Losing My Religion

Pat Byrne interviewed me last Thursday, 4 July, 2024. We discuss my dream of becoming a priest when I was an adolescent: ‘Doctor, teacher or priest? I decided to do the best of them all: become a priest!’

We chat about married priests, and coming to the realization that the Catholic Church would never allow its priests to marry. And my shock of realizing the Big Lie of all religions. And how losing religion and finding myself has b...

Author Joe Armstrong is interviewed by Scott R. Stahlecker, host of the leading YouTube channel Atheist View: Life without Religion

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7mNYXFXuBg). 

We talked about Irish rock legends U2. Joe sings Molly Malone! Both Joe and Scott are former committed Christian ‘pastors’ who no longer believe in God.

They discuss the negative view of self that’s inculcated from childhood by Christianity, with its emph...

Podcast of the book launch of Saved by a Woman, the new book in the acclaimed memoir series Losing Religion, Finding Myself by Joe Armstrong, author of the Joe the Human Substack. Humanist celebrant Eamon Murphy, interviews the author, Joe reads extracts from his second memoir, there is live music and recorded songs co-written by Andrea Patron, The Rayne and Joe Armstrong.

Recorded on 3 March 2024 at a live Zoom event. The podcast ...

The second part of guest appearance by Joe the Human Substack author, Joe Armstrong, at North West Humanists, Sligo, Ireland, on 3 March 2024, invited by Gill Bell, Convenor, Humanist Celebrant and Biodynamic Psychotherapist. Relaxed interview format, with readings from the second book, Saved by a Woman, in the memoir series Losing Religion, Finding Myself, by Joe Armstrong. Available in Kindle, Paperback and Hardback editions. Thi...

First Part of Gill meets Joe interview. Joe Armstrong, author of the memoir series Losing Religion, Finding Myself (https://www.amazon.com/-/en/dp/B0C71Q2XK7?binding=paperback&qid=1617184162&sr=8-1&ref=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_pc_tpbk) is interviewed by Humanist Celebrant and Biodynamic Psychotherapist Gill Bell (humanistgb@gmail.com), Convenor North West Humanists (Ireland), in Sligo, Ireland, on 3 March 2024, four days before th...

Do many priests and bishops feel that religion is a money-making ‘scam’? Are clerics too deeply embedded in religion to reject it? Do priests ‘know well’ that the whole thing is based on nonsense? Are there as many atheologies among non-believers as there are theologies among believers? How difficult is it to be searingly honest in public? Does a lack of self-esteem predispose people to religion? Does religion offer a sense of cont...

A million people gathered in Dublin in 1979 for the first ever papal visit to Ireland. Humanist celebrant and former student for the Catholic priesthood Joe Armstrong reads two episodes from his acclaimed memoir In My Gut, I Don’t Believe.

In Episode 9, he offers his perspective on Ireland’s then best-known clerics, Bishop Eamon Casey and Father Michael Cleary, both of whom had clandestine relationships and fathered children, causi...

In an emotional podcast, Joe Armstrong reads the sad account of his father's massive stroke and its impact on Joe as a young man, from his memoir In My Gut, I Don't Believe. This podcast episode also includes Joe's honest self-examination of his attitudes in his youth, prompted by the recent publication of the Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland. Joe speaks of the need for all of us to b...

In My Gut, I Don't Believe: A Memoir by Joe Armstrong has just been published in paperback and Kindle editions. https://www.amazon.com/My-Gut-Dont-Believe-Memoir-ebook/dp/B08MCS5VWX This book has been 25 years in the making. An intimate coming of age memoir, set in a Catholic seminary in 1980s Dublin. Using his private journals, Joe Armstrong shows his personal, psychological, emotional, sexual and intellectual growth, from boy to ...

Aged 17, Joe Armstrong, like so many of his contemporaries, became entranced by the Charismatic Renewal. The movement, supported by bishops and priests, was sweeping the Catholic Church in the late 1970s. People were ‘speaking in tongues’ and being ‘prayed over’. There were ‘Camp Jesus’ youth jamborees and all-night vigils.

It was as if the Holy Spirit had been released again, like the story of Pentecost, when the disciples went ou...

Weaving the theme of belonging, meaning and hope, I recall Tolstoy's opening line in Anna Karenina: 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'. My brother Paul banished from home in his teens. My brother David vanished in his teens, his whereabouts unknown. 'The family that prays together, stays together,' says my mother, missing the irony of my two absent brothers. She warns me that if she turns ...

In this second episode of Losing My Religion, Joe Armstrong compares our propensity towards religious belief to our vulnerability to Covid-19, especially when exposed to religion in early childhood. He explores how religious beliefs seeped into his mind as a child, given his family and 1960s Ireland. He also shares a funny tale of his recent purchase of a caravan, its close encounter with a gate post, a steep hill and a raging rive...