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.