Not a music question

[Vermontdave]

Or maybe it is.

1. What, if any organized religion were you raised with? I went to Methodist church growing up.

2. Do the instructions you received from your spiritual upbringing guide you today? As for me, I think it did.

3. Do you believe in the literal word of the new/old Testament? Me neither.

peace w/peace

[Paan]

1) I was raised some form of catholic, but my parents realized early on that I was just not going to believe in it... they were not hardcore themselves.

2) The instructions I received do not guide me today. But I don't believe that you need religion for morals or to teach you how to live.

3) I don't believe in either.

QQKCHU

[paisley]

1. brought up Roman Catholic, chased out by hypocritical standards around 13/14 years old (they didn't appreciate my 'jesus' hair for some unfanthomable reason)... though there were a lot of sweet caring people at my church as well

2. sure, nothing wrong with thou shall not kill, love thy brother and don't covet the neighbours wife... the premises laid down are sound, if somewhat common sense

3. books filled with metaphor... though I do believe in miracles (I did eventually get into that Oakland show after all)

found it interesting that theological study groups from various universities were following around deadheads in 89/90 as they thought the scene was parralel to many christian cults over history... the phish lot seemed to scare them back off though ;-)

Edited July 24, 2005 by Guest
the devil made me do it

[Paan]

I consider myself somewhere between an atheist and a heathen.... I am very scientific in my beliefs... I have to be shown something to believe it (and that does not mean reading or seeing it on TV).

But I do believe that there is some'thing' beyond our current level of knowledge lurking somewhere... I don't believe that this is a sentient being or beings, but rather a form of science or understanding that we have yet to discover.

[bouche]

Or maybe it is.

1. What, if any organized religion were you raised with?

Catholic church. Although, I didn't realize there were multiple religions until I met a friend that was a baptist and we went to each others churches.

I realized that religions are pretty much the same when we both realized that we both hated church in the exact same way.

2. Do the instructions you received from your spiritual upbringing guide you today?

Spiritually...no. However, all that stuff about not doing upon others that you wouldn't want done upon yourself, etc....worked. I still don't like lying or hurting people in anyway. I believe integrity was learned from many of the crazy bible stories.

3. Do you believe in the literal word of the new/old Testament?

ha. Poetry is art. The bible is art too.

[Jaimoe]

I was raised in a non-strict, non-denominational Protestant environment, but I was baptized Anglican. The baptismal cross is currently burning my forehead as I write.

By not breaking all of the Ten Commandments, then yes, the instructions I received ( whether directly or indirectly - moreso through family and societal influences ) have guided me through to adulthood.

I do not believe in the literal word of either the New or Old Testament.

Edited July 24, 2005 by Guest

[Jaimoe]

... and by obeying and believing in the laws of our soceity, we are thus all subject to Christian ideology in some form.

[Velvet]

1) I was raised in a completely religion-free houshold, though I tried my best to change things.

2) Absolutely.

3) If you take the Bible literally you lose all the theology.

[Ms.Huxtable]

I was raised in a non-religious household. In fact when my grandparents asked my Dad about having his children baptised, he said something along the lines of "I'm not going to parade my kids in front of a bunch of judgemental churchies."

But I was raised to follow a certain standard of morals and although I never learned them as such, they're pretty much the 10 commandments. It's true that they're just common sense and courtesy.

Bible? I always thought of it in much the same was as the Brothers Grimm.

[M.O.B.E]

... and by obeying and believing in the laws of our soceity, we are thus all subject to Christian ideology in some form.

you said it! Babylon your throne's gone down!

1% till I die

[Guest Low Roller]

I was raised Roman Catholic, however I always had problems drawing any sort of spiritual guidance and/or inspiration from it. For me it was more of a cultural thing rather than a spiritual thing. Being Polish you don't really have much choice but to spend an hour a week in church to be seen, make your connections, and work your way up the social pecking order.

Do the instructions I received then guide me today? It's hard to say. On a conscious level probably not, but unconsciously I'm sure that my 'common sense' decisions have some basis in religion.

I've never read either the old or new testament, so I can't comment on them.

[M.O.B.E]

when I was a kid my mom and dad both taught a bible study group in the Girls Brigade and Boys Brigade.My dad's best friend Davey is still the Minister at the Church of Scotland on the street i lived on. I come from a half protestant and half catholic family and I grew up in a catholic neighbourhood in Glagow, went to a public school...I was taught the ways of druidry almost bordering on a form of Asatru both from my parents and from my grandmother...when we moved to canada when I was 7 all forms of religion and spirituality were lost in my house and are still not spoken of...when you live in a place that is completly segregated by religion it is a change to come to a place like canada where it doesnt really matter what you are...

