Part 4: the point being

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:

This one I did redraw to be less hyper-offensive than the first version. Sorry.

I might at some point add to this. I probably should. But yeah, guys, that's basically it. Please stop thinking the need to feed this maybe-inherited-from-our-religious-mentor mindset must be included in any legitimate definition of religiosity or Catholicism. 

It's not. Religion outside of an anxiety mindset is both possible and rational. It's just like many other parts of life which those of us who've lived almost our entire lives under the sway of anxiety, have maybe never before had a chance to experience or evaluate outside of it. Myself included!

So if we're going to discuss God or Catholicism, please let's first of all

a) talk about how anxiety causes us to draw black and white distinctions as a way to try to control or predict things we can't actually control or predict (eg. our place among the righteous, or how many people are going to hell; ultimately, our distance from death),

b) how this is distinct from how logic causes us to draw black and white distinctions as a way to conform to how things really exist; and 

c) how this means we can predict that anxiety is likely still skewing our way of thinking toward overreaching distinctions, and work toward a robust understanding of how we can correct for this.

Then we can move past this and talk about the fun stuff. Ugh, and I really want to.

Final thought: I would ask that you glance at this one more time. But that's it.

Part 3: I began learning about load-bearing structures

First, a brief note on how I hold the convictions I'm about to recklessly pontificate upon. 

I hold my ideas about how to actually live Catholicism well, rather strongly. This is because the memory of my trials in Carmel provides me with the same kind of conviction I experienced when I presented to my engineering teammates the tests I had run on my brand new algorithm before sending it to production: "You have no reason to trust that my idea is good on its own, but there's proof it can withstand some rigor." 

Unfortunately, I think it's pointless to try to detail the level of dedication under suffering my faith had to withstand to stay in Carmel, and stay Catholic since then. I'll have to leave it to your imagination. Nonetheless, if I could convey those validations in a meaningful way, I happily would.

But anyway, speaking of tests.

One reason I'm skeptical that gradient Catholicism is the only real kind is how that gradient is manifested: the Catholic test suite, if you like. 

My problem with the Catholic test suite hinges on this Biblical concept: "Thus sayeth the Lord God: 'Stop acting like your shitty tests are helping with or really telling you anything about how well the code is running.'" 

In non-Kathleen translations of these and similar verses, "your shitty tests" are visible signifiers of faithfulness (sc. "sacrifices and burnt offerings" or "the law" in "the power of sin is the law"), while the code is a man's mind and heart. 

Basically, there exists an emphasis among gradient-Catholics that we should have not only good code, but test coverage: very often, all the test coverage. 

In this view, to the degree a virtue can't be exposed to the evidence-based process we learned to love so well in Logic 101 -- to the degree it isn't externally verifiable -- it risks irrelevance. If its unit test is failing, then it's for all intents and purposes nonexistent. This method prioritizes the surface-ability of virtue, the provision of a strong logical interface. According to this view, unless there is a clear and rational excuse not to, code should be provable by means of an agreed-upon interface: ✓ : success, ✗ : fail.

Anyone who has written a program even a few files big knows that having tests is good and important for sustainable future development. They also know that to aim for 100% coverage, and craft code to optimize for this ahead of flexibility and performance, would actually be totally horrible and ruin the program. 

Why? I mean, I think you can probably imagine it. All I'm saying is, in Carmel I felt viscerally how the cost of building and correcting the output of perfect (or sometimes any) tests just isn't worth it under some conditions. This sense matched beautifully with the one I found again years later among a good engineering team under pressure.

After all, tests can show all sorts of results whose significance is permanently in doubt. Meanwhile, being the entirely separate concern that it is, the code runs. And it can run flawlessly. I'm certain this insight is broadly known among those who have stressed their Catholicism under demand for a certain type of extraordinary, constant loving action: I'm thinking primarily of single mothers or fathers, or parents of disabled children.

In Catholicism, we were taught to optimize for test coverage -- external signifiers of virtue -- by high, ancient authorities, and by our mothers and fathers. I now firmly consider this to signify a good effort tarnished by one other hidden, essentially animal, and effectively ruinous motivation: to be able to communicate among ourselves the passing state of our code: to reveal the vital ✓.

✓ and ✗ is survival. ✓ and ✗ is acceptance and inclusion in the herd, or not. It's old, it's ancient of days; it's an instinct without which the human race could never have persevered through countless winter starvations. Our subconscious minds apply it to non-faith communities and faith communities with the same primal simplicity and force. My mother greeted the friend-pattern of one nun's habit, and guarded me from the no-pattern of another nun's beige pants, by literal instinct.

