Driving rain, expanding waistline…

Extract from my 2nd memoir

I resumed my audio diary on 4 January 1994: ‘Good morning. It’s extremely late. Twenty-five past seven. Holy fuck! And I’m only coming out of New Hall! I’m fourteen bloody stone. I get married, contentment arrives, I buy a car, ditch me bike. My waist used to be thirty-two, it’s now thirty-six!’

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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.

Beast from the East

There has arisen in the East a brutal tyrant

There has arisen in the East a brutal tyrant. Humanity quakes – not because Putrid Putin is a great and powerful man because he is not. Far from great, he is an ogre, a cancerous growth that must be excised. Nor is he powerful since the great threat he poses to humanity has nothing to do with true human power.

Puny Putin is inadequate

Like any tyrant, he is dangerous because he is so inadequate as a person. Puny Putin inflicts pain on millions only because of his inhumanity.

Hitler and Putin

Puke Putin is far from terrifying. Far more frightening is our repeated capacity as a species to allow Hitler and Putin to attain and retain political and military power.

And in the decades between the two to forget what humanity had to learn the hard way.

Humanity on trial

This story ends only with the decimation of human values and humanity or in a bunker in Moscow.

There is no room for moral ambiguity. Here, there is no neutral space between good and evil.

Hitler Youth restored

He has his Hitler Youth. He has his criminal apologists. He has his bombs. He has his deluded supporters who cannot or will not see the truth.

His legacy: death and destruction

As you read this, millions are fleeing from his tyranny, his delusions, his lies, his bombs. Women and children are dying. Lives are being wrecked, ruined, ended.

Wake up humanity!

Wake up! We are at war and humans of goodwill cannot rest in Russia or in the world until this cancer of humanity has been excised.

What are you prepared to do?

And there has arisen in the East a brutal tyrant. What are you prepared to do?

Pariah Putin

How can any Russians in the West support Putin?

We can understand that Russians in Russia are being lied to by Putin and his cronies. But what are we to make of Russians in the West who defend him?

I cannot understand it. Is it that identity clouds reason? I should know. For years I believed in Catholicism. I identified with Catholicism. I maintained that sense even when reason undermined my childish beliefs.

It took me so long to see the light of reason.

Is that how it is with national identity too? In a crazy world, do Russians cling to Putin and his mythology rather than face the unfathomable reality of the catastrophe he has unleashed on Ukraine and in the world?

How long did it take Germans to recognise the twisted logic of Hitler? Will it take Russians as long?

School Yard Bully

I used to be a teacher. I’m trying to imagine a school yard bully with such power that even teachers wouldn’t intervene to stop him beating up a smaller pupil.

That is the dilemma facing the West right now. A bully so powerful that people of reason are afraid to defend the bullied pupil. Why? Because the bully has threatened to massacre the family of any teachers who intervene to save the pupil who is being beaten to a pulp.

What can the teachers do? Nobody wants their families to be treated like this battered child is being pummelled. And we know that this psychopath would carry out his threats on the families of any and all teachers who intervened.

NATO’s cop out

NATO says: ‘You are not a member. I am not obliged to fight for you. If I fight for you, our cities will be laid waste by this madman.’

It is an understandable response. Our first duty is to protect our wives and children, our homes, preserve peace in our streets. We do not want war to spread to our homelands.

We watch the child being beaten to a pulp, almost to the point of death.

We feel impotent. We cannot make love to our wives. We are limp when we try.

We let the bully continue his unprovoked assault, his rape of the child.

But is our peaceful neighbourhood, our sanitised life, worth living, if we stand by and let this child be bullied, beaten, crushed, raped, killed?

What humanity do we preserve by saying ‘I can do no more’?

Heroic Bullied Child

We watch as the child heroically fights his aggressor, his enemy, the Arch Bully of Humanity. We watch.

Limp-organed, we do things from the sidelines. Radical things, like reducing the bully’s social welfare income. We won’t sell him sweets. We won’t play with him or let our children play with him. We ask him to stop.

But the Arch Bully, the mafia boss, the untouchable, goes on beating the life out of the pupil. The pupil begs for us to help. We say sorry. We can’t. Because if we do, he will do that to our wives and children too. And he will wreck our lovely homes and our happy lives.

The child has been pummelled almost to death. The pummelling continues. The child can barely breathe now.

‘Please, please, please help me,’ he manages, in stuttered gasps, almost inaudible now.

‘I cannot,’ says Boris the Brave. I cannot allow my brave British boys to be beaten like you are being beaten. I’m sorry, child, you must die.’

