A big difference between Irish and American Religosity

A final look at the Irish Catholic Bishops Conference summary of the 2008 European Values Study shows up how religion or lack of it is not an impediment to political office in the Republic of Ireland. This contrasts with the US where presidential hopefuls seem to outvie each other in their declations of religosity (of the right sort, obviously).

The following statements and tables are taken from the summary document:
[Republic of Ireland (ROI); Nothern Ireland (NI)]

‘Politicians who do not believe in God are unfit for public office’

That is, 85% of Irish Catholics in the ROI would not have a problem with an atheist politician. Indeed nearly two-thirds would take exception to you having a problem with that.

‘Religious leaders should not influence government decisions’

 83.2% of Irish Catholics in the ROI either agree or don't have an opinion, with 60% actively believing that the Church should stay out of politics.

'I have my own way of connecting with the Divine without Churches or religious services'

[on a scale of 1 to 5]

This one should give the Church pause and should also make the Establishment realise that the Church does not have the hearts and minds of all those it claims.  Only 13% of Irish Catholics in the ROI rely on the Church for their spiritual guidance while 60% effectively bypass the Church in their relationship with God. These sound more like Protestants than Catholics!

Plastic Catholics

In a previous post I reckoned that roughly 39% of Irish Catholics attended mass weekly, a key part of being a Catholic. Looks like I wasn't too far off the mark. The Irish Catholic Bishops Conference produced in 2010 a document summarising the 2008 European Values Study as it related to the practice of Catholicism in Ireland. It is a fascinating document both for its content and its deadpan tone and the following graphs and tables are taken from it. According to the report 82% of respondents identirfied as Catholic and the stats are based on their responses.

 Some of the other stuff is very interesting. Only half of Irish Catholics believe in Hell and a quarter don't believe in Heaven! A tenth don't even believe in God. I don't remember re-incarnation being part of Catholicism but for a third of Irish Catholics it is...

So what about God? Well in the Republic of Ireland 58% believe in 'Personal God', which skewers the New Religionist claim that God is the 'ground of being' etc.

So how important is God to Irish Catholics on a scale of 1 to 10? While it is definitely skewed to the high end, you have to ask yourself, if you were a good believing Catholic, would you not go all the way to eleven on this question?

Finally, what about prayer? In the Republic, 40% pray every day while about 25% pray less than 'several times a year' or never.

So, in the Republic of Ireland, of those that self-identify as Catholic:

• Only half believe in Hell
• Only three-quarters believe in Heaven
• 10% don't even believe in God (sure that makes them atheists?)
• A quarter believe in an impersonal God (and 17% either are atheists or don't know what they think)
• Roughly half pray at least once a week, while about a third are doing well to pray once a year.

Someone with a stats background could do a proper analysis but it strikes me that about half of Irish Catholics perhaps deserve the name and the rest are Plastic Catholics, to borrow a phrase. This why it is important in any discussion on how religious Ireland is to distinguish between cultural Catholics and real Catholics.

Bikini Mary: A terrible Precedent

It is scandalous that a religion in this day and age can use the law of the state to attack freedom of speech. Absolutely scandalous. Will we ever shake off the dark shackles of this church? Will it yet take us back to the dark days of Laundries and paedophilia and nobody prepared to speak out? The all powerful bishop and kowtowing politician?

To make it worse Irish Catholic lawyers are encouraging people outside of Ireland to use the Irish Blasphemy Law to complain “to prevent a crime occurring in that Country”. They appear to actively seeking to stir up a controversy:

“The more complaints they have on record the more likely it is that they will have to act. Also the offence of blasphemy is judged by how "outraged" people really are, so complaints will be evidence of that.”

What next – Pakistan using our own blasphemy law to stifle freedom of speech in Ireland?

