As an adult, can you easily spot people raised in your particular faith/denomination?

I feel like I am the only young guy trying to keep some kind of faith in my Catholic life. I’m very gay, but that doesn’t stop me from from God, Jesus, and asking for forgiveness. The Catholic Church needs to update, pronto. It is harboring the homophobic which is a purely hateful mindset and sentiment. The pandemic has really brought me back into my faith, as I am a very lonely person right now; it makes me feel better,

I kind of consider myself "culturally" Catholic, r1. I don't buy any of the metaphysics and I disagree with them on a lot of social issues (homosexuality, abortion, etc -- although they have the right idea about eradicating poverty, in theory, and abolishing the death penalty), but the art, the architecture, the ritual, the history, even the contributions to Western intellectual life -- some part of me is happy to be associated with that.

R2 OP — I totally agree with you. The ritual of mass is wonderful.

I would have to partially agree with both R1 and R2

I'm going to Assumption Catholic Church this Sunday and this is a great blessing during the pandemic. I don't agree with many of the Catholic Church's teachings but I sense a benevolence inside the church and the service and it is very comforting.

r1/r4 I think, perhaps, as humans, we have an innate yearning for the sacred -- for sacred spaces, sacred rituals, etc.

As a complete aside, I spend a lot of time in libraries (public and academic. Well, not since COVID ...)

With the huge increase in technology, I feel libraries are losing their status as sacred spaces -- places in which you are quiet, a place to be surrounded and enveloped and even cradled by the great thinkers and writers of the past, a place to indulge the life of the mind. Now, libraries have become loud and social, just a banal place like every other place. It's disheartening to me. I feel much of my life has come down to seeking out quiet spaces to read and think.

Meant to sign r5 OP

Catholics, if they're superbly conservative -- Opus Dei-level conservative -- will often dress quite modestly, and they'll have a smug look about them. If they're flaming Jesuit and Franciscan liberals, they'll be hipper. What unites them though is how they think about the Scriptures, which for them is not be all and end all of Christian life.

Such characteristic is what would set them apart from Baptists, Non-Denominationals, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Evangelicals (the non-racist, culty ones), and what have you. All of which subscribe to Sola Scriptura. Some of them are more thoughtful in their handling of the Scriptures and primarily focus on the Gospels. They probe the context, and they don't believe everything written ad historical. The others, not least the fundamentalist ones and the megachurches, however, are pretty much doing a cherry-picking exercise, making them nothing but douchey, culty hypocrites.

Episcopalians and Anglians occupy the grey speace in between.

So yeah, generally, it's easy to tell which one is which.

[quote] The ritual of mass is wonderful.

Even the body and blood part?

Not necessarily, but I nearly always end up becoming friends with people whose parents did not divorce or separate. There must be clues where we recognise one another. I wouldn't be able to say what those are.

Paid up, Temple recommend carrying, returned missionary Mormons have a superciliousness about them that makes them easy to identify and avoid.

Being raised Southern Baptist, I can do it as well. But, I find Catholic men arrogant and confident, because they know all they need to do is confess and do penitence and everything is all right.

I find most traditional Baptists, like I was raised, to be more humble, like Jimmy Carter. There are two strains of theology in the Southern Baptist Convention, Arminianism and Calvinism. Arminianism is the dominate strain and has been since the founding but Calvinism is gaining, especially in the pulpits if not in the pews. Calvinists ARE arrogant, confident, and cold, because they believe they are part of "the elect" that God chose to save and it has nothing to do with them or their actions, it is all God's doing for picking them. Arminians believe in free will and that it is up to the individual to choose salvation and that one can lose it, also through freewill, which makes them more humble. It is why Arminians are referred to as Whosoever Will Baptists, because anyone can be saved if they choose to be. If someone tells me they are Baptist, I can pick which theology they subscribe to immediately.

Maybe it is just that whatever group you are raised in, you see differently.

Definitely, although I gave it up.

"...and maybe it's partly confirmation bias..." <---hahaha, OP, as a person raised catholic, I see what you did there.

I can't spot a fellow atheist, but when the subject of religion comes up we usually click.

I never thought about it, R9, but all of the friends I have kept for decades come from parents who were not divorced. Unlike mine.

I'm not a fundamentalist, but I have picked up on some of the earmarks. Corn-fed, lots of smiling. I won't say a soft voice, but some gentle nature to the voice. The content of what they're saying is not gentle, though.

Perhaps