#Ukraine #NATO #Bully #Humanist #Russia #PariaPutin


Life’s Great Leveller

Death is life’s great leveller

Creates in us an edge like a beveller

Destroys every holy and secular prelature

Razes to the ground every predator.

Don’t shoot the messenger!

(c) Joe Armstrong 2022

All who hold power will cease to hold power. Every oppressor the world has ever known (except the living ones) has died. In time, everyone who wields power unjustly over others will die. They will become a skeleton, like everyone else. Their legacy? Shame. Hurt. Injustice. And the truth usually comes out in the end.

Death truly is life’s leveller. Knowing that everyone dies, myself and the oppressor, the oppressed can find within themselves an edge, just as a beveller creates an edge on a cabinet. Knowing our mortality and that of the oppressor can create in the oppressed an edge, a vitality, an insight, an energy.

All humans were created and will always remain equal, despite the injustices meted out by many who wield power.

Just as death creates in us an edge, so too does it destroy every prelate, king and unjust ruler; be they ‘holy’ or secular.

Every predator will be laid low, razed to the ground, sooner or later. Time and truth favours the oppressed. The truth will out in the end.

Those who wield power don’t like these truths. Some may be tempted to shoot the messenger. But that won’t save them from their inevitable end.

Audiobook of In My Gut I Don’t Believe, narrated by author Joe Armstrong, just published!

I am delighted to announce that the audiobook of my memoir In My Gut, I Don’t Believe has just been published! Narrated by the author, the audiobook has been a labour of love. It helps to grasp the meaning and flow by listening to the book read by its creator. Especially when it’s a memoir. The book is also available as a paperback and Kindle eBook on Amazon and elsewhere. Click here for the link to the audiobook if you’re based in Ireland or the UK.

Difficulty of breaking free from religious thinking, commitment & organisation

It can be incredibly hard to break away from religious thinking, a religious commitment and religious organisations. I found it very hard to learn to think for myself and harder still to trust myself enough to make a decision based on religious doubt and carry it out. I continually allowed religious people to undermine my decisions. Until I didn’t. I am happy that I narrated the audiobook of my experience. Just published.

Sample audio from In My Gut I Don’t Believe

Here’s the Audible summary of the book:

Summary of In My Gut, I Don’t Believe

Searingly honest coming-of-age memoir

Joe Armstrong spent nine years studying for the Catholic priesthood. He no longer believes in God. This is his acclaimed, searingly honest coming-of-age memoir of his nine years in the Marist Fathers seminary in 1980s Dublin, Ireland.

Procrastination

A case study of procrastination and self-discovery, it is of interest to anyone who has ever fluctuated this way and that and struggled to make a big life decision. It shows the author’s gradual transition from lack of confidence in himself to finally knowing what he wanted. It shows how he found the courage to make the hardest and best decision of his life.

Doubt is the beginning of wisdom

It champions the wisdom of doubt, and sees doubt as the beginning of wisdom. It charts the author’s inner movement from obedience to a church to learning to obey himself. He learns to trust himself, think for himself, and be true to himself. 

Authentic insight into celibate seminarian & priestly life

This is a rare authentic insight into the true lives of celibate seminarians and priests.

Co-dependency

It is also of interest to those struggling with co-dependency, giving a frank portrayal of a complex relationship with a dysfunctional mother. It is also a fascinating portrayal of an experience with counselling, and how it can help us to break destructive patterns and gain authority for our lives.

Very well-written & performed, with humorous moments

Despite the profound theme, it is a compelling, easy-to-listen-to memoir, with many moments of humour. Superbly written, the audiobook is performed with panache by the author.

Here’s a recent review of the book by Canada-based Dr Nick Overduin, whose doctorate is in memoirs and biographies, so this is high praise coming from him:

Recent review of In My Gut, I Don’t Believe

Extremely well written

This book is extremely well written. For example, the constant combination of abstract notions with concrete imagery is delightfully articulate and amazingly agile also in its grammar. As a personal journey, it represents a huge accomplishment in staying faithful and true to oneself, one’s innermost spirit.

Struggle for freedom from sense of religious calling

It deals with two crises simultaneously. First of all, the author struggled with the enormous tensions involved in extricating himself from a constraining sense of religious calling in Ireland. He spent nine years training for the priesthood before deciding definitively that this was not a good pathway for himself.

Freedom from complex family relationships

But secondly, the author also needed to process very complex family dynamics during those nine years, particularly in relationship to his mother, but also an uncle, two brothers and a father, not to mention many formative relationships with friends and mentors.

