As you may have noticed, I’ve been winding down That’s Ireland in recent weeks. During that time, I have been working on a new blog, which is now online.
MichaelNugent.com will be mostly about two issues that I’m very passionate about:
Understanding why and how people are happy, because happiness is the underlying reason that anybody wants anything, and
Promoting atheism, because I believe that the idea of gods is bad for society as it makes good people do bad things.
Ironically, my interest in happiness started when I wanted to be a success. I studied what very successful people have in common. Step one: to succeed in anything big, you must start with a passionate desire. So I did an exercise to help ignite that desire. For each aim, I asked ‘why do I want this?’ and for each answer, ‘why do I want that?’ I soon discovered my underlying motivation. Beneath all of the layers of sub-reasons, I wanted anything for exactly the same real reason: because I believed getting it would make me happier. But would it? Many people remain unhappy despite fabulous success. So I shifted my focus from seeking success to the reason I wanted it… happiness.
My interest in atheism is much simpler. I am an atheist because I reject the idea that gods exist, in the same way and for the same reasons that I reject the ideas that that the earth is balanced on the back of a sea turtle, that homeopathy is more useful than a heart transplant, that Rapunzel wove her hair into a ladder or Rumpelstiltskin wove straw into gold, that stepping on a pavement crack will break my mother’s back, that a deposed Nigerian prince wants to email me several million dollars, that Uri Geller can bend spoons with his mind, that I am in danger from vampires or zombies or broken mirrors, or that I am protected by angels or leprechauns or horseshoes.
With Ian Paisley announcing his retirement, here are a few clips from YouTube of the Big Man in action. First, Paisley calls the Pope the Antichrist at the UN Assembly in 1988. Which is of course funny, but even funnier is the news commentary at the start, which reveals that a display of bronze nudes had been removed from the UN lobby for fear of offending the Papal entourage.
Noah is sitting by a table, drinking wine. His clothes are falling off him, and he is partly naked.Mrs Noah, and their sons Shem, Ham and Japeth arrive with a birthday cake.
ALL
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday, dear Noah, happy birthday to you!
MRS NOAH
Congratulations, dear! Six hundred and one years old today!And we’re back on dry land.
Bizarrely, apologists for Cardinal Connell seem to be suggesting that the reason he is trying to hide files from the child abuse Commission is that he wants to protect the confidentiality of the victims of these crimes. However, Connell already has form in concealing knowledge of serious sexual crimes from the police, and the effect of this has been to protect the criminals and the Catholic Church, not the victims.
So what is in the files that Cardinal Connell is trying to hide? Well, the Commission is examining how the Dublin Archdiocese responded to a representative sample of complaints against priests. If those samples are similar to cases we already know about, the files could contain such behaviour as refusing to tell the police that a priest had admitted sexually abusing a sick child in a hospital and photographing the abuse, telling a victim of child sexual abuse that she was trying to ruin the good name of her abuser, lending money to a paedophile priest to settle a legal case against a victim then telling the media that he had not compensated anybody, appointing a paedophile priest as chaplain to a hospital without telling the hospital why, deciding to have a particularly vicious paedophile priest defrocked then letting him continue as a priest while appealing the decision thus enabling him to sexually assault the grandson of a deceased person after a funeral, and generally moving paedophile priests from parish to parish to continue sexually abusing children.
Here are details of five sample cases in which we already know that Cardinal Connell presided over the above responses.
In 1960, Father Paul McGennis, who was chaplain at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, sexually assaulted at least two young girls who were patients in the hospital, and took photographs of the abuse. One of his victims was Marie Collins, who was then thirteen. In the late 1970s, the same priest repeatedly sexually assaulted a nine-year-old girl in County Wicklow.
Here is how the Catholic Church dealt with this case. >>>(more…)
Between 1968 and 1987, Father Ivan Payne sexually assaulted an unknown number of children, some of whom were patients in Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, and some of whom were altar boys or may have been children who he met while he worked for more than 20 years as a volunteer with Sunshine House, the St Vincent de Paul holiday home for poor children.
Here is how the Catholic Church dealt with this case. >>>(more…)
Father Noel Reynolds admitted sexually abusing more than 100 children in eight Dublin parishes. In 1995, another priest reported concerns about the behaviour of Father Reynolds as parish priest of Glendalough. In 1996, several parents complained to Cardinal Connell that they were worried that Father Reynolds had been sexually abusing their children.
Here is how the Catholic Church dealt with this case. >>>(more…)
Father Tony Walsh was a priest in Coolock and Ballyfermot, who impersonated Elvis Presley as a member of the All Priests Show during the 1980s. He sexually abused an unknown number of children, including masturbating on top of an altar boy who had served at his ordination mass and raping a young boy in the Phoenix Park on his ninth birthday. In 1995, following a funeral, he sexually assaulted the eleven-year-old grandson of the deceased.