Fine Gael said before the election that it thought that blasphemy was not a crime. It is now time for them to put an end to this shameful state of affairs. They should revoke the 2009 law and take the opportunity of the presidential election and judges’ referendum in the autumn to have a referendum on removing the reference to blasphemy in the constitution.

Of course these Catholics still try to claim Ireland as their's. Witness Bishop Buckley’s comment:

"Respect for Mary, the mother of God, is bred in the bones of Irish people and entwined in their lives."

No, fear of the power of the parish priest and the shadow of the church-run institutions was bred into the bones of the Irish people.  Not to mention the fact that Ireland is no longer a particularly Catholic country.

Jesus - the ultimate Slum Landlord

Reading Rosita Boland’s article on childhood religious education made me wonder what the catechism looks like these days. I can remember well doing the catechism in school though I can’t remember much of the content. I decided to check it out.

Frankly skimming it was enough for me, as looking from the outside in it, it is completely loolally. However some interesting titbits jumped out at me.

According to the catechism on the Vatican’s website, Hell is a real place. I thought they’d made it all metaphorical but apparently not. God, it appears is indeed one sick vicious bastard:

1034 Jesus often speaks of "Gehenna" of "the unquenchable fire" reserved for those who to the end of their lives refuse to believe and be converted, where both soul and body can be lost. Jesus solemnly proclaims that he "will send his angels, and they will gather . . . all evil doers, and throw them into the furnace of fire," and that he will pronounce the condemnation: "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire!"

1035 The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, "eternal fire." The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.

Since we know neither the day nor the hour, we should follow the advice of the Lord and watch constantly so that, when the single course of our earthly life is completed, we may merit to enter with him into the marriage feast and be numbered among the blessed, and not, like the wicked and slothful servants, be ordered to depart into the eternal fire, into the outer darkness where "men will weep and gnash their teeth."

(my highlighting)

The old Penny Catechism was more succinct:

125. Where will they go who die in mortal sin?

They who die in mortal sin will go to hell for all eternity.

134. Shall not the wicked also live for ever?

The wicked also shall live and be punished forever in the fire of hell.

I’ve no interest in trying to understand the minutiae of Catholic theology – it has as much relevance as all those backstory Middle Earth books, but I certainly come away from this excerpt below thinking that Jesus is the ultimate slum landlord. I mean, if he’s killed the Devil (eh? Has no one told the pope?) and taken over Hell, these Trinity chaps have got a nice little monopoly going on afterlife holiday destinations. 

635 Christ went down into the depths of death so that "the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live." Jesus, "the Author of life", by dying destroyed "him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and [delivered] all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage." Henceforth the risen Christ holds "the keys of Death and Hades", so that "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth."

(my highlighting)

Dammed if you do and damned if you don’t.

Does God hate you?

This image from Rosita Boland’s Irish Times article on finding her childhood religious indoctrination schoolbook has been doing the rounds turning up on Pharynugla and Eric MacDonald’s site.

Apart from being creepy (I love the juxtaposition of God preferring his babies baptised and the space at the bottom of the page for the child to enter when they were procured for him), it highlights the way religion is a source of division and conflict. The child doing this exercise is being encouraged to divide people into same and ‘other’ with the clear implication that they are superior (“He gives them more gifts”) to anyone not of their faith. This is fostering sectarianism and the modern history of Ireland unfortunately bears out the terrible problems that brings.

I think it interesting as well that apparently God loves some more than others and neglects some children for his favourites. The corollary of this of course is that if God is capable of varying degrees of love, then he must also be capable of hate. So who does he hate? Best ask that child that’s been learning to divvy the world up into Us and Them.

The flaws in arguing from faith for religion

With the arguments for the existence of god or indeed gods so weak, the theologian retreats to the idea that it is all about faith, that is, a leap of faith to believe in something that cannot be arrived at by reason. By this means they can argue that their belief in god is not something that can be argued about rationally and hence religion is a conversation at which science or rationality does not have a voice. Completely coincidently of course, this gets them off the hook for, in the case of christianity, not being able to come up with a half decent proof despite two thousand years to do so.  There are two very obvious problems with this supposed killer "proof" that nail it dead.

