So if these tests are such a problem, why don't most advanced Catholics figure it out and drop them?
First of all, of course, the situation often just doesn't happen to demand a refactor. Usually we can expect a Catholic.sh with a strong Catholic.test.sh or whatever to chug along just fine.
I sense a problem of implementation only to the extent that the engineer considers a test suite to be actually critical to Catholic.sh being able to run at all. Even worse is if they insist that the testing library be on a specific version first released around, say, 1870. This would be all well and good coming from a beginner on their first naive implementation, following some step-by-step guide also published in 1870. But not from someone we expect to actually know what they're doing.
As we've seen, It's plain to me these tests don't actually serve Catholic.sh. If an even remotely attentive engineer treats it like important code, it's because of what it does serve. If it was gone, he knows something would break.
And indeed there is, so to speak, another program in us that quietly consumes Catholic test output for its own purposes. If this program is big enough, the demand it imposes can force those tests to be run ragged, triggering refactoring for increased output, growing them like a cancer.
What is this program? What would need a steady diet of answers to the question, "am I ok"?
Well, to those of a certain bent of mind -- that being Catholic means keeping within the bounds of the fold while lax Catholics and nonbelievers slide slowly toward Hell -- I, the lax Catholic from South Jersey, say unto you:
(ok, "maybe undiagnosed" would be more fair, but I don't feel like drawing it again)
The hardest part of this is that if this anxiety disorder is in fact, undiagnosed, it's very likely the person will deny have an anxiety disorder. Much less, that it could be affecting their reasoning in a profound way.
Ok, ok. Back up. I expect there must be a percentage of people in the group I just addressed who literally do not have an anxiety disorder, and have not had their religious beliefs systemically skewed by the habits of mind typical therein. Honestly, I think that percentage is small, and if I were right, that would be an important fact.
But to keep from losing all my friends in one blog post, I will say this: the point is not the disorder, but the mindset of anxiety. The mindset easily teleports through time and people when it is handed down as a co-tradition or hermeneutic. It's at least as much about the lens through which it's taught, as the lens through which it's lived.
The religious anxiety mindset accumulates credence from making us sound like humans did in the olden days, when we had not yet outgrown our need for herd instinct: when we were more anxious as a species, but we kinda actually had to be. It really wasn't that long ago. But I'm arguing that we should deduce this credence is a misapplication. All of the patriarchs were members of the more-anxious species, not because this is the right way to think about religion, but because no alternative species could uniformly exist yet.
Here's another way of putting it: