I see where the disconnect is now.

I, and presumably others, associate obsession with religious minutiae with religious fervour. I have a lot first hand experience with this, as some of the most ardent Christians I knew were also the ones who were eyeballs deep in apologetics and church history (and also adult converts). It makes a certain amount of logical sense too, as you wouldn’t expect a casual church-goer to care that much about all that.

With that in mind, it isn’t a big leap to connect the original post to the phenomenon of the zeal of the convert.

What it comes down to, then, is that the original post has more than one layer to it. Rather than focus on the difference between charity and dogmatism, I chose instead to highlight contrast between the simplicity [of charity] and the convolution [of dogmatism]. Once again, my personal experiences informed the way I approached this post.

I’m completely lost. How and when did this become about religious people behaving badly? I am 99.9% sure that the point of the original topic was a commentary on how recent converts tend to be more enthusiastic about their faith than people raised in the church, regardless of what the individual beliefs actually are. The example beliefs from the original post (“feed the poor” and “women shouldn’t drive”) are just examples to help characterize this dichotomy in an amusing way.

In fact, that second example, about women and driving, is almost certainly not an actual Catholic doctrine. Any search for the full phrase leads only to reposts of this image, and I’d wager it was made by just stringing together some Christian buzzwords for humorous effect. While I don’t doubt some Catholics do believe women shouldn’t drive, I also very much doubt they’d use the phrasing and justification found in the original post.

Why would I need to be more specific about the different branches of Catholicism? The author in the screenshot doesn’t do that either. They simply point out their observation that lifelong Catholics tend to value broad teachings that aren’t necessarily specific to Catholicism, while adult converts become fanatical about doctrinal minutiae. In other words, the former is relaxed about their faith, while the latter is zealous.

I then related that to my own experiences, where someone who is raised in a belief system tends to be less aggressive about those beliefs than someone who converts to later in life - i.e. the “zeal of the convert.” This observation isn’t exclusive to Catholicism, it’s just being made into relation to it in this instance. This phenomenon isn’t even exclusive to religion, as one can observe it with political beliefs as well.

I don’t think anything here requires a differentiation between branches of Catholicism, because the observations are about the act of converting, not about what specific belief system the converts moving to and from.

The “belief” in this case is Catholicism.

I’d say this is part of the “zeal of the convert” phenomenon, where someone who converts to a belief tends to be more fanatical than someone raised in that belief.

There’s probably bias in this observation, as a couple of very loud people can drown out dozens of others and make a trend seem more prevalent than it actually is, but I also have personal experience here.

I mean, I didn’t develop my own musical taste until my mid-20s. My parents only played Christian worship music, while all my friends in highschool and university were various flavours of music snob. I was literally convinced that no one actually liked pop music because everyone I knew seemed to hate it.

I don’t know if I was ever a “people pleaser,” in that I never pretended to like a band or song just because everyone else did. However, I definitely avoided saying anything negative about the music I was exposed to for fear that I’d be ostracized all the same.

It took me a long time to overcome all that, and it took even longer to admit my tastes publicly.

The only Canon printer I ever owned was a piece of garbage. For whatever reason, I couldn’t just select my home wifi from a list like literally any other network-enabled device. I instead had to select an option buried several layers deep in the menus to have it try to automatically connect to an open network. Only after waiting 5 minutes for this to fail would it show a list of available networks.

Of course, it also forgot the network and password settings every time it lost power, so I had to go through the whole process again after time I unplugged the thing to clean behind the shelf.

I grew up with the NIV, so it was just natural. It was also the default option when I went to biblegateway.com to copy the text, so I just rolled with it. I know there are some people who would be scandalized that I didn’t use the KJV, but that’s their problem, not mine.

I wouldn’t argue that the modern BIble “disowns” the OT, but some NT authors were doing their best to sweep it under the rug to make their fledgling religion more palatable to the Greeks and Romans. Early Christianity was just a sect (some might say a heresy) of Judaism, so it wasn’t inititally designed to appeal to Gentiles. With that lens, you can even argue that the apostle Paul is a more important figure in Christianity than Jesus - indeed, I’ve seen this argued a few times.

And you know what? These sorts of topics are a lot more interesting to me now that I don’t feel compelled to believe the traditional interpretation of them. I became far more interested in the development of early Christian theology after I became an atheist, probably because while I was still a Christian I was afraid of what I would find out if I challenged my beliefs at all. Not an unfounded fear as it turned out, given the arc of my life.

I have to put my 25 years of religious education and devotion to use somehow now that I no longer go to church. I figure helping non-belivers better understand Christianity is a pretty worthwhile endeavour.

“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”

2 Timothy 3:16 (NIV)

Here’s the verse that was always given to me to support “the Bible is the word of God and 100% infallible.” Not that it’s not circular, but it does exist.

Remember, the Bible has a lot more in it than folk tales and cultural laws. There are a lot passages that are prophecy, poetry, or theology - sometimes all three at once. It’s just that the stories are a lot easier to remember and internalize.

Truly a hidden gem.

I was somewhat inoculated against the pipeline for two reasons:

1. I was in my 20s when I finally stopped going to church and had enough perspective to be skeptical of the anti-feminism content.

2. By the time I started watching atheist YouTube videos the split between left and right was well-established, so it was easy to filter out the culture war stuff.

That didn’t stop YouTube from recommending Carl of Swindon’s channel every chance it got.