Disaffection with HAI aired in Newstalk interview

IN an interview with Andrea Gilligan on Lunchtime Live on Newstalk, Wednesday 23 March, 2022, I aired my personal disaffection with the Humanist Association of Ireland.

No Church has a monopoly on Christian weddings

I said: ‘Just as, for example, within the Christian community, there are loads of different churches and denominations, and the Catholic Church isn’t going to say no the Lutheran Church can’t do a legal wedding and Baptists can’t do a legal wedding. It would be outrageous.’

No Humanist body should have a monopoly on Humanist weddings

‘And in the same way the Humanists should also welcome other Humanist groups to have the same legal authority to legalize weddings.’

‘They shouldn’t seek to have it as a monopoly for themselves because that would be really against the values of equality and inclusiveness and reason.’

‘It should be an open thing. More groups should be allowed to do it.’

‘It shouldn’t be something that’s a monopoly of the Humanist Association of Ireland. And it would be a shame for Humanism if they were to grasp and hold on to that for themselves.’

The General Register Office should recognize other Humanist bodies, since the rich tradition of Humanism stretches over continents, cultures and millennia and cannot be the exclusive right of just one registered company in Ireland.

If and when the GRO recognizes other Humanist bodies, as I hope they will, it will be good not only for Humanism but also for the Humanist Association of Ireland.

Difficulties with direction of HAI

Interviewer Andrea Gilligan asked: ‘How is business, Joe, for you?’

I said: ‘To be honest, Andrea, I’m kind of on my way out of ceremonies.’

‘I’ve been doing it a long time. I was nine years studying for the priesthood (and as long as a Humanist celebrant) and the longer you’re at it, you see different things.’

‘I feel it’s gone too commercial’

‘So, to be honest with you, I would have difficulties with the direction being taken by the Humanist Association of Ireland. I feel it’s gone too commercial.’

‘For example, if I were do a free ceremony – every so often I would do a free ceremony – and the HAI want their cut. And I just think that’s ridiculous.’

Need for other GRO-approved Humanist bodies

‘So I feel increasingly uncomfortable within the Humanist Association of Ireland, which is why I would like there to be other Humanist bodies which were authorized by the General Register Office to conduct legal marriages.’

Trust your Doubt

Speaking of my indoctrination into religion from childhood, I said that I wished that someone had said to me to ‘Trust your doubt’.

Doubt is the beginning of wisdom, not faith in an imaginary god.

Yes, Yes, Yes

Thank you Ireland for voting Yes in the recent referendums. We are now living in a much more compassionate, egalitarian state. It feels much more like a secular Humanist Ireland.

I never would have thought that I would have lived to see the day when the once theocratic state of Ireland freely acknowledged equal marriage and showed such compassion and recognized the equality of women in the latest two-to-one majority referendum, which recognized women’s autonomy over their bodies and their personal right to choose what happens with their own bodies.

Any crisis pregnancy is precisely that: a crisis. Ireland came of age – we became adults! – in finally acknowledging that the decision is not ours but the woman’s. It is not the state’s, but the woman’s decision. It is not the church’s, but the woman’s decision. It is not a doctor’s, but the woman’s.

If men had babies, it would never have been a debate.

How barbaric was the Constitution until the Irish people, finally grown to adulthood,  saw that they had no right to decide for a woman what is only a woman’s choice to make for herself.

When I left my priestly path after nine years in a religious order, I realized that it was my first adult decision. With the two recent referendums in Ireland, we have grown up. We have heard bishops tell us that we should go to confession for voting Yes. It might be a better idea if bishops confessed to woman, wearing sackcloth and ashes as is the biblical garb of contrition, for their oppression of women which continues to this day. A church that declares that it has no authority to ordain woman simply has no authority!

I get annoyed when I hear church folk say to believers that they can’t ‘pick and choose’. In fact, the authorities of the church have for 2,000 years picked and chosen. They adopt positions that are outright contradictions of earlier positions that they held dogmatically. For instance, the church once held that ‘outside the church there is no salvation’ and an American priest got into trouble with his own church for maintaining the church’s original unambiguous stance. To say nothing of their condemnation of Copernicus, the church maintaining its insistence that the universe revolved around the earth! It remains the church which needs a Copernican revolution, and a humble and contrite one at that.