If we accept for argument's sake that the leap of faith is a valid argument, then we run into an insurmountable problem. Having by definition excluded reason from the process we are now left in the position of leaping off the cliffs of rationality into one of the multitude of boats below, each a mutually contradictory religion, but aside from the knowledge that one of them is correct, with no way of choosing the right one!  We cannot use reason to decide the merits of each before choosing (this is a leap of faith remember), so we have a very limited choice: choose none or choose randomly. If this is a search for truth, choosing none is the only valid choice. This also illustrates to my mind, that if someone makes a leap of faith to the religion they already believe in, they are either deceiving themselves or us. 

Secondly, everyday experience tells us that under ordinary circumstances the vast majority of people do not change the faith they were indoctrinated in as children. Indeed Islam goes as far as proclaiming the death penalty for its apostates to put them off doing so, while the Catholic Church recently changed its rules to make it effectively impossible to officially leave, as a result of the Irish Count Me Out campaign. If there was fluidity in people's religion, it might suggest that the proposed leap of faith is being made. The carrying over of childhood indoctrination into adulthood religiosity suggests that people assume their religion is true because it is their religion. There are a multitude of religions out there with conflicting claims and gods and all claiming to be true. Self-evidently at most only one of these can be true. There is clearly no active engagement on the part of most to genuinely seek out the 'true' religion, so no leap of faith either, as that implies more than impassive acceptance. Additionally if there was such engagement, it would be reasonable to assume some general migration towards a single religion.

As an aside to this point, of course there have been times when populations have changed their religion en masse (hence the caveat of ordinary circumstances above). This happened frequently in reformation Europe for example when the idea of the king's religion becomes the people's religion appeared. This reinforces the point though as these conversions are essentially political and nothing to do with the truth of religion.

As a closing point on religious proof, my experience and general impression is that outside of theologians, that is for the vast majority of believers, there is in fact little engagement with how to prove god exists or that a particular religion is true, and that if more people were given, and took the time to understand, an honest review of the evidence for god, they would be shocked at the flimsiness of the arguments.

Religion does not like Science

Jerry Coyne and Russell Blackford tackle a Huffpo article by Michael Ruse on religion and science's compatibility. It's not very a very convincing article especially with comments like this,

"But is there not the uncomfortable worry that religion -- theology -- is always going to play second fiddle, having to give way in the face of science? ... It may be true that this is a one-way process, but in no way does this imply that theology is inferior."

Yup, it does kind of imply that actually.

Religion seems to have at least four stances with regard to science.

Science as heresy. See christianity's history in Europe with astronomy as a prime example. Arguably creationists fall in this category too, though I'm more thinking of when a religion has the temporal power to kill or imprison those it decides to define as heretics.

Science to be denied. Creationists are the prime example. Their strange twistings of science, but only of those parts that are problematical, are a wonder to behold. I look forward to somebody showing that something like gravity is incompatible with the bible and seeing how they deny that...

Science to be impugned. As religion surrenders its explaining power to science, it attempts to belittle science. The attitude is that science may be able to explain questions like how we came about, the laws of physics, how to fly, how to make effective medicine etc, but that they still hold authority over important questions like the kind of sex God wants to see in bedrooms around the world (He's a bit of a prude apparently). More seriously though, they try to claim morality and ethics as their own, disenfranchising anybody coming from a non-believing scientific background as having anything worthwhile to say about these subjects.

Science to be pwned. This is the attitude of those who realise the truth of science and so have to demonstrate that their religion already knew all of science before science existed. Thus we have Hindu Science and Islamic Science, amongst others no doubt. It is bizarre to read how the Rig Veda has amongst other things the correct value for the speed of light, while a new one to me, the Koran had geology sorted out long before Lyell et al did.