“Not specified” was the drop-down option I reluctantly
selected under the “religion” section as I completed the online registration
page for the National University of Ireland, Galway. It’s rather a personal
piece of information to ask, so the possibility of non-disclosure is a welcome
one. What’s not so welcome is the lack of a “no religion” option: I want to specify, I’d like my personal
details to fully reflect who I am—an atheist, among other things—rather than
suggesting faith is a topic on which my lips are sealed. It’s not some militant
mindset that leads me to complain: I’ve lived happily and quietly without
religion for maybe a decade now, and never felt the urge to run about trying to
convert the faithful. Few subjects interest me as little as religion, so why
not simply not specify with a shrug of the shoulders?
Because of the underlying implications the lack of selection
suggests. The results of the 2011 Census state 256,830 people selecting “no
religion”, less than 6% of the nation’s population, perhaps, but still more
than twice the number of “Church of Ireland” answers, the next most popular religious selection after the
ever-dominant “Catholic”. Atheism, then, constitutes the country’s second
largest belief—or lack of, as it were—and one over ten times the size of the “Presbyterian”
contingent, yet that almost infinitesimally small fraction of the populace is
facilitated by NUIG over their faithless fellow citizens.
I lack the sharpness of memory to recall whether or not the
same system was in place the last three years I registered for the university
online; given the non-asterisked “unimportance” of the field, I think it likely
I simply skimmed it over, like the stereotypical student I am. Yet so seemingly
simple an oversight now gives me cause to shudder: have I been, these last
three years, unwittingly embracing the same don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy on
which NUIG’s restricted religious selection would seem to be based? Withholding
the opportunity to name oneself an atheist where others have free reign to proclaim
their own religious proclivities is tantamount to a secret shaming, as though Godlessness
were goodlessness.
It’s a particularly pertinent problem in a country like
Ireland, where church and state were once all but one and the same. I said
before that I have little interest in religion; perhaps that’s why I have so
much interest in distancing myself from it. It was the existential angst of
adolescence that saw me part ways with my last shred of belief, but with age comes
knowledge, and an appreciation for the sort of shockingly unjust things that
have come of Ireland’s unbroken ties to its religious past give way to the frightful reality of its present. Even if I were still church-going, I dare say I’d want to be seen to
stand aside from The Church.
There remains, at a time when ever more conservative parts
of the world reconsider their approach to same-sex marriage, no significant movement
toward LGBT equality in Ireland despite the recommendations of a Constitutional
Convention. Abortion has only just entered law, and then only in the most
extenuating circumstances of threat to the mother’s life; it took the senseless death of a young woman for even that small step forward to be made. These
distressing issues and more are the direct consequence of Catholicism’s stranglehold
on Irish society: a stranglehold that, though its grip may be loosening,
continues to keep from us the cold air of rational thought.
Maybe it’s exaggerating the issue to take it to the level of
LGBT rights and the abortion debate, but the fact that NUIG—a state-owned
organisation, lest we forget—appears to lend more favour to the faithful than
the faithless stands as a troubling artefact of the “special position” of the
Catholic Church once upheld in the Irish Constitution. To not include a “no
religion” option is as to tell the atheist students that they should feel
ashamed and keep quietly to themselves. I don’t, and I won’t. These are things
that need to be specified.
Update: 26/08/2013
Props, as the kids say, to NUIG.
Update: 26/08/2013
Props, as the kids say, to NUIG.
@baronronan @CynicalFilm - thank you for bringing this to our attention. We have added two additional fields to this list; 'None' & 'Other'
— NUI Galway (@nuigalway) August 26, 2013
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