Authenticity of memoir from author’s seminary journals

Since all the events recalled in the book’s decade happened quite a few years prior to this narrative production, the memoir’s accuracy and self-discipline profits greatly from the fact that the author made extensive forays into journaling while he was in that seminary long ago. He is therefore able to look back from the vantage point of age, more than thirty years after the events, but without re-casting things in his own reconstructed terms. The actual facts are constantly before him, and therefore also before the reader.

For people who struggle with demise of religion & complex families

It is clear that the author needed to write this journey down, not just for his own benefit and self-understanding, but so that readers anywhere who struggle with the widespread demise of religion alongside the prevalence of dysfunctionality within family systems will be able to recognize their own souls in the mirror of this book.

Ireland and Doubt becomes vivid

Ireland comes alive, and the nature of doubt becomes vivid; but more importantly, the world becomes alive, and the reader experiences an awakening of their own heart.

For other great reviews of In My Gut, I Don’t Believe, click here.

Audiobook coming soon of In My Gut I Don’t Believe

I am delighted that the audiobook of my memoir In My Gut I Don’t Believe will be published shortly. I feel it’s an important part of my legacy, showing my life’s lesson. I learned, the hard way, that I needed to make decisions for myself – not accept decisions about my life made by others.

I learned that nobody knows me better than I know myself. I learned to trust myself – my hunches, thoughts, feelings and gut feelings. I learned to make and act on the basis of my honest judgement – not the decisions of others. I learned to stand alone.

I extracted myself from my old pattern of shelving my opinions and judgements because I gave undue respect to the opinions of others. I learned the importance of Aesop’s tale about the father, the son and the donkey: we should not act on the basis of other people’s judgements but only on ours.

Learning that very hard lesson, I made the biggest decision of my life when I was 27. I left my priestly path, even though I was only six months or so away from being ordained a priest. I became free. I learned to cast off the ideas that had influenced my life from childhood and I began to trust my doubt.

Trusting your doubt is the origin of wisdom. Attending to doubt is what brings about discovery – in science and in our personal lives. Doubt is wisdom. Doubt is your inner wisdom, whispering to you that you are bigger and better than the fairytales you were taught to believe were true.

I walked through glass – metaphorically. Leaving behind my self-containment. I learned to accept myself as I am. I grew beyond the myths that I had been taught were true: they were not true. I learned to base my life on what I knew, not on silly beliefs, which remain silly regardless of how many people believe in them.

Where are believers in Odin now? Where are the believers in the Greek and Celtic gods? They are few and far between. Yet their beliefs are as far-fetched and nonsensical as the beliefs of the current fashionable religions of our day. Today’s religions, cults and deities will go the way of the Norse, Greek and Celtic gods.

Don’t spend your life believing in myth. Trust your doubt. Trust yourself. Live your one and only life to the full.

Fascinating questions about godlessness

Do many priests and bishops feel that religion is a money-making ‘scam’? Are clerics too deeply embedded in religion to reject it? Do priests ‘know well’ that the whole thing is based on nonsense? Are there as many atheologies among non-believers as there are theologies among believers? How difficult is it to be searingly honest in public? Does a lack of self-esteem predispose people to religion? Does religion offer a sense of control – if I say my prayers my sick relative won’t die?

Do people commit to religion believing it’s the best way to be good? How does leaving religion affect your psychological health and relationships? Where will the Church be in 20 to 30 years’ time – what’s the endgame for the Church? Are religious congregations heading for extinction?

Do Humanist celebrants touch people’s ‘souls’ at births, marriages and deaths? Is leaving religion like looking through the Looking Glass? Do former believers undergo a baptism of fire into Humanism? Tolstoy said that abandoning your religion was like walking out into a Russian winter snow without a coat. Is that true? How can you know that you are right to abandon your religion? What does it feel like to realise that, in your head and in your gut, you don’t believe in God? Is it therapeutic writing about the experience of transitioning from belief to unbelief?  

These fascinating questions are addressed in this podcast. They were asked at a live event, by people attending the launch of the acclaimed memoir by Joe Armstrong In My Gut, I Don’t Believe. It was hosted by the Humanist Association of Ireland and compared by Eamon Murphy. For reviews of the memoir, click here. To read or listen to interviews about In My Gut, I Don’t Believe conducted in the media, click here. For the author’s website, click here.

