No, he just can’t find any in Heaven.
(I am trying to joke. If there is a Heaven - which I don’t believe - a former colleague of my father belongs in it. My father doesn’t because he’s an atheist, and his former colleague wouldn’t be seen dead in a Catholic heaven anyway, being Jewish.)
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On the second sentence, if you had met some of the Ulster Protestants I have you would realise just how tribalised they are. My experience of NI Catholics is rather different and I have the impression that tribalism goes further up the socioeconomic scale among Prots than Catholics. If you sense that I like Irish Catholics better than Irish Protestants that’s probably true but born of experience; also educated NI Catholics are less likely to be religious bigots. Today tribalism seems to continue with segregated schools and walls between some areas, almost all of which are working class. But I’ve lost touch in the last 15 years and can’t really comment.
Now, tribalism versus religion - I’m not writing a thesis here. But tribalism for me is related to growing up in a social group which holds that its members are special in some way and which has a reservoir of special cultural practices. Heredity and often place are very important in tribal identity along with the transmission of the culture. It’s studied by ethnographers and social scientists. Religion is an external, non-organic set of rules, beliefs and practices which may often be traced directly to a particular founder, which is maintained pretty invariably by a written tradition. There are plenty of crossover examples - is Judaism a religion or an ethnicity? But the Roman Catholic church is not tribal, nor is Buddhism; Protestant sects tend to fission very quickly and don’t show the cultural continuity of tribalism.
I think the NI joke which perhaps exemplifies this is the one about the man who is stopped one night by two men who demand of him “Are you a Mick or a Prod?” to which he replies “I’m an atheist.” “But are you a Mick atheist or a Prod atheist?”
[variant readings substitute Jewish, Church of England].
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I find Fry’s angle the least convincing one, that is, criticizing the Judeo-Christian god for various cruelties of nature.
Why not focus on his “actual” words and acts in the Old Testament? The guy is a genocidal, narcissistic, illogical kook.
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I always felt that this joke is one of the most enlightening about a complex matter.
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Father Dougal: Come on, Ted. Sure it’s no more peculiar than all that stuff we learned in the seminary, you know, Heaven and Hell and everlasting life and all that type of thing. You’re not meant to take it seriously, Ted!
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On another comment page about the Irish blasphemy case someone has posted how he was beaten up by NI Unionist Protestants for not standing for “God Save the Queen”.
Whereas I imagine that if asked 80% of the British public including the entire Royal Family just wish the Unionists would b…r off and die, because they are nothing but a troublemaking drain on the Exchequer. Like having Alf Garnett in the house next door, but also having to pay his rent.
the Unionists aren’t a homogenous tribe either, most of the middle and upper class unionists detest the working class loyalists and fundamentalist presbyterian nutters, almost as much as they detest the shinners.
Then there has been progress, which is good.
This isn’t progress, it was always thus.
I suspect that the Swiss are pretty tribal. They have just decided to suppress their dislike of the funny-talking sheep-shaggers from the next Canton over, in the service of the greater cause of disliking people from outside Switzerland.
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Well, all right. Swiss story. Told me by someone from Zug.
A man in Zurich owns a factory and takes his son into the business. Then the son marries a girl from Zug. After a year she gets tired of Zurich so they move to Zug and the son commutes.
After six months his father sacks him. “But why, Dad?”
“Everybody knows you can’t trust those buggers from Zug.”
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Haha! You wish. What this politician (who I have no time for) did was craft a minimally compliant piece of legislation after the Supreme Court told them that they needed to address the issue one way or another. What yours did was fuck everyone over for the sake of their own egos and careerism. There really is no comparison.
I would have much preferred if they had a referendum and deleted the section of the constitution that mandated this, but if they had I would have also complained that they had dealt with an utterly trivial example of a part of the constitution that has no actual effect and never has when there are important issues that need fixing like the 8th amendment which has real negative outcomes every day.
Are you sure? I thought that was the previous position. The old law was ultra vires the constitution. This law hasn’t come up for discussion in the SC I thought but the salient point is not that it is unenforceable but rather that it is pointless as:
“It shall be a defence to proceedings for an offence under this section for the defendant to prove that a reasonable person would find genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value in the matter to which the offence relates.” So it is pointless prosecuting something other than pure hate speech which is covered elsewhere. Anything other than pure racist driving trollies is a defence which defeats the prosecution, the Gardaí and the DPP won’t bring prosecutions that will inevitably fail.
Investigation was, nobody was offended apparently (and as pointed out above this is in a program for OAPs), most people believe that it was a (seemingly successful) attempt to force the government to move forward on the schedule to amend the constution.
