So Paddy’s day has been and gone, our national and unofficial day of drinking and thanking our patron saint for ridding our isle of snakes. (Regardless of the fact that fossils show Ireland has never had a snake of any kind.)

Recently, I was at the receiving end of a near death experience, now while this has not had any effect on my own personal views of religion, I can now see how some people might drastically change their lives after such an experience.
It has, in one aspect, made me think about life more, about how we are such fragile parts of this world.
The fearful part of this experience for me, though, was that it was a natural force that caused it, the Atlantic Ocean. It proved to me that although humans may think we control the earth and that we are the force to be reckoned with, we are in fact, weak.

Can it all just be a coincidence? That everything all just came together at the right time, the right temperature, the right place, and combined to make this wonderful world. Where we have televisions, iphones and fridge magnets, where we can graph the evolution of man from prehistoric times and yet still be unable to find that missing link when animal became man.
It has to be said here that most Christians’ do not know the full story, that there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands, of books in the Vatican in Rome, containing undisclosed information that has not been deemed ‘suitable’ for the public to hear. Yet why the secrecy?
Wouldn’t it be fairer if our respective schools and teachers told us this? Personally I found out about it by accident, while reading The Da Vinci Code which then made me more interested in finding out about these hidden books.
Just why aren’t we allowed to have the Gospel of Judas proclaimed from the Catholic pulpit every Sunday? If we were given the full story, then it would seem less like we were being manipulated into our beliefs by selective preaching.

So it is St Patrick's Day, the Irish national day of celebration. This is a day which is supposed to be held in honour of the saint who brought Catholicism to Ireland. Indeed this is the man who returned to our island after he escaped from slavery here.
Yet how do the majority of Irish people see this day?
As a day for drinking.
I can honestly say that I have never spent a St Patrick's Day in the pub, indeed I don't think I have even spent that night in the pub either. So I cannot speak from experience about the queues and the hiked prices of alcohol on this day. But just take a look at the parade travelling down O Connell St in Dublin today, the crowds are 10-15 people deep in places at the side of the street.
Just how many of them will leave the parade and head straight into the nearest bar for the evening?
It will be a fairly high percentage I can tell you that much. Just what example is this that we are setting for youth? Its our national day and we spend it half langered in a pub, singing Irish songs and claiming to be patriotic about our country, yet just how many people can tell you what our national colour is.........and no its not green.....

The historian JH Whyte, author of Church and State in Modern Ireland. asked at the start of his book whether the Irish were truly religious or merely adhering to social norms of churchgoing. He concluded that, since people did far more than the church demanded of them, they were obviously genuinely religious. The church said we had to go to confession and communion once a year; most of us went every week, some every day. Whyte was judging behaviour against the demands of church law, not against the social rules by which we were drilled into conformity in a rural country in which there was little other opportunity for meeting all your neighbours in the one place

So where did it all go wrong for Irish religion then? Most people presume that it was the sex and child abuse scandals which led to the Irish public ditching a clergy which failed to meet our standards.

Actually, the decline started in the 1960s, with the urbanisation of Ireland, and it was the women who started it. Around this time the Vatican reaffirmed the 'evils' of sexual deviancy and contraception. This led to questions as to why the church was condemning something which took the risk out of sexual relationships, why were we all following a narrow, strait-laced path when there was other possibilities which could now be chanced?

So perhaps it is the church itself that has led to the present day demise of religion. Certainly it has not helped them to remain so old fashioned in the modern world.