I wouldnt say that what I learned guides me today as much as it was the basis and building point for seeking out the answers to the questions I have/had

yes I know both testaments and am currently reading the Kebra Nagast or Valley of the Kings; the Rastafarian interpretation of the bible and the stories of it.

[M.O.B.E]

better than any bible, IMO

If

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;

If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breath a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Rudyard Kipling

[sandora]

1. I was not babtised and our family did not go to church on Sundays (just weddings and funerals). When I asked my parents what religion they were they said Anglican. I was not forced to take part in the practice of any religion.

2. I really didn't have a spiritual upbringing and tossed away whatever spirituality I may have picked up along the way. I live by the morals that I have set for myself and the belief in what I see around me.

3. don't believe in either

[d_rawk]

1. I am the sole unbaptized child of my family, though my immediate family is decidedly not religious. I have vague memories of going to church on holidays so that my mother could feel that she had appeased her kin. I'm pretty sure I was put in Sunday school, too, but it is blurry. From what I can piece together, there were great (in the sense of large, rather than the sense of positive) religious debates with some deep rifts only a couple generations removed from myself, and that curious couple who spawned me seem to have largely walked away from all of it. I have the Quakers on one side (who, ballsy progressives that they are, I have enormous respect for and identify with strongly), Nazarenes on the other (biting my tongue), and this strange Catholic thread weaving itself across both planes.

2. Not sure about this one. Again, blurry. I think that there was little to no indoctrination, and I think that matters of ethics, of which I'm strongly concerned, are not things that have really preoccupied or interested my "flesh and blood". The fact that we often arrive at the same conclusions through careful reasoning as do others through matters of faith actually leads me to respect those matters of faith more deeply than I might otherwise.

3. Velvet said it well, and much more succinctly than I would have. I found both vulgarity and beauty in those books -- I appreciated one as much as the other. Literally? No. I'd say no.

[Freak By Night]

The only instructions I needed to guide me were from Bill & Ted.

"Be excellent to each other".

[timouse]

1. What, if any organized religion were you raised with? I went to Methodist church growing up.

raised by lapsed catholics who went out of their way not to beat us over the head with dogma.

2. Do the instructions you received from your spiritual upbringing guide you today? As for me, I think it did.

if "quit hitting your brother" counts as spiritual instruction, then no.

3. Do you believe in the literal word of the new/old Testament? Me neither.

no.

everything i know about inperpersonal relations i learned from the counterculture...the world of the grateful dead had a profound impact on me.

have fun, but not at the expense of someone else's fun.

be kind.

pick up after yourself.

oragnized religion is a crutch for people that can't handle drugs

[bradm]

1. What, if any organized religion were you raised with?

I was baptized in United Church of Canada, but only had minimal attendance while I was growing up.

2. Do the instructions you received from your spiritual upbringing guide you today?

I don't even recall any instructions from the church while I was growing up. Most of what guides me today comes from observing the behaviour of people I admire (esp. my Mom and Dad), my own experience, and reasoning and logic.

3. Do you believe in the literal word of the new/old Testament?

No.

Aloha,

Brad

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Thanks, Vermontdave, for a completely distracting thread .

1. What, if any organized religion were you raised with?

Anglican; went through the altar-boy/choir thing, stuck with the church until my early 20s, and then drifted out of it. See (2) below.

2. Do the instructions you received from your spiritual upbringing guide you today?

Yes and no, for better and for worse. I got caught up in the evangelical thing for a few years in my teens, which turned me into a complete idiot until I snapped out of it, thanks in large measure to good friends (cf. timouse, e.g.), music I loved which was deemed contraband (now there's another thread for ya - anyone remember "backmasking"? **shudder**...), psychedelics, and figuring out that other traditions, monotheistic and non-theistic, did in fact make sense, in contrast to the manipulativeness and sometimes blatant mendacity of the literalists (see (3) below). Even so, I still have to be attentive to the reactionary, unreflective morality that conservative religion did its best to hard-wire into me; they'll index a (typically decontextualised) scriptural quote for every difficult question that life can throw at you to spare you the effort of actually thinking it through, and it's to the believer to commit those connections to memory if they plan on avoiding hellfire and cashing in on paradise. I'd like to hope I'm past all that indexical thinking, but of course, that's a life's work, actually thinking things through and arriving at your own (hopefully reviseable) conclusions. We're all saddled with the same kind of problem, I figure; I guess that's the strict meaning of the word "prejudice" - having your mind already made up for you.

