Monthly Archives: June 2018

A new secular take on the Prodigal Son, by Joe Armstrong

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A guy decided it was time to leave the nest. He formed the view that he wouldn’t grow and develop if he just went on working with his Da and bro. Life was out there and life was short and fleeting. He seized the hour, asked his Da if he could have the inheritance that would come his way in later life and, to his delight, his Da supported him in his choice.

His Da was remarkably detached. He trusted his son, didn’t try to manipulate him to stay, gave him a heap of cash and the young man headed off, leaving home, heading off like Dick Whittington for London. He’d seized the hour. He was creating himself anew, decided things for himself, becoming an adult.

He lost his virginity soon enough and had a number of sexual liaisons. He explored his sexuality, mainly with women, and realized he was more straight than gay. He even met the woman he thought he might live with for life but it didn’t work out. He learned much about life, about himself and about growing up.

He got a job which he was good at and he went on learning and feeling more alive than ever before. He was obeying himself, making choices for himself, earning for himself and in search of the love of his life (he wouldn’t meet her for another three years!)

Then the financial crisis hit. He lost his job. He’d taken on more debt than he could manage. He had to hand back the keys of his house. He was skimping just to eat enough and after a few months of that he came to his senses and said, ‘Feck it, I’m going home. I’ll touch base with Da and start again from scratch.’

His Da, ever detached (in a good way), ever supportive, said ‘Sure, son, come on home until you get yourself sorted. You’re always welcome here.’

His Da threw a party for him, celebrating his son’s decision-making, his adventures, and his return home to recalibrate his life.

His brother, who had never made an adult decision in his life, was well-cheesed off by all this. Fooling himself into thinking that his cowardice to live his life, make his own decisions and take his chance in the world was a virtue rather than the vice that it was he said to his Da: ‘Here I am slaving for you on the minimum wage for the past decade and your other son comes home broke from all his galiivanting and you welcome him home and throw him a party.’

His Da said. ‘I love you, son, no more and no less than your brother. You chose to stay. You knew the wages. It was your choice. You knew you could have earned more by taking your chance in the world. You could have trusted yourself and left home and been willing to make some mistakes and learned to live with the consequences of your decisions. I respect your choice, just as I respect your brother’s. But don’t blame me or your brother if you die without ever feeling that you have really lived, without ever having taken some risks, without facing your fear of making mistakes and having to live with the consequences of your choices, which is what adults do. Don’t blame anyone. You alone decide.’

Joe Armstrong © 2018

Yes, Yes, Yes

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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.