Decision made

If I digress at times throughout the course of this text it is because the thoughts swirling around my head are so confused and unfiltered that it makes it virtually impossible for me to speak about them, and only a little less difficult to write about them.

I must begin again with a qualification. Not one of the points of argument or criticism in this article are concerned with the question of whether or not there is a God. Nor am I interested in anything he may, or may not, have said or done but I am sharpening my knives for some of the people who say and do things in his name. After-all the Roman Catholic Church is a man-made empire regardless of their reasons for beginning it in the first place. Every one of it's theological doctrines relating to this topic are the words of men not Gods. Each of it's pre-conditions and rules come from the mouths of men claiming they understand the mind of their celestial master. Whether a believer or not, you have no reason to accept any of the things these men have been telling you and even less reason to allow yourself to be influenced by their self-ordained (quite literally) moral authority. 

'De Omnibus Disputandum' - Karl Marx

Three weeks ago my sister Mairead asked me if I would be my little niece's Godfather. My other siblings had all done it for the other children so I guess it was my turn. After initially declaring my unease and taking some time to consider whether I would be able to do it, I finally had to say no. I thought about it quite a lot and more than almost anyone in my position would. Because of this I know she respected my decision even if it was disappointing. That doesn't stop me feeling an acute sense of despair at having to let someone down. Since then, when I have mentioned it to a few of my friends I have found it difficult to articulate effectively my reasons. Most people find it a bizarre thing to have done, I suppose because it is so often an automated response to say yes. Anyway, as a method of absolving myself somewhat I thought I might stick some reasons down in a word document.


Each of Mairead's three children have been conceived through IVF and now each one of them is a baptised member of the society that considers their very conception unethical and sinful. This disgusts me absolutely and is one of the core reasons why I refused the request. But if a child's parents can accept the evil paradox in full knowledge of the facts then I don't think it is my place to proselytise to them directly. So I shall proselytise to you instead...

You know they think these children are illegitimate? You know they think it violates a marriage because the process includes masturbation? You know they think the scientists and doctors who deliver you a baby this way are villainous murderers because some of the eggs are destroyed along the way? You know they tell people that children conceived through IVF are more likely to have birth defects without resolving the scientific reasons behind it (The birth defects are more related to the initial problems regarding the parents infertility than they are to the IVF process)? 

Remember, these are all church teachings and not the word of God. This is why it was impossible for me to stand up as a proxy for this church's inscriptions on the blank moral canvas of my five-week old niece. She still has me always, just not like this.

At some point during my considerations it was put to me that myself and my siblings had not been pushed in the direction of Catholicism or Christianity, not really. It is a typically apocryphal description of how religions operate in Ireland and in my case it is simply wrong. The apparent hereditary character of religion should probably be proof enough of this but anyway, I will elaborate. I 'am' Catholic and I didn't have any choice in the matter. I went to two Catholic schools, both of which took time away from teaching English and Maths to shove their own religious diatribe down our throats. Even this might be seen as the broadening of a childs mind to help them develop a spiritual understanding. But it never was that, it was always awful indoctrination. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the only eating we ever did was on the Roman Catholic wafer. I wouldn't even have known Islam existed then or that eastern philosophy might help me develop spiritually. At that time I would barely even have been informed that there were a million other forms of Christianity. Obviously those protestants were wrong! 

The supple brains of young children will accept what they are being told as indisputable, grass is green, blood is red, God is great and he is Catholic. So it becomes very difficult to change afterwards and even when it does, open dissent carries a burden of shame for some people.

I really have trouble with any kind of indoctrination. Anything that tells people what they should believe or feel about something only encourages narrow-mindedness and intolerance. Thinking for yourself and being yourself regardless of what other people might want you to be are the greatest things you can hold on to. If only I had a little more confidence I may have been able to dissent earlier than I have.

I live in Northern Ireland, a country historically segregated along religious dividing lines. Violent, murderous dividing lines and although I am not naive enough to think religion was it's only defining factor, no-one could excuse it of some of the shared culpability. Yet we continue to propagate the dividing lines by forcing our children to join us on one side before they've even spoken a single word. Tony Blair once remarked in a debate about how touched he had been at a meeting that bridged the religious divide in Northern Ireland. Christopher Hitchens then hung Tony by his own petard when he asked him in a gloatingly droll tone, "Where does the religious divide come from?" I always think of Hitch when I think of religion in Northern Ireland.

However far we have come, protestant and catholic are still attached as labels and the ludicrous prejudice and suspicions persist towards the other despite a more enlightened population. I hope that when I send my children to school that the factors determining their destination do not in any include their membership of one church over another. I know it seems utopian but it shouldn't be. 

It is possible that you think I have been totally selfish here. That I have made a mountain out of a molehill and that I should have kept my mouth shut and gone along with things like everyone else does. I can understand that but it is not the way I want to do things. I genuinely think the baptism is a bad thing and that it would have been extremely hypocritical for me to have gone through with it. It would have been a completely vacuous ceremony if I had been involved and anyway I hope that my little niece would rather have an uncle who actually gives a fuck about her to say no for the reasons I have. 