But this instinct is outdated. We no longer need to stay accepted in our tribe to survive. In the past 100 years or so, sanitation and technology have lifted us a whole new distance away from the terror and heartbreak of death that once defined our lives on earth so much more uniformly.

Once, we had no choice but to weave the imperative ✓ and ✗ into our Catholic design. Today, we have a choice. And that's why it's just plain wrong to insist upon keeping it as much of a design priority as it ever was. It ruins Catholicism in exactly the same way this mindset would be expected to ruin a computer program.

If it's so obvious that this design pattern is flawed, why don't most gradient Catholics figure that out?

That's my next post.

Part 2: then I went to Christendom

Now, rewind almost 20 years to my college days (hard oof).

At Christendom College, I plunged into a faith community that took their religion very seriously and, for the first time, I joined, enjoyed, and continue to enjoy the special bond that exists amongst those who feel they have recognized together a secret and important fact. 

I quickly discovered that for most of my new friends, this special bond was nothing new. This was their normal experience of being Catholic in their families or parishes. 

More importantly though, it was also part of their definition of Catholicism. Whereas my old community would have called both us and themselves "Catholic", in this new view, some Catholics were not true Catholics, and slid away from the definition in the degree that they did not assent in their hearts to what we all knew we had to do, to be Catholic.

What is this thing we were doing? I think a definition my friends would agree on might be something like, "live out Catholic teaching in the ways that are uncomfortable but necessary when logic is brought to bear on the tenets of the Faith, in addition to the ways that are comfortable." I learned a new concept: something or someone is not just Catholic in a binary, but to a degree.

In its gradient form, "Catholic" (sc. something like "rational-and-Catholic", "intentionally-Catholic", "faithful") represents a ratio between assent to the teaching of the Magisterium and what rationalists would call inner alignment: grit, lack of akrasia, with respect to adhering to the conclusions of reason. I will call this gradient-Catholicism.

(Gradient-Catholicism exists on a gradient too. I'm not really addressing moderate amounts of this mindset. I'm referring for the most part to Catholicism with strong traditionalist tendencies.)

Gradient-Catholicism struck the same chord plucked by my mother long ago, the first time she looked at a nun in pants and whispered to me of betrayal. It was a precise, clear, sharp chord, like a taut violin string suspended in my soul, separating either side of it in an echo of the angelic Battle depicted in a painting prominently displayed in my home: the side of Light, and the side of Darkness. And indeed, that chord also defined the limen I felt I mustn't cross, whenever I considered the morality of an action. The goal, in a sense, was to sharpen this line ever more clearly.

It was with a feeling of enormous rightness that this aligned with another kind of precision and sharpness I was learning at the same time: Logic 101. This sensation cannot be emphasized enough.

Gradient-Catholicism provided the inner language whereby my religious identity and self-improvement could interface with this wonderful tool: the ability to make correctly reasoned distinctions, bidding the entire universe open up and deposit the jewels of reality and agency at our feet. 

Non-gradient-Catholicism was just that: Catholicism, but without this interface. It atrophied into irrelevance.

All us younglings graduated and gripped our firebrands -- one edge Reason, the other Faith -- as we toddled into the dark outside world.

Then what happened? Well, some "fell," you see. Some "lost the faith." Alas, they must have been led astray or grown weary, and are now languishing in darkness. Yes, I'm kidding. Many who say the same aren't.

Nearly all of my dearest friends are atheists. With those who fell away after Christendom, I enjoy our continued shared love of truth, rationality and the power of logic. It's no coincidence many of us are programmers. It is to these friends I am mainly speaking now. 

Meanwhile, I count myself lucky that my best friend, also an atheist, I have kept since sixth grade at St. Joan of Arc. I enjoy discussing spiritual things with Jamie too, and others of a more worldly stripe.

But there is an enormous difference in such talks with Jamie and her ilk, and with my post-Christendom, post-traditionalist atheists. The communication hurdle I face with the latter almost always makes less enjoyable, fruitful, and insight-rich the very conversations I would wish and expect were more so than normal.

The difficulty is that to their minds, and unlike the rest of the world, there is still no such thing as non-gradient Catholicism. It's not only erroneous, but nonexistent. Especially when compared to gradient-Catholicism, it is treated as essentially worthless in rational conversation.

