I'm left-handed and have been a practising Catholic my entire life (now aged 60 nearly 61) I've never been beaten for writing left-handed nor was it ever a mentioned when I went to primary school in 1964 or the Catholic secondary school that I attended when I was 12 till I was 16.
The RC church had far too much power and control over the people in Ireland probably due to their control over the education system.
What interests me is why, with all the control the Church had over the lives of the people, did Ireland become one of the most socially progressive countries in the world? Ireland seems to be unique in the way the hegemony of the Church just seemed to evaporate in next to no time.
Changing subject slightly - there was a programme, again on R4, yesterday, about the Mormon Church, worldwide. A massively crude summation - the Church is reorganising what is owned, how, within the Church. That way the likely billions US$ of compensation for sexual abuse within the Church, will not be paid as the Church will effectively have no funds. Well worth a listen if your curiosity is pricked.
This is interesting. A similar process has been occuring in the Jehovah's Witnesses religion.
A moral bankruptcy, but not a financial one, it would seem.
You all are not going to like this - at all.
Religion as a force for good - ya, in concept, but in execution, like anything human it tends to get highly perverted in the quest for power - even though they were originally well intentioned....
The Church.
Dont care which one, god, devil, aliens, bob next door...
Strip them of all assets - follow the money re LDS, Jehovah above.
Ban their formal structures.
Assets to into a public trust to help the poor and downtrodden - the ones they were supposed to help, but seem to fail institutionally. Term limits on administration and other barriers erected so the trust does not turn into another form of the same thing.
You want religion, has to be personal - no institution - no problem.
You want study groups (legally limited to size) - no problem.
Study groups are not interlinked / joined / nor do they associate in any way for anything other than simple dissemination of doctrine.
You want to organize and monetize in any way past a bake-sale with profits turned over to the trust - PROBLEM - Banned.
This way you get the "love thy neighbor good stuff" without the money and power.
Have I missed a whole bunch of issues - yup - but compared to the shit-show religion has forced upon the world for thousands of years it can't get any worse than burning people at a stake, pressing them under weights, throwing babies into a septic tank, and a whole host of other atrocities that somehow get rolled up in some perverted love of god.
Flame suit on - convince me otherwise - bring it.
A very seriously HUGE problem there Mykel. You have confused and conflated purveyors of religions, with religions.
Many, many times, I have said that if I had one wish, it would be that all humans were devout, observant Buddhists. A second would be that all humans had the same shade of the same colour skin.
Trouble with those wishes is that they do not legislate for maniacs and megalomaniacs.
Similar tales from my father, who went to a Catholic school and spent 5 years having the daylights beaten out of him by the De La Salle brothers. I fear it was institutional. Not taught, sure, but ingrained just like the Taliban stuff is today.
I went to a Del la Salle Catholic school. It was brutal. Only some of the Brothers (and only some of the lay teachers (non-brothers) were violent towards the students.
Oddly and sadly, that school taught me to be homophobic. My parents were very supportive of our closet uncles (I grew up in the 70s so most gay people were not out then) . It took very good friends to set me right on my then homophobia a few years later in life. I don't see those people anymore but I am thankful to them to this day for that.
I did quite well at that school but that school did damage me.
This is about power. The vast majority of the public who knew about it didn’t speak out because the church had all power and they had none.It's such a sad part of our history, the worst being that this was let happen and the vast majority of the public who knew about it didn't speak out.
What annoys me in Ireland currently is we have committees and commissions and righteous indignation from political leaders and the general public about this brutal part of our history, while at the same time we have a system called "direct provision" for asylum seekers where conditions aren't probably much better than in the Magdalene Laundry years ago. It's so easy to condemn things that happened years ago whilst tuning the exact same blind eye today that was turned years ago.
.sjb
I recall being given the slipper for putting the name of my hamster as my middle name....that was a secular school in Britain not that long ago !!I was beaten at school for being a sarky bastard.
I was trying to ask why is Ireland apparently unique in the way it has moved away from being arguably the most Catholic country in the world to one where the power of the Church is a busted flush? This dramatic decline has not been matched by the Church anywhere else although the abuse committed by priests has been exposed all over the world.When the evidence of the paedophile priests along with the horror of the Magdalene laundries was released the RC church lost a lot of its power and respect.