And the church held dogmatically that Anglican orders were ‘absolutely null and utterly void’. The church no longer holds that position either. And the celebrated saint and doctor of the church Thomas Aquinas did not regard a fetus as having a human soul until 40 days after conception for a boy and 80 for a girl. Nope, I don’t think I heard anyone on the No side in the termination of pregnancy referendum mention that one. And when you study the history of the church it is clear that there was not one clear position on the status of the fetus nor on abortion through the ages, even though believers either don’t know this or are economical with the truth.

I recommend the scholarly work ‘Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven‘ by Uta Ranke-Heinemann for anybody interested in discovering the truth about the Roman Catholic Church and sexuality and especially its two-thousand year oppression of women in its warped thinking and practices.

 

All great truths begin as blasphemies

Blasphemy Day
Come along to the Humanist Association of Ireland’s World Blasphemy Day Saturday 30 September 2017 event in Foley’s Bar on Merrion Row, where the HAI will be screening a lighthearted ‘blasphemous’ movie for your entertainment. Gather from 5pm onwards. The film will be shown after 6pm and finger food will be provided!
Due to the size of the function room, numbers for the film screening are limited. If you would like to come along to see the film, please RSVP to Selina at blasphemyaware AT live.com.

More Humanist musings

Time passes so quickly! As ever, the challenge is to live in the present. To  savour this moment. To be thankful for all we have and all we are. Being human, all too often we only appreciate things when we’ve lost them.  So enjoy this day. Count your blessings. All you have going for you. Stand back a bit and reflect. Breathe. That heart won’t tick forever. It’s later than you think, and all that. Health, our greatest wealth. The people in our lives. Be thankful too for yourself. I always liked the line from one of the psalms: ‘For the wonder of myself.’ Most of us need to consider that. For each life, ours included, is full of wonder. Sure, we’ve all made mistakes. But we’ve got a lot right too. Made more good decisions than poor ones. We’re survived. We’re reading this. We live. Hope lives. Life exudes all around us. Expel air. Breathe it in. You won’t always be able to do that. Heart ticking. Yours. Mine. For now. So, enjoy this moment.

What would a Humanist Ireland look like?

It would begin with children. Every child in Ireland would have equal access to his or her local national primary and second-level State-funded schools. None would be discriminated against because he or she was not baptized.

How shameful it is that in 21st-century Ireland that that still remains the case!

And, staying with children, in a Humanist Ireland, young children would not be taught to believe in deities simply because their parents or grandparents believed in them. The integrity of children’s minds would be respected. Children would not be taught as ‘fact’ something for which there is not one whit of evidence.

Warping children’s minds is intellectual child abuse. There was a time when lots of people got away with child sexual abuse because the wider community didn’t appreciate how shameful a thing it was to sexually abuse children. Or they didn’t realize how pervasive it was. Or it was just hidden and not talked about, so unlikely and outlandish did it sound.

Likewise, it’s not that long ago since corporal punishment was allowed in schools: physical abuse of children was socially acceptable. Now, thank goodness, neither child sexual nor physical abuse is tolerated.

So how long will it take before people realise that to abuse children’s minds is equally despicable?  Why do we still think it’s OK to teach children that man-made deities exist, watch them, judge them and will punish or reward them?

I speak as someone who believed in a religion for years, who staked my life on that false belief and spent nine years studying for the Roman Catholic priesthood. I, more perhaps than many, realize the tortuous and difficult path from belief to unbelief. It is like casting off an addiction. It is to rethink everything.

Imagine if a society believed it acceptable to give alcohol and drugs to children as young as three and five and seven and nine and twelve? And yet, I submit, that is what we do in having children ‘imbibe the faith’. A nice word for indoctrination.

Religions indoctrinate children because if most sensible, rational and reasonable adults were to  first encounter the crazy doctrines of religion as an adult they would laugh and dismiss them without giving them another second’s thought.

So what would a Humanist Ireland look like? Equal access by all children to their local State-funded primary and second-level schools, with baptismal privilege abandoned as not only discriminatory but abusive of children’s innocent minds.