#Humanism #agnostic #atheist #exCatholics #Ireland #InMyGutIDontBelieve #JoeArmstrong #BeingGoodWithoutGod #memoir #Unbelief #Religion #Beliefs #LeavingReligion #HumanistCelebrant #HumanistWriter #FreedomFromReligion

Review by Eamon Murphy of In My Gut, I Don’t Believe

To see many more reviews of In My Gut, I Don’t Believe see here. The review below is by Eamon Murphy, which was first published in The Irish Freethinker and Humanist magazine in its March-April 2021 edition. Eamon interviewed Joe Armstrong at the launch of In My Gut, I Don’t Believe on 10 March 2021, at an event hosted by the Humanist Association of Ireland. You can watch the full launch on the Losing My Religion Joe Armstrong YouTube channel. There are also shorter readings from the book read by the author at the launch on that channel. To watch and hear the clip entitled Innocent Ireland click here. For the clip entitled Sex and the priesthood, click here. At the launch, Eamon Murphy described the book as ‘an answer to a secular prayer’.

Eamon Murphy’s comprehensive review follows below:

Honesty, self-examination & craving to read more

The story and author of this book will be familiar to any regular reader of this publication. Joe Armstrong – journalist, podcaster, humanist celebrant – has been serialising his memoir in the pages of the Irish Freethinker for three years now. For those readers who, like myself, finish his 800-odd words every two months craving more, relief is here; In My Gut I Don’t Believe is now available in paperback and Kindle through Amazon.

A compelling read

For the uninitiated, the book details Joe’s time as a seminarian in the 1980s. He spent almost a decade there before leaving when on the verge of ordination. Just as in his bi-monthly column, it is the author’s honesty and ability for self-examination about this period that immediately strike the reader. Most of us like to think ourselves capable of in-depth self-exploration, openness and candour, but I’ve read few autobiographical works that examine family relationships, internal thought processes or human urges with the honesty displayed here. It makes for compelling reading.

Loving and hating his mother

One of the most fascinating themes explored is the author’s relationship with his overbearing mother, whom he admits to simultaneously loving and loathing. It is never easy to admit that internal family dynamics are far from ideal. From Pauline Armstrong’s dealings with her children and step-children, to a scathing assessment of her by her own brother, to the allusions to her treatment of her husband, she does not emerge well.

Sexual desire, longing for intimacy

Joe brings the same frankness and in-depth analysis to exploring the aspects of his youth which drove him to enter Mount St Marys, a Marist seminary in Milltown, Dublin, in 1980. These sections are a fascinating read for anyone wishing to understand the journey from faith to ‘freedom’. Joe’s honesty in tackling the causes of doubt – sometimes in his vocation, sometimes in his faith entirely – is remarkable. No one will necessarily be surprised to read that the barriers to committing his life to the priesthood included his sexual urges, a desire for freedom from obedience, or a longing for an intimate and exclusive relationship, but the sincerity with which each are explored is what makes this a page-turner.

Affection still for the the Marists

Decades on from his time in the seminary, it is clear that Joe still holds a certain amount of affection for many of the religious he met during his time, while simultaneously eschewing their belief system. This makes for a balanced read. While full of criticism, there is no church-bashing from this escapee of the faith, and the love, friendship and acceptance he experienced in Mount St Marys make it easy to understand why he would spend nine years in such an environment while simultaneously almost constantly doubting his ‘calling’.

Caught between belonging and disillusionment

That juxtaposition between the camaraderie of the novitiate and his feelings of disillusionment on various issues – from chastity to lack of control over the work he would do upon ordination – is laid bare. So too is the long journey from early intolerance of those who did not share his religious outlook – Joe once preferring that those who did not share his Catholic beliefs would leave Ireland altogether – to a more balanced worldview, augmented well by re-produced letters to/from family members during the period (including a beloved uncle, a priest in South Africa).

A microcosm of the decline of Catholicism

While it is obviously not the focus of the story, many of the reasons for the decline of the Catholic Church in Ireland provide important backdrops, and the book gives a deeper understanding of many of these; in dealing with the sexual abuse experienced by the author at the hands of two Christian Brothers; in describing an encounter in the seminary with a priest subsequently to be revealed as a serial child abuser; and examining the struggles of young seminarians with chastity and obedience. Of the twenty young men who entered the novitiate with Joe in 1980, all but three eventually left, either before or after ordination. I’ve no doubt that, to some extent, Joe’s story is their story too.

Joe’s journal a key to the book’s success

The book would likely not have been possible had Joe not been a prolific journal keeper for most of his life, including his time in the seminary. This makes possible a detailing of his emotional, spiritual and philosophical journey that would otherwise have been at best misrepresentative, at worst impossible.

The unexamined life is not worth living

More than thirty years on, we can see that even at a young age, few important aspects of life – faith, love, sex, desire, friendship, vocation, place in the world – were left unexamined or unquestioned by the young seminarian. If the seminary gave him nothing else, it allowed him to truly examine and know himself. The proof is in this book, and it makes for worthy reading.