Atheist Ireland Forum

I was looking online for an SSPX pamphlet for tulip1, when I came across a book called "Motherhood and Family". Here are some choice extracts from the review:



There's more fun to be had on the website, Family Life - Roman Catholic Books. It's easy to forget when Catholicism is so commonplace in Ireland, just how mental it gets if you really buy into it!

What's going on here?:


Villainous sneer, flash of leg..."Me? The 13th Duke of Wybourne? Here? In a sixth form girl's dormitory? At three o'clock in the morning? With my reputation? What were they thinking of?"

Those books...wow! Wacko is right.

Indeed Hank, wacko is right...

Here's my next "wacko update" from the world of traditional catholicism - the evils of natural family planning:

Married couples must have as many children as possible to avoid being sent straight to hell!

According to the church, the benefits of having a load of children is that you'll be so tired from looking after the chizlers, you won't have time for any of that sin mularkey. It's the road to perfect Catholic chastity:

Family planning is the road to HEEELLLLLLL!!!!!11!1eleventyone!!!



Yeah, where's the harm in Catholicism. What a wonderful moral framework. Bastards.

I hardly believe I'm about to say this but ... in defense of Catholicism... ... the source that you're quoting is does not adhere to Catholic doctrine. Is this more from SSPX? They were only founded 40 years ago and it's doctrine/ministries aren't recognised by the Church. For some reason, the more recently something was founded, the crazier it seems. (Church of Latter-Day Saints, anyone?)

There is, too, a difference between traditional Catholicism and traditionalist. It's hard for them to be truly traditional when they were founded in the latter 20th century. Rather like how there is the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, and then there's actual Muslims.

Just for reference, the Church has no problem with natural methods of family planning.

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part Two, Section Three, Chapter Three, Article Six:


Not that I want to defend the Church as sane or rational, I just think it's important to recognise there is difference between these splinter traditionalist "Catholics" and the actual Catholic church. For one, they are much crazier. And second of all, it's simply misrepresentation. Like when creationists misrepresent evolution as a theory of chance.

Still a good example of how ridiculous religion can be, and the thread is good for a laugh. But I think we should be clear about whose doctrines these are.

aiseiri47,



Right so, straight to the lapsed atheist confessional with you! And you can read 3 chapters of "God is not Great" by Christopher Hitchens as a penance.

viewtopic.php?p=48847#p48847

Well done! You are forgiven your transgressions... you may go in peace.

Your point is fair enough though! I admit I tarred the RCC by inference with the SSPX brush; however I stand by the point that this kind of traditionalist doctrine is not that far from the dark heart of Catholicism. Pope Benny has reinstated the ex-communicated LeFebvre and his cronies, and has decreed that the traditionalist Tridentine mass can be celebrated in a diocese if the local Bishop agrees. In the meantime the standard RC mass has got quite "lovey-dovey" in recent years and the average churchgoer doesn't need to think too hard about how fundamentally uncivilised their belief system is, until it comes to the big rites (particularly baptism, marriage, funerals and school-based indoctrination).

My own deconversion was initiated by the process of being confronted with the rite of baptism when it came to my son's christening. That made me look into the hideous doctrine of original sin, which in turn caused me to look into the writings and context of St. Augustine, and before you know it "the scales had fallen from my eyes". All it took was one question for the whole edifice to come tumbling down, but it had to be the right question for me... 3 years later and I've never looked back!

Ah, dear Pope Benny. See, I was never a Catholic under "his rule". I defected before the death of Pope John Paul II, who was more modern and less insane, and never saw Traditionalists as a manifestation of Catholic doctrine but moreso the sort of people who give something else a bad name.

I never saw the two as one, never examined my religion because of these even more bizarre manifestations - my rejection of religion was more... like my body finally rejecting a transplant part. I had one of those passionate struggles to believe because I thought I was supposed to but I never stopped questioning. It was the idea of God I couldn't handle, nevermind the nutjobs who come up with the really creative stuff.

I think because of that, I still view Traditionalisism as separate from "official" Catholicisms; it's in the same way I view Catholicism as different from Protestantism or Christianity different from Islam - I scowl upon all of them pretty equally on the basis that they are all dogmatic nonsense, by I judge their individual madness based on their individual merits.

Okay, bearing in mind the constructive criticism , here's some proper mainstream RCC thinking in action:

LIMBO LIVES!

Limbo is a hypothesis about the permanent status of the unbaptized who die in infancy, too young to have committed personal sins, but not having been freed from original sin. The Vatican says:

"...We have sought to read the signs of the times and to interpret them in the light of the Gospel. Our conclusion is that the many factors that we have considered... give serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptised infants who die will be saved and enjoy the Beatific Vision. We emphasise that these are reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge... What has been revealed to us is that the ordinary way of salvation is by the sacrament of Baptism. [This should not be] taken as qualifying the necessity of Baptism or justifying delay in administering the sacrament. Rather, as we want to reaffirm in conclusion, they provide strong grounds for hope that God will save infants when we have not been able to do for them what we would have wished to do, namely, to baptize them into the faith and life of the Church."

