Making Confirmation and regular attendance at Mass

Hannibal_Smith wrote: »

You were the one posting about How people weren't reverent enough. I came up with a suggestion which might restore the reverence and you have a problem with that too. :pac:

See previous posts on being a Catholic. I'm getting off the roundabout

No. The only way to restore the reverence is to remove the irreverent people. No need for genuine Catholics to be inconvenienced by a change in the routine at all .

kylith wrote: »

There is nothing to stop the child choosing to join any religion they want to as an adult.

Personally I think that no baptisms or the like should be done until the inductee has reached the age of reason. It should be a person's own choice whether they want to join a religion, not their parents'.

Part of being a Catholic is handing down the faith to your children,
And absolutely if a couple wanting the sacrament of matrimony having not had the sacraments of reconciliation first eucharist or confirmation then the priest they speak to about this will be able to organize all the Catholic instruction they need to help them to get up to speed.
Many adults return to the church in later life.

splinter65 wrote: »

Part of being a Catholic is handing down the faith to your children,
And absolutely if a couple wanting the sacrament of matrimony having not had the sacraments of reconciliation first eucharist or confirmation then the priest they speak to about this evil be able to organize all the Catholic instruction they need to help them to get up to speed.
Many adults return to the church in later life.

Nothing to stop parents talking about their faith to their children, just that the churches couldn’t baptise them until they’re old enough to make the decision for themselves. In some religions parents modify the bodies of their children. Surely it would be both a greater expression of commitment for the inductee to choose to have this done rather than having it done to them, as it would be more meaningful for someone to choose to be baptised.

Bob_Marley wrote: »

Thing is though, Catholics don't care what Catholic haters think they should do. Parents are entitled to bring children up in their culture.

No-one’s saying they can’t, just that they can’t sign their children up for lifelong commitments when they’re infants and can’t make the decision for themselves. Why the anger toward the idea that people should be able to make their own decision about religion they’re signed up to?

I don’t hate Catholicism. I just want it to leave me alone.

One eyed Jack wrote: »

I wouldn't agree that atheists generally do know more about religion than the religious adherents of any particular religion.

Pew findings in the US do suggest that sort of thing though.

I myself have always been amazed at how little people seem to know about the religions they claim to follow. The most striking example of this was when I was actually giving Bibles to Christians who never owned or had one before.

What was striking about that was how shocked they were at the size of it. They genuinely thought it would be MUCH smaller because A) they had never read it and they had been fed the same cherry picked passages in Mass and School over their life they became convinced they must have heard it all.

I can only speak for myself of course, but if I genuinely believed the universe was created by an intentional agent, and that agent had a hand in writing, inspiring, co-authoring or in any way influencing a single book in my local library...... I would go out of my way to read that book quite closely. I could not NOT read that book. So it is interesting as a social and memetic phenomenon that people who DO have such beliefs about that book.... can't be arsed to even inform themselves on what one LOOKS like. Let alone read it.

Meanwhile my own experiences match that of Pew here in Ireland when I was collecting and experimenting on the magic crackers of Catholicism. Or the "Haunted Bread" as one TV Character once put it.

Much like yourself when it comes to religion I suspect, these people have ZERO substantiation for anything the purported to believe. But what they purported to believe fell into three main groupings. Those that thought the cracker ceremony was purely symbolic, those that believes a spiritual (but conveniently undetectable in any way) change actually came over the foodstuff, and those that thought a LITERAL physical change succoured (none of which my experiments with fire, chemistry, physics and more could detect).

Striking was that everyone, regardless of group, claimed to KNOW they were conforming to actual Catholic Teaching on the subject despite admitting openly they had never actually read Catholic Doctrine on the matter, nor do they recall anyone in school or mass ever informing them of it. They just "knew".

And yet I have not met an atheist myself who does not know what the ceremony mumbling Latin over dry tasteless bread is actually meant to symbolise and achieve.

One eyed Jack wrote: »

It stands to reason of course that if you attended school in Ireland, you'd be more familiar with Christianity for example (and the various denominations within Christianity), than you would be with Islam (or the various sects within Islam), so this whole 'atheists know more about religion than believers' stuff? I don't think so.

All of the people I describe above were schooled in Catholic Schools in Ireland however. Does not appear to have helped them know one iota about Catholic Doctrines however. Shows the efficacy of that school system you defend I guess.

