As a fellow atheist who is an ex-Christian, I can recall multiple stories in the gospels where something happens at a dinner or other visit by Jesus to this or that follower’s house. For example the one where the penitent “loose woman” put oil on Jesus’ feet and wiped it off with her hair, and when the disciples scolded her for buying expensive oil with money that could have been given to the poor, Jesus said “you always have the poor but you only have me for a while.” Or the time when the wealthy man who would have been seen as a sinner by Jesus’ followers was hosting Jesus and declared that he would give half his wealth to the poor, causing Jesus to pronounce: “Today, salvation has come to this house.” Both stories teach a moral lesson. Perhaps you conflated one of these gospel episodes in your mind with another story, passage or lesson about form over substance?
Up until only a few years ago, I thought that there were two big cities called Baltimore in the USA: one in Ohio and one in Maryland (I’m Canadian). It was only due to a conversation with an American colleague where, in some context, I mentioned “Baltimore, Ohio”, that I found out there weren’t (I would have been thinking about the one in Maryland). There is a Baltimore in Ohio, but it’s just a village.
But in this particular case, I know exactly where I got this confusion from. From the B & O (Baltimore and Ohio) Railroad. Clearly the company’s name caused me to conflate the two toponyms in my mind, and little wonder, for the first denotes a city and the second a whole state. Given that there are some 93 Springfields in the USA and some 7 in Canada, (why do you think Matt Groenig named the Simpsons’ city Springfield?) I’m not surprised you somehow developed the notion that the capital of Massachusetts was Springfield (note also that that name can be associated with early American history - think for example of the Springfield rifle - and Massachussetts is in New England, one of the older parts of the USA).
Our minds seem to be good at conflating memories. I can remember quite a few times when I misremembered something as existing somewhere where it actually didn’t. Back in 2022, I actually posted a question about this, but received no responses. I summarize three interesting examples I mentioned there, all connected with car rides with my parents:
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I have a memory of being six years old and being driven to school on a very gloomy morning and seeing fire hydrants of a type that occurred in Downtown Toronto but not in the then-City of North York where we lived lining the street. I should mention that as a boy, I was fascinated by things like the difference in shape of fire hydrants in different parts of town. Was this a dream of a mundane ride to school? An actual ride during which I was groggy and half-asleep, causing me to misinterpret the hydrants I saw? Or did I just conflate a memory of a ride to school on a particularly dark morning during which I saw the real hydrants (and perhaps remembered the different model while looking at them) with a memory of the hydrants in another part of town?
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As a teenager, on a car trip, I noted a coffee and donut shop called “the Dutch Master”, which I had never seen before. For some reason, I associated it with one major Toronto street, and wondered why a cafe that I knew of on this street was not “the Dutch Master” when I passed by it later. Many years later, I found myself on the actual street of “the Dutch Master” and saw the cafe again, and realized that it was located on a street quite far away from where I had remembered it to be, near the place where my parents used to work.
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I have a memory of driving past a strip mall in the Jane and Finch area of Toronto at around the age of 18 and seeing a row of flagpoles on the roof that were never there in real life, and being surprised to see a row of Dutch flags on them. For years, I wondered if I had dreamed this. Many years later, I was taking a bus ride a few kilometers back on the same street, and saw a used car lot that did indeed have a row of flags on the roof, you’ve seen these - with three horizontal stripes, red, white and blue, and “USED CARS” written on the white stripe. If you removed the writing, you’d have a Dutch flag. Now I know that at 18, my family went to that area (where we had lived in the past but which we no longer regularly frequented) for Boxing Week sales. Perhaps I noted the flags on the correct building and genuinely thought they were Dutch flags, or was at least strongly reminded of them, and later associated them with the strip mall more familiar to me, either in a dream or by memories being conflated?