Of course I don’t think we should all be taking religion to the extreme like some of the images we get from Israel etc. I have seen images and videos of people ‘re-living’ Jesus’ last walk bearing the cross and being nailed to it also.
Imagine seeing that at the top of O Connell St!
But I do believe there should be more respect for religion in Ireland. Its not that it is non existent, in any town in Ireland there is always less graffiti and rubbish around the churches, although the same cannot be said for graveyards unfortunately.
They seem to have become places for ‘knacker drinking’ where youths conjugate to drink alcohol in little known areas. Now im not saying all youths do this, but some do.

But Jesus (supposedly) gave his life for us, he died for sins we committed. So where has the respect for him disappeared to in the last 50 years or so?
The generation before this one still holds respect for church holidays and actively participate in church activities. Yet how many younger people will obey church 'rules' such as fast days and refraining from use of contraception.

On Holy Thursday the off license in the town near me had three other people buying crates of beer and spirits in the brief time I was there. This was, presumably, to get them through the next day; Good Friday, where alcohol cannot be served. One day! Our nation cannot go one day without drinking, or at the very least, stocking up on alcohol in case they are in dire need of it.
Good Friday was also a fast day, where traditionally we don't eat meat. But look at any menu in a pub or a restaurant that day and you would have been spoiled for choice with any meat you wanted to eat. There would be, of course, a non meat alternative supplied but it is still a shame to see our holy traditions being overlooked.
But come Easter Sunday, we were all Catholics once again. This was a day for celebration, a day to go to the pub, to drink at home with the family, or to hit the dancefloor that night with your mates. Isn't it fantastic to be living in Catholic Ireland where we get this long weekend where we can so thoughtfully appreciate and celebrate being part of this religion

So Easter is nearly upon us now and the shops are filled with.......chocolate. Is it just me or has Easter become almost as commercial as christmas? The first Cadburys Creme Egg (the number one confectionary sold during Easter no less) was out....wait for it....before Christmas.

So have we gone too far? Thinking about the next holy celebration even before we have one over and done with?

There has been a backlash in recent years about religious feasts becoming far too commercial and Easter seems to prove this. While the retailers seem to think it is ok to force their products on us in 'celebration' of Jesus rising from the dead on Easter Sunday, it is a tad ironic that we are mourning his death just 3 days earlier. 

So just where did this association with chocolate eggs and Easter start? And how has it taken over so quickly? It makes me feel old just to look in the shops at the Easter decorations and I'm still a student! The Easter Bunny phenonomon also seems to have spiraled out of control, the shops are full of cutesy little Spring animals, all in shades of pastel, inviting us to buy them as 'Spring is here! Winter is over! It's time for Easter!'

But is this too far, would our Lord approve of this farcical celebration of Spring, which has pagan connotations by the way. 

Just how many children care about the celebration of Easter? It is supposed to be a day of celebration for the rising of Jesus, who died for our sins. Yet there is no sign of this in any of the shops around Dublin City. How are kids supposed to associate Jesus and Easter when all they see around them are bunnies and baby chicks. 

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.