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.

My parents were Methodists (mainline Protestant Christian). A friend of theirs wanted to get their support to become a pastor of a new, independent Protestant church. They said, essentially, "That's great! Which seminary are you going to?" His response was that he'd heard the call of God, so clearly God figured he was qualified. And if God wanted him to know any more about the Bible than he'd already figured out, He'd let him know.

I don't believe my parents provided any financial support.

And they asked me why I abandoned the church.

Huh. There wasn't any hypocritical stuff going on in my church that I knew of.

I abandoned the church when I was 19 because I thought Pascal's Wager was lame.

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.

Similar to the Hindu Bhakti movement.

That was part of the Reformation, though, that people should actually read scripture and not just get told what it said by the Church.

Which is one reason why I don't understand why so many Protestants don't do it. I mean, my mom read the Bible a lot, but she read the same "inspiring" passages over and over.

Catholicism has a lot of requirements, but reading the bible isn't really one of them.

I did not know that.

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.

It's a very appealing idea. I think (limited knowledge here) that there's a similar belief in a certain sect of Hinduism, that loving Krishna with all your heart is all you have to do.

Similar to the Hindu Bhakti movement.

Ha! I think that was what I was thinking of.