My catholic ireland

The Catholic Church in Ireland has in most instances seceded its credibility and influence. For many people who would have once slavishly cooperated with its ludicrous demands there is merely disillusionment and apathy. I have gone past the point of disillusionment by now. I have reached eager hostility.

When my sisters baby was stillborn last year I was sad. She was devastated beyond anything my meagre emotional abilities could understand. You do what you can to help people at these times to ameliorate the pain and provide whatever inadequate succour you can. Later, I began to familiarise myself with a former teaching of the catholic church that any babies that died before being baptised into the church would never be permitted to enter heaven and be left to dangle in limbo for eternity, motherless. Obviously because of recent events it excited my interest. I admit that it may not seem like such an utterly malevolent thing to say in 2014 but it decades gone by in devout Ireland this was a truly evil idea. To tell young mothers who have just had their hearts ripped out of their worlds, young women who believed with absolute certainty in an afterlife, that their child was not worthy to join them in heaven, that they would never be seen again stuck somewhere between heaven and hell was unjustifiably cruel and abusive. Yet this is what happened. Misery heaped upon misery. Lives ruined for parents who could never get over it. God will accept murderers and rapists with the correct access codes and a little repentance but he doesn't want to know about your dead baby. 

This stuff is real. This stuff happened. It has been perpetuated because we have allowed it to play a persistent role in our lives. The good doesn't outweigh the bad. It merely provides shelter for its perpetrators.

It seems that in Ireland, just as everywhere else, that religion is hereditary. I was a Catholic before I could walk, before I could talk, before I had developed the cognitive ability to realise that a piece of wafer is not also the flesh of a two thousand year old man from the Middle East. Get them young and you get them for life! History tells us that they took that particular motto to its sinister extremes.

Baptised as a baby I am now one of the flock. Free to have the same opinions as everyone else, free to learn the prayers and dogma of Christianity, free to disassociate myself from people who’s parents and teachers have slightly different opinions to what mine do. So the guilt begins to seep into the conversation around the age of six. All those terrible things that a child is capable of need to be addressed. For a short period at this important point in a child’s development the maths and English lessons are dispensed with to make way for the classes preparations for First Confession. I’ve thought about this as coldly as I can and I will try to distil my opinions succinctly. There are certainly children in these classes who require a little extra help with their reading or their writing or their counting. Nevertheless their valuable time at school is being used to tell them how they should feel guilty and beg for forgiveness from a supernatural being they can’t possibly understand for the crime of slapping their sister or stealing an extra biscuit. As well as this they need to be coached to ensure that they interact in the correct manner with the elderly virgin who will be their direct interlocutor when they repent for their sins. Of course it all ends well. The child may not be able to read any better than yesterday but God will have forgiven them their childish misdemeanour's. This is all assuming that they have been forced in the right direction and have chosen the correct god. Otherwise these kids are condemned to eternal hell.

Next up for us kids is the beginning of the financially incentivised indoctrination. The first holy communion and later confirmation are the two major milestones on the young catholic’s résumé. The child is quite literally forced into these religious ceremonies. They have absolutely no right of refusal and for the most part don’t even fully understand what they are about. Community peer pressure comes into consideration for most parents in Ireland because even the non-religious wouldn’t want it to be said that their child hadn’t been confirmed along with his classmates.

It is not the theology itself that incites my anger when I remember my religious experiences as a youth. The fact is that many or most people pick and choose the bits they personally require and dispense with the more ludicrous and nasty elements of Catholicism in favour of a bespoke type of religious moderation that really isn't catholic at all. More often it is the repression it always had on free thought and critical thinking. In my school religion was taught an examined in a way no different to biology or maths. However it differed in being a subject not only to be learned in the classroom but a doctrine to be enforced by peer pressure and ceremonial propaganda. 

It amuses me now to remember the teacher student dynamics that often occurred at those sports-hall masses we used to have ash wednesday or some other nonsense. Back then we would have been sniggering and laughing as adolescents do, not taking the event very serious at all, until one of our teachers would come along telling us to be quiet and show some respect. The teacher would be satisfied that he had imbued us with the appropriate level of contrition and we would sit quietly and listen as just a little pang of the old catholic guilt rises in our bellies. Thinking about it now though, I see that the sniggering and laughing boys were showing the appropriate level of respect all along. We were the silly little boys not grasping the full significance of the ceremony and the teacher was the dutiful overseer of virtue. Now I see that the teachers had taken a break from teaching and that now they were enforcing.

It is true that the Catholic church has displayed an outward growth in humility over recent years. There is more room for open discourse with the population and even some theological concessions have been quietly accepted. However, it is always a retreating tyrant that begins handing land back to the natives. Modesty is a weapon to shield decline. Where was the humility when their power in Ireland was seemingly exponential? Was there any modesty in the horrific and malevolent acts they committed when the island was theirs to be pillaged. They preach forgiveness if you repent. So they repent.