aZerogodist wrote:I am sure that Ireland would have of been one of the last European Pagan nations, also the "Celts" had their own verbal literature and culture. Fine you can say that the RC did contribute to the education of the masses, but so did, hasten I say it the British occupation building Universities and giving us an international language unlike the RC's Latin. But we don't have a day celibrating Cromwell, but this is a discusion where the most of us just see the day for celibrating the Irish culture without the imposed trappings of religeous hi-jacking. Also I wonder how Ireland would have of developed without the RC, as the Celtic Irish were intelligent they would of aquired a written langauge.
I have to say that the facts are against you here. Ireland is one of the earlier European countries to have comprehensively adopted and retained Christianity, well ahead of England, Scotland, all the Scandinavian countries, Germany and all countries east of it, the Balkans, and also Spain and Portugal. Irish missionaries played a significant role in spreading Christianity throughout Europe, something they could hardly have done if the rest of Europe was mostly Christian already. (Incidentally, it was during this time that Irish monks were instrumental in spreading the idea of the university, an idea which some centuries later made it back to England.)
One of the reasons Celticism is so popular among neo-pagans is precisely because Irish paganism disappeared so long ago. We have relatively little detail on it, so you can project onto it pretty much what you like. For what it’s worth, our best source for understanding Celtic spirituality is in fact Celtic Christianity, which is well-documented and which – naturally – absorbed and retained a great deal of pre-Christian Celtic spirituality.
The Celts certainly had their own literature and culture before Christianity; it was reinforced, not eclipsed, with the arrival of Christianity, because the Christians brought literacy, which enabled a great deal of information and lore to be written down, recorded and propagated. Gaelic culture survived and prospered for centuries; it collapsed only in the seventeenth century under the influence, not of Christianity, but of Anglicisation. Your comment about the British “giving us an international language besides the RC’s Latin” is bizarre. Latin doesn’t belong to the Catholic church; the church adopted it precisely because it was the pre-eminent international language; it was much more an international language, for much longer, than English.
I’m not sure why you think “the Celtic Irish were intelligent they would of acquired a written language”. In the first place, there is no reason to think that they were any more intelligent than their neighbours. In the second place, you don’t have to speculate about this; they
did acquire a written language. The fact that they acquired it in circumstances that don’t appeal to you is, I’m afraid, a fact of history which is at this point unalterable.
aZerogodist wrote:. . . did the RC teach the ways of the Celts and the real Irish culture or their own ethos. It is always the victors that write the history and "airbrushes" out the parts they don't like.
Indeed. And it seems to me that the attempt to airbrush Christianity out of the Irish story is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Ireland has a very long history with Christianity, and it has profoundly shaped the nation. A version of secularism which can’t deal with this and prefers to deny it is not very appealing.