The above statement from the Vatican highlights the fact that they have not in fact abolished Limbo. The point of Limbo is that if you're baptised and die free of sin, you get to help god with his narcissistic tendencies and look at him for ever (he can't look at himself all by himself you know!). Those who are unbaptised will have the "stain" of original sin and be denied forever the "Beatific Vision". The Church's latest statement is simply that they "hope" that such infants will in some cases after all be able to see the beatific vision if god whims it.

Limbo is very much open for business!

Is this the most recent update? Do I remember that they recently got rid of Limbo, are they bringing it back again?

Limbo annoys me because it's basically their best guess to an awkward question. Also, I'm sure I've seen people defending the concept of baptism based on the idea it doesn't wash away sin from the baby, but "protects them against future sins", and Limbo just goes to show that's a load of bollocks. (Then again, a religious person not knowing their own religion and making up theology that they're comfortable with? Shocker.)

Indeed this is the current position. The page I linked to is a current page on the Vatican's website, so I'm afraid there's no "get out of Limbo free" card!

The Church's offical stand on the rite of baptism is still fundamentally Augustinian, and based on the fact that we are all supposedly born with the stain of "original sin", which is effectively carried down genetically in the semen from Adam.

Which raises the point that the entire doctrine of original sin and redemption by sacrifice / deicide is based on the truth of the Adam & Eve story. If they didn't exist, what was the point in god coming down to earth to impregnate a virgin in order to give birth to himself in order to enable himself to be tortured and killed for a sin which he didn't commit and which in fact never happened?

Ah, but even if they did exist, why go through with the earthly manifestation of Himself to be tortured and killed anyway? I mean, surely God - being all powerful - can just forgive us anyway (if he thinks we deserve it), and let Adam and Eve suffer for their own sins. I always thought the whole plot was overly-complicated and insufficiently developed.

I have sepnt the past few months on the Facebook group:
Anti Catholic Church ActivistsWorldwide
https://www.facebook.com/groups/117172751713053/.

One of the Admins. is John Deegan who demonstrates outside the Pro Cathedral in Dublin.

The storys I read from victims of the paedophiles in the "Holy" Roman Catholic Church are horrible to read. And they get nowhere with the CCL as you all know.

Roman Catholic Doctrine: What a joke, what a pack of lies. Even whan I was suffering 12 years of my youth in a Jesuit concentration camp, Xavier College I though must of it was bullshit. The worst was the "Holy Trinity". I could never swallow that shit and was too scared of the strap to question.

I can't understand why there are any Irish people who still believe that crap and still go to Mass.

Quite ironically, I think the reason for this is because religious education is so poor! From what I've gathered about what goes on in RE, particularly from religious parents complaining that kids aren't being churned out to be very religious, it's a bit half-arsed. Sure, they make you say your prayers and teach you Bible stories and discriminate against the non-RC, but I've yet to meet a single Irish person who can tell me what transubstantiation is - so I don't know if they really try to hit home the concept that the Eucharist is physically the body of Christ and not a wafer of bread. And since I've never met an Irish Catholic who knows that the Immaculate Conception is the conception of Mary, and not Jesus, I'm pretty convinced that the general religious education curriculum is that God exists, say your prayers, don't be naughty, go to mass, etc; the more problematic metaphysical stuff they seem to just skim.

So basically, this is the sort of stuff that you take for granted because you don't really think about it because Mammy and Daddy and Teacher believe it, and we're taught to accept information from authority figures. Why should you question that God exists? Because the idea of "God" is not really any more mindbending or difficult to process than the concept of life beginning through a one in a billion chemical process and then evolving to the complexity that it is today. God intervening in the conception of Mary so that his son (who is in fact God, but not the Father, because they're all seperate but also one!) could be carried in a clean vessel not tainted with original sin (the concept that we're all tainted from birth because Eve disobeyed God): this is a bit more to swallow, and more likely to arouse questions, so they try to blur the focus on those bits!

I mean, I take myself as an example. I identified as Catholic for the first 16-17 years of my life. For most of this time I attended secular school and did not go to Mass; when I went to make my Confirmation (which you do around 16-17 in the US - much more sensible time to ask young people to confirm their beliefs, I think), I had to attend CCE classes at the Church. Thus began my true religious education - and a couple of years later, I was an atheist. I know correlation is not causation,but I'm pretty sure there's a real connection there.

And it seems a majority of the atheists in Ireland I come across were put through more vigorous religious education than the bog-standard sort I hear about from actual Catholics. As you said yourself, you couldn't buy the Holy Trinity. But how many schools teach kids about what that actually means, and how many just teach the story of St Patrick using the shamrock to explain it and don't really get into the problematic issue of how God can be three seperate entities, but also one?

[quote]So basically, this is the sort of stuff that you take for granted because you don't really think about it because Mammy and Daddy and Teacher believe it, and we're taught to accept information from authority figures. Why should you question that God exists?[quote]

Excellent reply aiseiri47.
It all boils doen to this: All Roman Catholics are taught are the bare minumum: A few prayers, when to kneel, stand and sit at Mass. That's it.
They are told to Believe, never Question, and OBEY---- OR ELSE!