Morality without god

Didn't see this until now (big thread!)First of all regardless of whether Catholicism is Christian or not, Ireland is slowly getting rid of Christianity, because younger people are increasingly atheistic, which I think counts quite strongly as not Christian.The vast majority of the population under 25 would be either atheists or liberal deists, this is a huge change from my parents generation were almost everybody was a strict Roman Catholic.As for Ireland having an original "pure" Christian church, this is an idea I've seen a few times, along with the idea that Gaelic Ireland was libertarian (or anarchist according to some writers). I'd be happy to debate this with you on another thread if you wish, because I think it is completely false. The pre-1200 Irish church (1200 was when the Irish church became mostly Roman), would certainly not count as evangelical or true Christians using your definition.

Ah, I see. Yes, that is correct, the island originally had a church semi-independent of Rome, so there is some justification in calling it non-Catholic. One of the big areas of debate in Irish church history is was the church Roman or not, so certainly that view is a valid one.Full "Roman" Catholicism took over in the period you mention, basically as a consequence of the Norman invasion.What I was getting at is that the non-"Roman" church which existed in the Old Irish period (so called because all texts from that period are written in Old Irish, a literary standard) had a lot of elements to it that I would imagine (although I could be wrong) you wouldn't consider very Christian and maybe possibly worse than Roman Catholicism.That is, I'm not sure Celtic Christianity would be any more palatable than Roman Catholicism to modern Protestants. Well in the turn from Roman Catholicism, the two major alternatives have been American style evangelism or deism/atheism, so probably the number of Christians has gone up as far as your concerned! I should say though that our Christian/Catholic character is mostly a result of the famine. In the 18th century for example virtually nobody attended mass and having heard or read any of the bible was considered noteworthy even for a literate person. To give you an idea our native poetry (in Gaelic) rarely contains any reference to the biblical imagery.

Well to be more detailed:Irish churches explicit state that they drew their authority from Rome and the Pope. For example the Madslechtae a legal text composed in the 9th century contains two works, the Hibernensis and the Liber Angeli, (along with other works, such as how to rate Latin scholars!) which acknowledge the preeminence of Rome as sedes apostolica "apostolic see" and caput urbium "chief of cities".Specifically it says the church is the greatest thing on Earth, the bishop is the greatest one in the church and (translating myself, I couldn't find one online):Is espac as uaisliu db-sidhe easbuc ecasla Peatair
"It is the bishop of the church of Peter (i.e. Rome) who is the highest bishop among them."And the Hibernensis is the work of legal experts who were more tolerant of non-Roman views. (Sharpe, "Armagh and Rome in the seventh century", in N Chathin and Richter (1984)). There was another faction the so called Romani who strongly advocated for completely following Roman doctrine.Edited by Son Goku, : Pointless "of"

No way, T.F O'Rahilly got in a lot of trouble with the Irish Catholic hierarchy for saying that there was two Patricks. He worked in DIAS (Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies) which also had a theoretical physics department which at the time was discussing quantum gravity, where the universe could just come into being. I remember when I was young that a lot of Catholics used to say disparagingly of the Institute:
"They say there's no God and two Patricks".

Well I don't know what the Catholic church thinks exactly, I just know that most historians think there were two Patricks. T.F. O'Rahilly's 1942 short lecture "The two Patricks: a lecture on the history of Christianity in fifth-century Ireland"is still a good introduction, there's also "The problem of St. Patrick" by James Carney.