Take a minute out to watch and listen to The Pale Blue Dot, scientist Carl Sagan’s reflections on the tiny speck that is the beautiful earth in the midst of the vastness of the universe. Awe is a human experience – it is not the preserve of people stuck within myopic religious constructs. Don’t let irrationalists hijack it. Be human. Experience wonder. Enjoy life.
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Category Archives: Joe’s Blog
religion warps thinking
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.
TV3 interview
If you liked my documentary on my journey from belief to unbelief you might also be interested in the TV3 interview which was broadcast today in which myself (Joe Armstrong) and my pal (John O’Sullivan) were interviewed on Irish television.
My documentary ‘From Belief to Unbelief’ now live online
Click here to listen to my documentary ‘From Belief to Unbelief’ which charts the story of the journey of three men – Declan Wynne, John O’Sullivan and myself, each of us former members of a Roman Catholic religious congregation – from religious belief to outgrowing those beliefs.
John Murray Show interviews Declan, John & Joe
To listen to Declan Wynne, John O’Sullivan and Joe Armstrong being interviewed on Irish national radio about our journey from belief to unbelief, click here.
‘From Belief to Unbelief’ documentary on RTE Radio 1, Sat. 13 October, 2012.
I’ve spent more than six months working, with Nicoline Greer from the Documentary on One team at RTE Radio 1, on making a 40-minute documentary called ‘From Belief to Unbelief’.
It charts the story of my journey from belief to unbelief, and also that of two fellow novices, John O’Sullivan and Declan Wynne, who entered the Marist Fathers’ seminary at Mount St Mary’s, Milltown, Dublin, in September 1980.
Of the twenty who entered that year, only three remain in religious life. I left after nine years. Declan after ordination, having spent thirteen years in the order. John is the most recent to leave: he was a member of the order for some thirty years.
We each speak of the insights, realisations and key events in our personal paths starting with our sense of a call to the priesthood and religious life; entering the seminary; our challenges, questions and crises; our deeply personal and painful decisions to leave religious life; and our contented lives today as unbelievers.
The documentary is not only the personal story of three men: our lives may be seen as a microcosm for the transformation taking place in Irish society in the last 20, 30 or even 50 years. In the early 1980s there were some 40 seminarians in the Marist Fathers’ seminary in Ireland alone. Nowadays, there are no Irish seminarians in the order and Mount Saint Mary’s is no longer a seminary. The chapel which once reverberated to the sound of many young vibrant seminarians now lies silent and is rarely used. As recently as the early 1980s, the houses of the Marist Fathers in Ireland boasted full communities of priests, compared to the small and aging communities remaining today.
Thirty-two years after entering the order, I revisit the former seminary in the company of Father Denis Green SM, now in his nineties, who used to be my spiritual director.
Documentary maker: Joe Armstrong.
Production supervision by Nicoline Greer.
‘From Belief to Unbelief’ is scheduled for broadcast in the Documentary on One slot on RTE Radio One, at 6 p.m. on Saturday, 13 October. It will be repeated the following evening at 7 p.m. From broadcast date it can also be listened to online or downloaded from www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone as an mp3 or Podcast. If it isn’t on the front page of that link, simply search for ‘From Belief to Unbelief’ in the RTE Radio One, Documentary on One search bar, or find it under the ‘Life’ category.
Olympic lessons
I have been much inspired by watching the Olympics. I’m amazed by the healing of my own attitude to the British in light of the Queen’s recent visit to Ireland. Even my inherent reaction to the Union flag has changed for the better. That nod of the royal head towards our dead patriots in the Garden of Remembrance earlier this year has shifted something tangibly within me. Intellectually I’d long discarded the myopic nationalism of my childhood and youth, one which watched Bloody Sunday live on television when I was aged ten. Then, the British were the enemy on the day that the Parachute Regiment did more to recruit for the IRA than any campaign the republicans could have dreamed of.
I was thrilled by Katie Taylor’s much-deserved success. But Annalise Murphy’s heartbreak probably taught me more. The commentator mentioned how she would see that the wind was on the right and that the third time she would take the more favorable course. But she did not. And after the race, a distraught Annalise realized that it had been within her power to choose a different course. But then, she, and I, may have learned more by her mistake than had she blazed to Olympic gold. She was doing so many things right and only one thing wrong. And the realization that we can choose a different course, that it is within our grasp to change our destiny, is a wonderful lesson to learn. Think of Invictus, that wonderful film about Nelson Mandela: we are masters of our fate (even if we’re in prison!).
We can learn from our mistakes. Sometimes victory is missed not by forces beyond our control but by our passive repetition of a repeated mistake. Realizing I could choose differently is a powerful realization that we are masters of our fate. And we can, today, choose a different course. We are not slaves to habits or windless tunnels. The open seas are ours for the taking.
