Ireland in "Top Ten" Countries for Atheisim - Less than 50% say they are "religious" - Red C Poll

[Monetpenny]

Many years ago I was working & living in Carlow.
In my last week there a young lady moved into the house.
I was moving out on Friday after work.
On Wednesday night I had a long chat with her – there was no-one else in the house & I wanted to make her feel welcome, even though I was only going to be there 2 more nights with the 2nd of those being my going away party.
Turns out she is a religion teacher & also a lunatic.
That was not a personal assessment.
She told me that she had serious psychiatric problems which she did not specify & had been in several mental institutions on numerous occasions & currently was on medication but every now & then still had ‘episodes’.
She told me of escaping from an institute twice & how on other occasions she used deliberately self-harm as she had a crush on her psychiatrist & she wanted to meet him.
I thought the most insightful thing she told me was that a mental institute is like a prison in that cliques developed & were maintained.
The schizophrenics would group together, similarly the ‘eating disorders’ as she put it & the manic depressives etc would all hang out together. She said it was because there was empathy between the group members as they understood each other.
A part of me wondered how someone with a record of previous & ongoing psychotic disorders could be allowed teach children. But it was a religious school & she was teaching religion so maybe it was appropriate that she had psychiatric issues as there seems to be a parallel between religious cults & psychotic disorder empathy.
Perhaps these cults are so popular & so well knit together as the members understand the lunacy that lurks within each other & think it is normal as they see it reflected in each other.

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

Look at the 'Venerable' Mattie Talbot who when he collapsed and died in the street in Dublin was found to have chains wrapped around his body under his clothes. Apart from that I gather he existed mostly on cups of tea or cocoa.

This chap is known to the dingbat club in Ireland as the 'Venerable' or someone to be admired because he was a drunk who went dry and in the process went off the rails and into what in any logical society would be called a process of self-harming.

There was a man who was quite clearly in need of psychiatric treatment and instead is held up as some kind of ethical example by the more fervently minded.

The old people in Ireland had a piece of wisdom which led them when confronted by someone behaving a bit bizarrely to tap the side of their heads and say to each other 'ah, shur, he is closer to god'.

No truer word. Best bit of psychological diagnosis available in the country for many a decade