I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like had I never been told the lie that ‘God’ exists. Imagine a life without picking up all that negative made-up, loopy thinking about ‘sin’, ‘sex’, ‘Hell’, ‘guilt’, ‘damnation’. Religious thinking warps normal thought. It leaves us believing in mythical beings. We choose things on the basis of false information. We make life decisions based on the biggest lie of all. Little wonder, then, that once we realize that God doesn’t exist that it takes a long time to shake off all that warped thinking.

The Emperor has no clothes. Yet people place religious leaders like the Pope on a pedestal, even though he is peddling nonsense and piffle.

When you think of the history of religions, their rise and fall, it is inexorable that all current religions will decline and fall. What’s happening in Ireland these days, and in much of the Western world, is a gradual realization that, in Christianity, in Catholicism, in Protestantism, we’ve been sold a pup. That which we once believed in is, we now see, literally incredible. That a carpenter rose from the dead. That a child was conceived in a female human by an angel. That the Pope – heavens forbid! – is infallible.

The West is waking up and realizing this. It’s a painful realization. Catholicism has all but shed the great openness introduced by Pope John XXIII: like the collapse of the Soviet Union, they see that once freedom and honest thought is introduced, most reasonable people leave. And so they clasp at the past, wind back the clock, retreat to conservatism and control and ostracizing the thinkers. Where, for a while, it seems people could engage with theology, now they are not to think but merely to submit their uncritical minds to the party line. That is no future! That is the death of any organization and any religion. Their own leaders will strangle it, twist life from its body politic. And, in the process, they will warp more lives, as mainly those too lazy or unable to think critically will respond to the dodgy invitation to pay up and shut up and park their brains outside the increasingly empty and chilly churches.