Canada’s military is small enough that there is typically only one officer with the rank of General (or Admiral if they are from the navy), and their position is the Chief of Defence Staff. I think a second General is appointed if Canada gets a seat on the UN Security Council, to act as the senior military advisor for the delegation.

There are more Lieutenant Generals (and Vice Admirals), and the CDS is appointed from their ranks when a new one is needed.

EDIT: To clarify further, there are multiple ranks with the word “general” in them. In order of increasing seniority, they are (with equivalent navy ranks in parentheses):

1. Brigadier General (Commodore)
2. Major General (Rear Admiral)
3. Lieutenant General (Vice Admiral)
4. General (Admiral)

Briefly: I didn’t.

More substantively: I never owned a cell phone growing up, even though I was at the right age when they became a common thing for teenagers to have. It wasn’t a money thing, nor household rule, as my sisters got phones when they were in high school. The biggest reason was probably just how I communicate. I wasn’t big into IM services either, and I preferred email or face-to-face, or a (landline) phone call if it was an urgent matter.

Then there was also my adolescent brain thinking I was making a bold counter-culture statement by steadfastly resisting the march of technology. In reality, I was probably just being a pain in the neck for my friends and family, and I probably unnecessarily endangered myself at least once.

I did finally, begrudgingly, get an old hand-me-down flip-phone in my final year of university, but that was out of necessity, and I used it to make maybe only a dozen calls the 2.5 years I had it before getting a smart device.

To bring it full circle: I did try sending a text message with that flip-phone exactly once, at the insistence of my family. That message was predictably a garbled mess, and to this day my sisters still wonder how I managed to get a number to appear in the middle of the “word”.

I have a number of other somewhat amusing stories about people’s reactions to my lack of a cellphone, but this post is long enough already.

Am I the only person in my generation who never learned to type on a number pad? It wasn’t the only thing I didn’t recognize from the “test”, but it stuck out to me.

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 as well.

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.

I grew up with the NIV, so it was just natural. It was also the default option when I went to biblegateway.com to copy the text, so I just rolled with it. I know there are some people who would be scandalized that I didn’t use the KJV, but that’s their problem, not mine.

I wouldn’t argue that the modern BIble “disowns” the OT, but some NT authors were doing their best to sweep it under the rug to make their fledgling religion more palatable to the Greeks and Romans. Early Christianity was just a sect (some might say a heresy) of Judaism, so it wasn’t inititally designed to appeal to Gentiles. With that lens, you can even argue that the apostle Paul is a more important figure in Christianity than Jesus - indeed, I’ve seen this argued a few times.

And you know what? These sorts of topics are a lot more interesting to me now that I don’t feel compelled to believe the traditional interpretation of them. I became far more interested in the development of early Christian theology after I became an atheist, probably because while I was still a Christian I was afraid of what I would find out if I challenged my beliefs at all. Not an unfounded fear as it turned out, given the arc of my life.

I have to put my 25 years of religious education and devotion to use somehow now that I no longer go to church. I figure helping non-belivers better understand Christianity is a pretty worthwhile endeavour.

“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”

2 Timothy 3:16 (NIV)

Here’s the verse that was always given to me to support “the Bible is the word of God and 100% infallible.” Not that it’s not circular, but it does exist.

Remember, the Bible has a lot more in it than folk tales and cultural laws. There are a lot passages that are prophecy, poetry, or theology - sometimes all three at once. It’s just that the stories are a lot easier to remember and internalize.

Bit of an obscure one, but Fire Emblem Gaiden.

There is a miniscule (0.014%) chance for the very first enemies in the game to drop an extremely powerful item that normally isn’t available until much later. Getting it early is absolutely wild because one of its effects is doubling stat gains when leveling up, which can quickly snowball your characters into godhood.

teenage_wasteland_the_who.mp3

Different problem, same vibe.

My work phone is specifically partitioned to separate personal and work activities. I can’t even copy and paste text between the two sides, they are so disconnected from each other. This is done specifically so people can use their work phone for personal business without cross-contamination.

I still refuse to use my work phone for anything but work. I only log into my personal accounts long enough to install/update a few apps from the Play Store that aren’t allowed on the work side but are still useful (MS Teams, WhatsApp).

Part of that is not wanting to enter a 12 character password every time I want to do anything simple . But the other part is that I just don’t want to mix my personal and work lives more than I have to.

I believe it’s 8000 in the manga.

You’d think so, but every couple of months there’s another post making the rounds on the internet because some oblivious person completely missed the message of their favourite band.

My last haircut + beard trim was about $40 CAD, and I tipped 20%.

Now I tend to go to nicer places, so the price is a bit higher than Magicuts or something. My hair is also a pain to deal with so I generally tip well.