Here is how the Catholic Church dealt with this case. >>>(more…)
Between 1983 and 1988, Father Thomas Naughton sexually abused an unknown number of young boys in three different Dublin parishes. During this time, the Archdiocese twice sent him to see psychiatrists for treatment, then returned him to work as a priest thus enabling him to continue to abuse children. In 1995 one of his victims, Mervyn Rundle, took a legal case against Father Naughton.
Here is how the Catholic Church dealt with this case. >>>(more…)
As Archbishop Connell is now putting his faith in the civic Courts, I was wondering what would happen if some Biblical characters did likewise. Here is my take on the legal case of the Serpent from the Garden of Eden versus God.
A Courtroom. There are two serpents. One is sitting at a bench, and is wearing a Barrister’s wig. The other is lying on the ground.
BAILIFF
Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. The Court of Appeal of Biblical Decisions is now in session. All rise for the case of the Serpent from the Garden of Eden versus God.
The judge enters. The Barrister-Serpent rises and stands upright. The other Serpent stays lying on the ground.
JUDGE
(to Barrister-Serpent)
Why has your client not risen?
BARRISTER
He has been cursed by God, your honour, and he must now
(looks at papers)
‘go on his belly and eat dust’. He wishes to appeal that decision.
Here is the rest of the case transcript: >>>(more…)
Cardinal Connell is trying to block the child abuse Commission from seeing 5,586 documents, out of a total of 66,583. His apologists quote this statistic as if it proves that he is only trying to hide a small number of documents. Of course, they are also likely to be the most important documents, but put that aside for a moment.
Just look at the scale of this. You know what a ream of A4 paper looks like. It contains 500 sheets. Well, Connell is trying to hide an absolute minimum of between eleven and twelve reams of paper, all dealing with his response to complaints about paedophile priests.
And that’s assuming that each ‘document’ is only one page long, which would be unusual for most legal documents. The actual total might be twice that, or even more.
But the scandal is even greater than this. >>>(more…)
Two extraordinary phrases jumped out at me when I read today’s report about Archbishop Connell’s court challenge.Those phrases are: ‘relating to claims of child abuse against a representative sample of 46 priests in the archdiocese’ and ‘insurance policies in relation to child abuse claims.’
Now I know that we have become immunised to scandals, but just think about those two phrases for a moment.Child abuse is a serious crime.
What type of organisation could gather together in one city not just two or three employees, but ‘a representative sample of 46′ employees, all of whom have been accused of abusing children?
What type of organisation would feel the need to take out insurance policies to cover the consequences of their employees repeatedly abusing children? And what type of insurance company would provide such a policy?
Just last week in England, a Catholic parish priest from Kerry lost his bid to appeal a five-year jail sentence for using €20,000, including gambling winnings, to finance his lover, already a twice-convicted child-rapist, to rape another child.
I wrote about that case last June, both because of the serious nature of the crime and because of the astonishing response of Bishop Joseph Duffy of Clogher, who commented on a Catholic priest assisting the repeated rape of children as if it were some sort of natural disaster for which nobody was responsible.
The preamble to the Irish Constitution includes at least two untruths: that all authority of both men and States comes from a fictional being called ‘the Most Holy Trinity’, and that the people of Ireland have obligations to somebody called ‘our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ’.
Actually, all authority (in the sense of legitimate power) comes from agreed relationships between people, and not from any gods that some of those people imagine to exist.
And the people of Ireland have no obligations to Jesus Christ, who may or may not have existed in the Palestine of two thousand years ago, but who is certainly not the ‘Divine Lord’ of four million citizens in the Ireland of today. >>>(more…)
Taghboy in County Roscommon is one of only four rural Irish places where everybody is a Roman Catholic, and there are seven more places where there is only one non-Catholic. Here are the top ten Catholic Rural Irish places, based on the recently-released Small Area Census Statistics. >>>(more…)
97 of every hundred people living in the John’s A area of Limerick City are Roman Catholic, and six of the ten most Catholic urban Irish places are in Limerick City. Here are the top ten, based on the Small Area Census Statistics. >>>(more…)
97 of every hundred people living in Ferbane, County Offaly, are Roman Catholic, and the ten most Catholic Irish towns are in Offaly, Limerick, Clare, Donegal, Carlow/Kilkenny, Mayo, Cork and Kildare. Here they are. >>>(more…)
Roscommon is the most Roman Catholic county in Ireland, and Limerick is the only Irish city with more than the national average of Catholics. Here are the ten most Catholic Irish cities and counties. >>>(more…)
One in five Dubliners is not a Roman Catholic, and ten Irish cities or counties have less than the national average of Catholics. Here they are. >>>(more…)
One in every four people in Coolmountain, County Cork, has no religion, and the ten most godless rural Irish areas are all in Cork, Clare and Kerry. Here are the top ten, based on the recently-released Small Area Census Statistics. >>>(more…)
