After going to a Christian grade school, Sunday school and vacation bible school I think I know more about Christianity than most Christians.

Now I'm curious what percentage of Christians fall into Zen's category...

The phrase "Easter and Christmas Christian" exists for a reason.

Yeah. Our church generally was only a third full on Sundays when I was growing up. On Easter and Christmas there wouldn't be enough seats so they'd set up folding chairs for the overflow.

Now I'm curious what percentage of Christians fall into Zen's category...

It may just be a function of where I've lived most of my life, namely, the American Southeast. It's funny that I met more evangelicals when I lived in New Jersey, though.

And while on one hand I understand why that was so important in the early church, why it was so meaningful that a person didn't need anything or anyone in between them and God, on the other hand it leads to people being really awful to each other and knowing next to nothing about their own holy teachings and still being certain they're good Christians going to heaven, and I don't think that was the point of those letters Martin Luther nailed to the church door.

Yes but...in my experience people who came up Protestant tend to actually have a much stronger grounding in actual scripture than many who were raised Catholic. There an argument to be made that for a fair chunk of modern Catholicism it can become all about the ritual and little about the underpinnings. And going through the motions of ritual doesn't actually mean anyting about how good a person or their behavior is.

It's funny that I met more evangelicals when I lived in New Jersey, though.

I think the only evangelicals I knew in New Jersey were Korean. Well, they were Seventh-Day Adventist, I think. Is that evangelical? One of them kept trying to get one of my friends to go to church with him.

n my experience people who came up Protestant tend to actually have a much stronger grounding in actual scripture than many who were raised Catholic.

Yes. This.

I was brought up Christian Scientist and while I left before I was old enough to really have to deal with the "physician heal thyself" stuff, I do remember Sunday school. It was mostly the bible stories but with added emphasis on what the story was trying to demonstrate and how that related to life today.

That was part of the Reformation, though, that people should actually read scripture and not just get told what it said by the Church. Catholicism has a lot of requirements, but reading the bible isn't really one of them. Or wasn't when I was learning that stuff, anyway, and I haven't heard that's changed.

There's a variant of Buddhism called Pure Land Buddhism that holds that nothing matters except a true belief that a particular boddhisattva will save you. That sort of thing is appealing to many people, of course there will be organizations that espouse it. And what do I know, maybe there's something to it.

Yes but...in my experience people who came up Protestant tend to actually have a much stronger grounding in actual scripture than many who were raised Catholic. There an argument to be made that for a fair chunk of modern Catholicism it can become all about the ritual and little about the underpinnings.

See, that's interesting to me, because I don't know much about modern Catholicism except from people here. IRL I only know one Episcopalian, who doesn't talk about religion so she's no help. So for many modern Catholics it's become all about the ritual and for many modern Protestants it's become all about the baptism. I went to a Church-run high school where we studied the Bible every single school day, and still no one knew anything! They just didn't pay attention, and the teachers weren't teaching anything BUT the Bible -- no history, no language, no context, and what little of that they did teach, they got wrong. Mainly they were teaching their denomination's tenets, like, no dancing, no drugs at all, no sex outside marriage, no smoking (as the principal hid his cigarettes in his suit jacket and the coach hugged the wife he was blatantly cheating on and the wife swallowed her tranquilizers). Everyone just went on and did whatever they wanted to do and said Praise God a lot. And they asked me why I abandoned the church.