[mumblemumble]

You're sort of telling on yourself with that "in a religious sense" jab. ;)

The original idea of OO design was to strive to eliminate stateful idioms. Which is a slightly different idea than what we're used to. The state existed, but the point was that you were supposed to design your system so that objects didn't need to know - or even attempt to infer - information about other objects' state.

The whole intellectual lineage that includes pervasive use of explicit state querying and manipulation methods such as getters and setters could be characterized as a whole lot of procedural programmers collectively missing the point. It's right up there with when people over-use the State monad in Haskell, effectively doing their darnedest to Greenspun imperaive programming on top of a lazy functional language because they haven't quite internalized this new paradigm yet.