[MDCore]

I hear you about these being a bunch of different branches of Christianity. But the difference between branches of Protestantism and Catholicism is old and significant.

It'd be like saying "Talking about Rust is segregational. It's just all branches of programming languages starting with C". Technically true, but not a useful distinction.

[motorest]

> It'd be like saying "Talking about Rust is segregational. It's just all branches of programming languages starting with C". Technically true, but not a useful distinction.

That analogy is not valid. Protestants argue that catholicism does christianism in a sloppy way, whereas they do it right. If you're going with a programming language analogy, it's like a C++ programmer arguing that onboarding cppcheck and --Wall --pedantic is the only acceptable way to work with C++, and everyone else is doing it wrong.

[snickerbockers]

>That analogy is not valid. Protestants argue that catholicism does christianism in a sloppy way, whereas they do it right. If you're going with a programming language analogy, it's like a C++ programmer arguing that onboarding cppcheck and --Wall --pedantic is the only acceptable way to work with C++, and everyone else is doing it wrong.

Every sect within a religion is going to argue that they are the ones doing it right and the others are either wrong or at least suboptimal depending on the state of inter-sect relations. I would peg the Protestants as C and the Catholics as C++ in this analogy, as the chief defining feature of protestantism is that they do not acknowledge the legitimacy of just about everybody who has ever claimed to speak on God's behalf past a certain point; thus, like C, their view of religion is inherently stagnant. They don't necessarily deny that God continues to interact with his creations, but they've realized that statistically speaking any given prophet or saint has an approximately 0.0 probability of actually conveying messages from God so they'll just stick with the ones that are so old that just about everybody [who calls themselves christian] already agrees on them. This is similar to the way that many C programmers are really C++ programmers who got tired of all the dumb new C++2x bullshit and just want to write computer programs.

Both the protestant religion and the C programming language have viewpoints that make sense given the histories of their respective subjects, but the major drawback of these viewpoints is that they have chosen to limit themselves to only iterating through new interpretations of old ideas; both of them are fundamentally incapable of innovation because being incapable of innovation is the fundamental core of their belief systems. Thus, if God ever really does try to leave the protestants a voicemail or if bjarne stroustrup ever does come up with an idea that isn't terrible and needlessly complicated, both the protestants and the C programmers will miss out on it.

I will not even attempt to speculate as to which programming languages should represent islam and judaism in this analogy because i do not want to die or have my account banned.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

That's really not fair because the different sects and denominations of Christianity have different apocrypha and different translations (or lack of translations) of the source texts.

And of course they vary widely in rites, practices, and liturgy.

People think they are closer than they are. The difference between the protestant denominations, catholic denominations, mormans, jehovah's witnesses, etc are quite major and in a very real sense the separation between these different sects of Christianity are essentially only a few steps removed from the separation Islam has from Christianity.

[disgruntledphd2]

Protestantism is more like C++ than Rust on this analogy.

It's mostly compatible and people keep confusing them.