I don’t think so. The law would not be struck down as unconstitutional as it was written not to be while at the same time being unusable. It was much more likely for the above reason.
Fry is round about as much a national treasure in Ireland as he is in England. I think he’s seen as the modern incarnation of Wilde or something! (as @caze says he played him in a film)[quote=“Enkita, post:80, topic:100551”]
Back 1500 years ago Ireland consisted of 5 (and sometimes 4) kingdoms who spent their time kicking shit out of one another
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The actual fuck does that have to do with anything? Seriously. That you can describe Ireland, Serbia, and Palestine as inherently tribal is absurd. Inherent? A forced colonisation does cause a little bit sand in the vaseline of social lubrication. Other than that Ireland is the same as any Western democracy. If Englandwere invaded by a ruling class of Germans who still owned, say, London it might look a tiny bit different.
Educated NI protestants are unlikely to be religious bigots. And their distaste for the fundamentalist women hating, gay hating extremists is genuine. They suffer from a serious lack of political representation though.
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I’m going on the ones I encountered at university and afterwards. They were presumably educated and middle or upper class to have got into Cambridge and their bigotry level was jaw dropping. In fact, I well remember one of them remarking in a discussion that of course Catholics were not Christians, and when called up on that saying “If that makes me a bigot, I’m proud to be a bigot”.
I am sure, because I’ve met a few, that there are plenty of non-bigots in NI. But the only way they could be described as “Protestant” was in terms of not being Catholic.
“One shouldn’t make useless laws. They weaken those that are necessary.” Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis
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Yes you’re right, it seems the previous act (1961) was found unenforceable by the supreme court because there was no sufficient definition of blasphemy in Irish law (and what was there was found to be unconstitutionally discriminatory), the 2009 act rectified this, but was worded in such a way as to make it next to impossible to prosecute (you would need to prove intent to cause outrage “among a substantial number of the adherents” of a religion, and proving intent is very difficult), and like you said it provides enough defensible justifications to allow just about anything aside from overt hate speech.
There’s another interesting part of the act which might provide an interesting angle for a defence:
In this section “ religion ” does not include an organisation or cult—
(a) the principal object of which is the making of profit, or
(b) that employs oppressive psychological manipulation—
(i) of its followers, or
(ii) for the purpose of gaining new followers.
Would be fun to argue that Catholicism is one such religion, childhood indoctrination alone could reasonably be argued to amount to “oppressive psychological manipulation”. Really the only difference between a cult and a religion in my eyes is the number of members.
Obviously the entire blasphemy clause needs to be repealed, and the relevant parts of the constitution need to be amended to do that, but this issue is probably the least important issue of religious interference in the state, which would be the role the church still plays in healthcare and education. Several successive governments now have attempted to deal with those issues, but they haven’t got very far, and in the case of the National Maternity Hospital they seem to have gone backwards.
There was also the recent Dáil Prayer thing, and the half a minute of quiet reflection where everyone must stand, and while that’s also ridiculous (even if for no other reason than it means the Ceann Comhairle has to be religious (and Christian) - to read the prayer, so it’s discriminatory and therefore unconstitutional), it’s more akin to the mild embarrassment of the blasphemy law.
We also need to remove nearly every reference to god from the constitution, aside from something dealing with the freedom of religious belief perhaps, that should be tied together with fixing the blasphemy issue in a single referendum, but we’ve got to sort out abortion and religious control of schooling first.
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I like the BBC’s line on it
Irish media say the Garda dropped the case as there was no injured party.
(emphasis mine).
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I think the world changes. If NI Protestants find Ireland hateful, stuff like this is ample reason. See also Dáil prayer (which is actually fine for C of I but not Muslims, Jews, atheists, dissenters, etc). The disheartened lower class bigot is closer to the trump supporting racist: the industry which hired only them is gone, the institutional racism which favoured them is dying (Arlene Foster couldn’t helping herself embezzling money intended to improve the environment for sectarian groups because: fundaligionist, environment, what else do they stand for?), and they feel cheated without a coherent political voice.
Amen to all of that. Every word. That is why this has never been an issue for me to campaign on. Simply deleting the reference in the constitution to blasphemy is an easy and appropriate fix. But it’s less important than nearly all the urgent reform that the constitutional convention was supposed to address. This particular issue actually in practice more exercises people who hate, fear, or have contempt for, Muslims. And Muslims (and Protestants and Jews) are actually my allies in seeking to disentangle religious history from healthcare and education.
Also: referendums are a blunt instrument with unintended consequences if poor information, sloppy wording, imprecise definitions etc. are used.
