| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Religious meetings at the Natural Cafe | |
| Posted by: | Alan Duffy | |
| Date/Time: | 21/05/07 18:58:00 |
| I strongly suspect that neither you or Julia have been to the North of Ireland and hence your rather simplistic view point on what has been happening there over the last few decades. It is true that in much of the nationalist community tends to be Catholic and much of the Loyalist community is Protestant but the reasons for the division are largely political. The British ruled the area through a 'Protestant Ascendancy' which denied Catholics basic Civil Rights up until the late sixties. When Catholics marched peacefully to try and obtain those rights (supported by progressive voices from across all sections of society) the response was brutal and violence followed. There was no endemic emnity between Catholic and Protestant who get along just fine in the Republic. The primary cause of 'the troubles' was the mishandling of the situation by a succession of British Governments. The religious element to the conflict is incidental. Most of the Loyalist terror groups were completely amoral criminal gangs whilst the IRA were ostracised by the Church and the INLA were a secular and avowed anti-clerical group. It goes without saying that their activities were totally at odds with the teaching of the Catholic Church. All mainstream Churches promoted reconciliation and without them it is extremely unlikely that the Good Friday Agreement would ever have happened. I perhaps should point out that I myself practise no faith but as a rule the people in this part of the world that I knew who were the most constructive and committed to peace were the ones that were sincere in their faith. The ones who promoted division and violence generally had no faith or saw it as a tribal badge to wear with little understanding of Christian morality as they were too ignorant to see the contradiction of their views and their expressed beliefs. I suspect what I have written won't cause some people to change their opinions on this matter either because they are too set in their views or unable to take in arguments of any degree of complexity. Unfortunately an association with this part of the world does make a person familiar with the modus operandi of bigots. In Northern Ireland people generally use quite respectful language when talking about another person's faith even if it is not their own. It is therefore quite a shock for me to hear the way people are expressing themselves here. The bigot would always take an entrenched and often insupportable position based on prejudice rather than fact, advance his views with absolute certainty that they are right and use deliberately offensive language to rile those that he hated. I don't really see how a lack of a religious element makes bigotry any more palatable or acceptable. |