Sure, I mean, they'd agree non-traditionalist Catholics are obviously out there. But they are definitionally on the "fringe." When seen from the inside, the reality is clear: if you embrace the teaching of the Catholic Church, you are taking the first step toward something that terminates in an unhealthy state of mind: a certain blocking-out of reality. 

One friend tells me that a Catholic "could not" write a book about sound rational practices, because being Catholic de facto means being slightly irrational (later amended to "probably would not"). A second habitually refers to Catholicism as a cult, and voices concern that someone thinking of leaving Catholicism might be in danger because "a life inside the church doesn't prepare you very well for a life outside." This sentiment is difficult to mesh with the St. Joan's Catholicism of my youth -- to say the least.

Telling from my own habits of mind, the argument for only-gradient-Catholicism-counts would go like this: the only kind of Catholicism is the kind to which you could apply tests of logic regarding tenets of the Faith and the resulting way of life. Because those other Catholics are failing obvious tests, much like writing code while ignoring big red errors in the unit tests, they are obviously not really using Catholicism as a load-bearing program in their lives. Sure, they have a file called Catholic.sh in their heads, but that's all it is: a bunch of text, dead code. When the reckoning comes, what do you suppose the odds are this code will run?

In principle, it's difficult to disagree. I become skeptical, however, for a few reasons, which will go in another post.

Part 1: confessions of a trashy Italian Catholic

Ok, here we go.

I am born-and-bred Philadelphia-area Italian Catholic trash. This is important; please let me help you understand what this means.

I was told about God. From the time I first formed memories, and surely before that, my Catholic mother and grandmother were continuously pumping into me how wonderful and awesome and loving and [literally any superlative that makes you feel happy] God is. Also of course, that Jesus is God, and the Eucharist is Jesus. When I wrote my magnum opus at the age of 6 ("Mothers", hardback, first edition ©1992) I would draw little flowers around the word "God" every time it appeared in the text, because just those three letters alone clearly failed to convey the level of fabulousness that should be associated with the concept of God.

I went to church. The people who showed up to Mass at St. Joan of Arc Parish in South Jersey were just like the people I met outside of church in South Jersey. Notably, this meant they were what some would call "bad" in Mass. They were so noisy. They dressed exactly as they pleased: booty shorts, halter tops and all.

I went to the church's grammar school. The nuns had poofy hair and wore slacks and were pretty worried about saving the rainforests. My classmates were Catholic, sure, but probably on average less invested in the faith than in how their tamagotchis were doing.

Therein lies my foundational religious identity. But unlike my classmates and fellow parishioners, I began to follow a different religious path. 

The nuns were the first flashpoint I remember. My mother's lament was continuous: what sort of nun abandons the habit? She doubted their faithfulness, and together we grew suspicious of the information I received there, in school and the liturgy alike. When the protocol changed to standing at the elevation of the host, I knelt in protest, pushing down the embarrassed feelings of doing something so different from those next to me.

Things escalated. I eventually took vows as a cloistered Carmelite nun in the strictest papal enclosure in the United States. I was dismissed after experiencing an acute paranoid episode.

As it turns out, I came to recognize a link between this path and another mom-grandmom hand-me-down: their anxiety disorder. 

After being diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and taking medication, I have experienced far more joy and freedom than I once thought was even possible to attain without some deep counterweight of sinful guilt. My mother, who tried to secretly disable the vehicle of her 35-year-old daughter to keep her at home during Covid -- bless her heart -- continues to deny she herself could be experiencing anxiety.

I want to return to that link later, but for now, there is me in a nutshell. Next, I want to talk about my friends. But work beckons, so it will have to wait a bit.

Intro

Hello, I did another blog restart on a whim because I suddenly had things to say (feels I was feeling) and wanted to write them down before I lost them.

In this blog, I'll be allowing myself to propose very sweeping theories about the nature of both my and others' internal experiences. That's a big liberty, so I'm hoping to counterbalance it by emphasizing the need for correction. Maybe by this process, both I and my readers can have a shot at adjusting hidden assumptions.

So if I write something that outrages you, please respond to it in the comments section. I'm even open to ad-hominems, e.g. "you probably think this because of your childhood experience of...etc", if you feel inclined. 

If I only hear from people who agree with me, I won't be able to see where I might be going wrong. So, if you feel inclined, I hope you help me out. :3