‘Punk prayer’ & Putin’s repression of free speech
The continued imprisonment of the feminist Russian girl punk band Pussy Riot is an outrageous repression of free speech by Moscow’s Putin regime. The punk trio – Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (23), Yekaterina Samutsevich (19) and Maria Alyokhina (24) – have been detained since March 2012 following a noisy but peaceful protest in an Orthodox church last February 2012 at which three masked people sang a ‘punk prayer’ calling for the overthrow of Putin and mocking the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Last Friday their detention was extended for a further six months. If convicted, they could face up to seven years’ imprisonment. The London Times rightly last Saturday, 21 July, 2012, ran an editorial on this unconscionable attack on free speech, seeing it as a test case for freedom of speech under Putin’s regime. No less chilling than their imprisonment for musical political protest is the report that a Russian Orthodox Patriarch has accused the singers of ‘blasphemy’, that hairy old chestnut of those who believe in ridiculous things wanting their daft beliefs protected rather than being exposed for what they are: abject nonsense.
Amnesty International have called for the immediate and unconditional release of the trio. Amnesty have pointed out that the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly ruled that freedom of expression applies not only to inoffensive ideas, “but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population”, even if the action was calculated to shock and was known to be likely to cause offence. Amnesty adds that ‘the activists left the cathedral when requested to do so and caused no damage. The entire incident lasted only a few minutes and caused only minimal disruption to those using the cathedral.’
Putin: release these women now. Tear down the new walls you are erecting of fear, imprisonment and silencing freedom of expression. History shows where that leads. Be brave and release those who criticize you. As for the Patriarch: your life is based on a lie: Jesus did not rise from the dead. Grow up and leave aside your silly religious beliefs.
Censoring priests and the Vatican’s breach of UN Declaration of Human Rights
Does it not bother Catholics that what they hear from their priests and bishops isn’t necessarily what those selfsame clerics actually think or believe themselves? Or that those who mouth the Vatican line might have more akin to parrots than pastors?
Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights enshrines self-expression as a fundamental human right: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’
Does it bother you that well-known and unknown Irish Roman Catholic priests, are, as we speak, denied that fundamental human right by the Vatican?
If it is true that books have been bought and pulped on the instruction of the Vatican, does that not unnerve anyone? Can anyone think of other regimes that burned books and suppressed ideas?
The trite argument that priests signed up to a body of belief and that they can’t pick and choose is simplistic and silly. For instance, the tradition of a married priesthood has a longer tradition within the Roman Catholic Church than that of compulsory celibacy. The ‘you-can’t-pick-and-choose’ brigade might remember that when they cling limpet-like to the Vatican’s current stance.
Does anyone really want their priests to be unthinking indoctrinated automatons who have abandoned their intelligence and critical faculties to become mindless minions of the Vatican?
There are those who argue that priests who can’t swallow the Vatican’s current dictates should simply leave. Simply? What of a man who has spent his entire adult life as a priest? A man who is entirely financially dependent upon the Church, without whose priesthood he has no job, no professional identity and no wife or children to go home to?
Besides, why should thinking Catholic priests allow the current Vatican clique to usurp onto themselves the mantle of Catholicism? The Vatican manifestly breaches the Church’s own teaching on conscience. Thomas Aquinas was clear that one must always follow one’s conscience even when it means disobeying the pope. The current repressive, censoring, anti-free speech, anti-discussion Vatican regime has little in common with the openness engendered by Pope John XXIII or the vision of the the Second Vatican Council.
Given that freedom of expression is a fundamental human right enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, are we to stand idly by while the Vatican violates that basic human right through its censoring and silencing of fellow Irish citizens?
Hitler, Stalin and Mao burned books and silenced dissent. Chilly company, Benedict.
Dear Cardinal Brady
Dear Cardinal Brady,
Resign. Your position is untenable, unconscionable, incredible. It is self-evident to any adult of common sense, but evidently less so to an episcopal canon lawyer.
If a person in a golf club became aware of the dangers posed to named children by a member of a golf club, do you honestly think it sufficient for any responsible adult merely to report the incident to the president of the golf club and not also tell the police and the parents of the endangered children? And then you lamely, limply, blame the president of the golf club for not curtailing the rape of children by the golf club member!
To say nothing of your involvement in a confidentiality agreement with an abused victim.
Your moral failure is remarkable, your lack of accountability extraordinary, your ‘reasoning’ as you defend the indefensible and cling to your power and position gob-smacking beyond words. Shame on you.
And this shame will follow you to, and beyond, the grave into the annals of history; and will grow with every hour that you cling to your bankrupt episcopal authority.
Joe Armstrong