It's for that reason that I/we refuse to embed our kids in a religious community. I love it that they are surrounded by people, our friends and (some) family, who do their damndest to see and think straight, and, above all, respectfully and with openness and curiosity. They can't avoid questions about religious traditions around here either - our bookshelves are overflowing with them (occupational hazard, as it were), and when our 8-year old pulls down a book on the life of the Buddha just out of simple curiosity, I know things are alright.

As far as Christianity is concerned, I still treat Jesus' material in the Gospels (canonical and extra-canonical) seriously. I do, though, think that Paul was a goof, and John was on ergot or mushrooms or something (what else are you supposed to do when you're stranded alone on an island in the Aegean? Anyone ever dose and go snorkelling? What a hoot!). Same problem in Islam - the first caliphs after Muhammad did an awful lot to screw up the social reforms he had brought into play (esp. re. the status of women).

3. Do you believe in the literal word of the new/old Testament?

Literal is as literal does. If you push any, say, evangelical on this, you'll start to see how the process of selection happens. They'll distinguish between "wooden" literal and "real" literal - using examples like "raining cats and dogs" to illustrate the former, vs. Adam and Eve created in the Garden for the latter. It's the fissures between groups like the new-earth and old-earth creationists (world created in just six days, vs. possibly millions of years where each day is interpreted as an "age" or "eon") that are really worth watching, where category of "literal" breaks down, and any simple reading of the Bible becomes utterly impossible. Inerrantists will write those things off as "in-house debates", but it's the winners of those debates - usually judged by who gets the most airtime - who set the scale on what else is to be ruled as strictly literal and not just metaphorical. Kill someone for sodomy? Mandated. Kill someone for wearing clothes made of two different sorts of fibre? That was then, this is now.

*shaking head**...

On that note, I still keep a copy of this open letter from some terrifically clever but now anonymouse source tacked up on my office wall.

Dear Dr. Laura [schlessinger],

Thank you so much for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18: 22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

A) When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Leviticus 1: 9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21: 7. In this day & age, what would be a fair market price for her?

C) I know I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev 15: 19-24). The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

D) Leviticus 25: 44 states that I may own slaves, both male & female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims this applies to Mexicans but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

E) I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35: 2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

F) A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree, can you settle this?

G) Leviticus 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20 or is there some wiggle room here?

H) Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Leviticus 19:27. How should they die?

I) I know from Leviticus 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

J) My uncle has a farm. He violates Leviticus 19:19 by planting two crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton & polyester blend). He tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev. 24: 10-16). Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws (Lev. 20: 14)?

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

[phorbesie]

my parents are very anti-religion, so i had to discover it on my own, which didn't happen until i was a teenager. fortunately my church (small lutheran one) was an incredible community of kindness and acceptance. all the 'cool church kids' (lol) went to the baptist church and i joined them a few times, but found it (well, them, and mostly the adults not the kids) rather hypocritical...and then they told me that all my rock music was evil, so that was the end of that.

i definitely learned some valuable things from those experiences, but as people have been saying, i learned those things just as well, or even better, from being on tour and from heads. but christianity definitely gave me a very real belief in God which has guided me ever since and i am so glad that i have that.

i recently started studying buddhism and it has had a huge effect on me and how i relate to people, how i view the world, and it's definitely guiding me...all the time. i think my buddhist experiences have had a more positive effect on me as a person than any of the other stuff.

i believe some of the bible is true, some of it happened, and other things are figurative. it is written by men after all so it's subjective no matter what.

[Gr8FuL]

1. What, if any organized religion were you raised with? I was raised united baptist..never went to oftne..neither of my parents were to into it thank god..cuz i was not likin it one bit form earley on

2. Do the instructions you received from your spiritual upbringing guide you today?No one bit...i dont beleive in any of that crap at all..in any way

3. Do you believe in the literal word of the new/old Testament? Nope......like any storie the more mouthes it goiues through the more twisted and embelished it gets..i mena i could write a book liekit...bury it and someone could find it in thousands of year or more and think i was jebus h Christmas....religion just lacks proff which i would need to devote my life to something lie that

[Davey Boy 2.0]

A nun is lying in the bath washing herself when there is a knock at the door.

"Who is it?" she asks.

"It's the blind man," comes the reply.

"Come on in, my child," the nun says.

The door opens and a man walks in.

"Nice tits. Where do you want the blinds?"

[Vermontdave]

You're a sick person Mr. Davey Boy.

The reason I posted this thread in the first place was because I had just had a customer who had made it pretty clear that Jesus was the answer, and by supporting W your doing Gods Will.

We don't see this sort of thing in Vermont that often and it got me thinking about my upbringing.

I think Dr. Evil Mouse said what I wanted to hear. Thanks.

peace