But the Pew studies do find that not only do atheists tend on average to know more about a given religion than adherents of that religion....... when it comes to OTHER Religions they score even better. As the study says "Jews and atheists/agnostics stand out for their knowledge of other world religions".

Of course none of this is the "finger pointing" or "judgements" you might want to pretend it is. It is just commenting on social facts, nothing more. And once can discuss facts without passing judgements. But certainly something is amiss when someone can not read a simple question like "What is your religion" before going on tangents about their memberships which have NOTHING to do with the question actually asked.

But certainly it is comical (to go back to the main topic of the thread) for a priest to be worried about offering services to people who do not go to mass often enough. Perhaps he should be worrying about how informative and useful his masses have NOT been in actually letting people know what it is the church is even teaching in the first place. Perhaps rather than withholding services from irregular mass attendees, he might worry instead as to WHY attendance is falling off.

Or perhaps it is easier to slap (perceived) punishments on others for him than self-evaluate his own failings.

beauf wrote: »

...if they didn't follow ANY of them the kids wouldn't be attending communion or confirmation anyway...

As pointed out, they leave that to the schools.

beauf wrote: »

Well I'm convinced. All those people in the world who have no interest or contact with religion especially RC will likely be christian theologians.

Hardly But they do appear in my experience to have a solid grounding in the basics.

Though an atheist for example is not "people in the world who have no interest or contact with religion". Quite a lot of them have more contact with it than they care to. I for example would love to never have to deal with it ever again in any way. I am, alas, simply not let. It invades EVERY sphere of interest I actually do have.

All I can say is that if I was a believer in a creator of the universe, I would certainly do my best to learn all I can about it and what it wants and what it intends for me.

It does strike me as unusual that the people I would therefore most expect to do so, do not, and the people I would least expect to do so, do.

Would it not strike you as at all odd that someone who professes to believe the Bible is the one true insight into the mind of the creator of the universe has not gone out of their way to even see a bible and know how big it is, let alone what it actually contains?

It certainly strikes me as odd. Or at least it would if I did not subscribe to some working theories that actually explain it perfectly. Such as Daniel Dennetts "Belief in Belief" concept for example. A theory that appears to fit observation quite neatly.

beauf wrote: »

...this thread would make you seriously consider that some people do exist in an alternative universe....it bears no relation to the one I'm in anyway...

Even if you had no contact with religion your whole life and simply watched movies you'd know about most of this stuff that apparently people in religions don't know but atheists do. Maybe people in religions don't read books, or watch movies etc.

Banning religion is a communist dictatorship “thing” so some atheist posters don’t want to be seen as advocating for that.
What they would be mildly interested in however, as far as I can ascertain, is some sort of written exam for Catholics ( no other religion or denomination mind, just Catholics) and if you fail this exam you are forbidden by law from describing yourself as a Catholic, thus reducing (presumably) the still fairly hefty percentage of Catholics in the country who are apparently oppressing and subjugating everyone else.
That’s my probably daft take on all this.

Odhinn wrote: »

It's strange that you resent knowledge.

Studying the Bible and reading about catholic dogma and doctrine and Canon Law, particularly when you are coming at the whole thing with an almost overpowering negativity and resentment, doesn’t give you any insight into what being a Catholic is, so there’s no real aquisition of “knowledge”.
When you are studying something with a view to using that information in an effort to ridicule somebody else’s beliefs, belittle them and embarrass them then you haven’t acquired knowledge, you’ve just gathered up weapons.

splinter65 wrote: »

Studying the Bible and reading about catholic dogma and doctrine and Canon Law, particularly when you are coming at the whole thing with an almost overpowering negativity and resentment, doesn’t give you any insight into what being a Catholic is, so there’s no real aquisition of “knowledge”.
When you are studying something with a view to using that information in an effort to ridicule somebody else’s beliefs, belittle them and embarrass them then you haven’t acquired knowledge, you’ve just gathered up weapons.

Maybe you should look at yourself when it comes to an ‘effort to Ridicule’. I, and many other atheist, were raised in the RCC. I was a member of a church choir for over a decade. I went to the bible to read, study, and learn about my religion; and what I learned there inspired me to atheism.

Again, I say it is telling that atheists know more about religion than believers and have more respect for the sanctity of sacraments than believers.