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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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 IrishFreethinker 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.
A million people gathered in Dublin in 1979 for the first ever papal visit to Ireland. Humanist celebrant and former student for the Catholic priesthood Joe Armstrong reads two episodes from his acclaimed memoir In My Gut, I Don’t Believe.
In Episode 9, he offers his perspective on Ireland’s then best-known clerics, Bishop Eamon Casey and Father Michael Cleary, both of whom had clandestine relationships and fathered children, causing scandal to what was then innocent Catholic Ireland. He also reads Episode 29 on celibacy, loneliness and desire in the seminary. ‘I was experiencing my loneliness. My desire for intimacy was heightened. I craved an emotionally interdependent, physically expressive relationship.’
Interviewed by Eamon Murphy at the book launch, hosted by the Humanist Association of Ireland, the author also reads one of the several humorous moments in the book.
In an emotional podcast, Joe Armstrong reads the sad account of his father’s massive stroke and its impact on Joe as a young man, from his memoir In My Gut, I Don’t Believe. This podcast episode also includes Joe’s honest self-examination of his attitudes in his youth, prompted by the recent publication of the Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland. Joe speaks of the need for all of us to become self-aware and to learn to think for ourselves.
Reviewed in The Irish Times on 16 January 2020 as an honest coming-of-age memoir that will stir emotional memories for people reared in Catholic Ireland of the 1960s and 1970s, the reviewer Tim O’Brien concluded: ‘Volume 2, please’.
In My Gut, I Don’t Believe: A Memoir by Joe Armstrong has just been published in paperback and Kindle editions. https://www.amazon.com/My-Gut-Dont-Believe-Memoir-ebook/dp/B08MCS5VWX This book has been 25 years in the making. An intimate coming of age memoir, set in a Catholic seminary in 1980s Dublin. Using his private journals, Joe Armstrong shows his personal, psychological, emotional, sexual and intellectual growth, from boy to young man, escaping a dysfunctional mother and a Church calling for the submission of his mind, body and will. A journey from belief to critical doubt.
‘A fascinating, courageous and moving account of an individual leaving the trammels of religion for the good light of humanism – an educative story on many levels, well told.’ – Professor A. C. Grayling
Torn between faith and doubt, safety and risk, love and fear, this memoir is a portrait of a young man struggling to live the vow of celibacy while awakening to his need for affection, intimacy and love. It shows him wrestling with the vow of obedience while discovering his need to obey himself.
This is a life-changing story of trusting and becoming yourself and making the hardest decision of your life. This personal journey from belief to convinced doubt articulates the experience of millions.
In this episode of Losing My Religion, Joe Armstrong reads an episode from his newly published memoir. By coincidence, the book has been published the same month that it was announced that Mount St Mary’s, the Marist Fathers’ seminary in Dublin, has been sold and is to be demolished. This book is a surprising, invaluable and peerless account of a vanished world and a changing Ireland.
My memoir, In My Gut, I Don’t Believe, will be published on 19 December.
It has been 25 years in the making. I’m proud of it and a bit scared about its publication. Honesty is the best policy, and I have been honest, very honest. I wrote things in my personal journal while I was a student for the priesthood that were for my eyes only. Yet, on 19 December, much of what I thought would never be read by anyone else other than perhaps my spiritual director will be in plain sight for anyone to read.
If a book is to be any good, especially a memoir, the author has to become vulnerable. Well, I did. So my apprehension is, I think, a good sign. I feel a bit like I felt some 30 years ago when I was leaving the Marists. You make a decision and there is no going back.
What kept me for so long in the Marists was my ability to see 360 degrees of any issue I faced. Even the week or so before I finally left, my mind could still glimpse another interpretation of my life – the religious one. Called by God. Remaining true to your vocation. Sacrificing yourself.
In my mind, I really could see both sides. And my cure was to get out of my head and into my gut.
‘In your gut,’ asked my counsellor. ‘What do you believe in your gut?’
It was the turning point of my life. A scary prospect. Was I to determine my life, not on my mind, but on the solution offered me in my gut?
Then, as now, it was scary. Literally, I could have been making the biggest mistake of my life, leading to my unhappiness and a lifetime of regret.
Decide on the basis of my gut?
What was ingenious about my counsellor’s question was that my gut doesn’t give a damn about what anybody else thinks. My gut isn’t swayed by other people’s opinions. My gut, it turns out, knew the answer.
Aged 17, Joe Armstrong, like so many of his contemporaries, became entranced by the Charismatic Renewal. The movement, supported by bishops and priests, was sweeping the Catholic Church in the late 1970s. People were ‘speaking in tongues’ and being ‘prayed over’. There were ‘Camp Jesus’ youth jamborees and all-night vigils.
It was as if the Holy Spirit had been released again, like the story of Pentecost, when the disciples went out to ‘preach the Good News’.
If God had really become human, if the Christian message really was true, it had to be the most important thing in life. But that ‘if’ is a very big word, upon which the lives of millions turn.
Secular Humanist Joe Armstrong reads a letter of religious enthusiasm that he wrote to his Uncle John, a priest in South Africa. Once embarrassed by the letter, now Joe is proud of it. It captures the feeling of the charismatic movement and it shows, even at the height of charismania, an underlying, and welcome, sense of doubt.
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