only the material world. An atheist dismisses Shakespeare’s view that ”there are more things in Heaven and Earth than you can dream of” and usually regards human beings as merely cleverer animals than, say, apes.

An agnostic is humbler. The agnostic says he doesn’t know and does not venture to suggest he has the answers to the mysteries of the universe.

A humanist believes in humanity, but a humanist may also believe in God: humanism grew out of Christianity. A secularist is someone who calls for a non-religious state: but a secularist may have a private faith. So there are many strands in this apparently new phenomenon in Ireland.

But is this movement really new? People of this cast of mind have been around for a long time. The only real difference between now and 50 or 80 years ago is that they have changed their category. They used to be called, and to call themselves, communists.

The Communist Party and its many splinters in Trotskyism, Maoism, various international movements for ‘Peace and Progress’ – formerly a cover for Communism – encompassed a range of secularist thinkers. Communism was about many things, but it was, above all, about godlessness.

To be sure, some good people, and some well-intentioned people were Communists. And not all Communist concepts were unworthy:

Communism often promoted education, and even ideals of ”virtue” among the young. However, its fundamental value was rooted in atheism.
Then communism was seen to fail, and it duly fell. And when it fell it left an ideological vacuum in its place. Some former Marxists embraced capitalism, even with gusto.

Others turned to the new religion of environmentalism, in which everything green and associated with nature was to be sacralised (even though Marxism itself was in favour of industrialisation and most definitely against Nature: Marx would have regarded tree-hugging as ‘rural idiocy’). And others still turned to atheism in its various forms, whether it be called secularism, humanism or even ‘new ethics’.

The vacuum left by the world-wide ideology of communism remains the principle mainspring. People look for new ‘isms’ where old ones fail.
But usually the new isms, in their turn, are found wanting, and in the fullness of time faith is reborn in the hearts of men and women, as St Augustine predicted it always would. All you have to do is to live long enough to see the wheel complete its eternal return.