Oof ouch my bones (?)

It seems outrageous, but either they really believe their own nonsense, or it’s one of the longest and most convincing trolling campaigns ever waged.

My vote is that it’s 100% sincere. One of Andrew Schlafly’s other misadventures involved harassing the head of a microbiology research team because they had shown evolution in bacteria in a laboratory. Sending formal emails to this one specific scientist seems well outside what someone who was just in it for the laughs would do.

Yah, chronicling the shenanigans at Conservapedia is one of RW’s strong points.

In an academic sense, no, revising the Bible is not heresy (though some branches of Christianity will call you a heretic for it anyhow). Every time one sect or another of Christianity wants to put out a new translation, they will also consider some revisions based on things like newly discovered manuscripts or breakthroughs in ancient linguistics.

That was not what Mr. Schlafly was doing, though. He was taking an already existing English translation of the Bible and rewording it to suit his politics. As such, yes, it would definitely be considered heresy by some people. In fact, his harshest critics were other conservative Christians, especially those with actual academic credentials in the field of Biblical Studies.

Conservapedia is absolutely wacky.

The curator, one Andrew Schlafly, once tried to write a new, improved, “more conservative” version of the Bible. But, Mr. Schlafly is neither a historian nor a linguistic scholar, and he couldn’t consult the source texts. So, his way of “correcting the liberal bias” found in modern translations of the Bible was just to change the words in a modern English translation (probably the 1611 KJV EDIT: Apparently Schlafly prefers the NIV) to better fit his politics.

One of the changes I remember reading about was altering the words in The Beatitudes to be things like, “Blessed are the managers, for they provide for their employees,” and such. He also deleted parts he didn’t agree with, like removing one of Jesus’ utterances from the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” According to Schlafly, Jesus’ executioners knew exactly what they were doing and thus shouldn’t have been forgiven.

Honestly, I always liked getting up early on weekends (at least before I had kids). Those hours been 7 and 10 were mine in a way that my other free time wasn’t. Because everyone else wanted to sleep in, I had no social obligations and thus could do whatever I wanted. There was a certain joy to having all my weekend chores done early. Or, if I didn’t want to do chores, I could just relax and not worry about trying to align with anyone else’s schedule.

I fully appreciate that, and it’s the same in Canada for many people. I’ve witnessed it personally. I’m very fortunate to be in a position to handle that sort of thing.

The hospital just wrote it off instead, so the cost was passed to the Canadian taxpayer. Lucky for me, but frustrating all the same. I would have rather the insurance pay like the were supposed to.

Hell, I’m from Canada where we have (mostly) socialized medicine, and the one time I made a claim on private insurance it was denied. That was after I had called them to confirm that yes, my policy (should have) covered that expense.

And it was only a few hundred bucks too, so my frustration was more about the principle of the thing rather than the cost.

It really wants me to host a webinar. I get a pop-up every day telling me about how great this function supposedly is. You’d think there was a VC generative AI project attached to it with how hard it’s being pushed.

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.

When I was growing up, my two sisters and I decided what to watch on TV pretty much by pure, brutal democracy. They formed a bloc against me and I always got outvoted, so it was Little House on the Prairie (and The Waltons) every day after school.

I feel this in my soul. My university house had mould on the bathroom ceiling, and one of my roommates was allergic - they went into violent sneezing fits every time the showered.

Our landlords tried everything to avoid addressing it, up to claiming that, “people couldn’t be allergic to mould like that.”

They only “fixed” it after one of my other roommates threatened to talk to his father who was a lawyer. Their “fix” was to paste over the ceiling with vinyl plates.

Don’t forget every magical staff , necklace, and ring that casts a spell.

Will I ever use Create Water from the Rain Dancer? Probably not, especially with Shadowheart lugging around more than a dozen bottles of water. But what if I really need it?