I was raised
Lutheran. I tried my best to follow that religion up to my sixteenth year. I was locked up from early fourteen to mid sixteen. While in lockup I tried harder than ever to embrace Jesus. I read the bible in it's entirety. Twice. I had plenty of time. Why twice? After the first pass I sat there for days during my free time trying to understand. So many things were said that clashed with other things said. So many stories just didn't make any sense as a whole.
I had many questions raised by reading the bible that no priest could answer. My long time pastor's son told me once "Mostly there are no answers for these questions. Christianity is fascist. There's no way around it." I later protested a church and held up a sign which read "Christianity is Fascist."
After lockup I went back to my old church. Once. I sat there and observed with changed eyes. I saw people rising, sitting, chanting, singing. It was strikingly similar to hundreds of services I had seen in the past. Then one word stuck out in my head: Hypnotism.
In the few years after I set out to learn as much as I could about as many religions as I could. Very different. Very interesting. Some were similar. Some were not. But one thing I did develop was a strong hatred for the God I was raised to believe in. The internal bind over the entire situation built over the years. I wasn't sure what it was I hated. I'm still not entirely sure. It changes often.
I had an album in the works, as some of you will recall, called God is Void. I adopted that name to screen names and character names in games. Didn't float well. But the people it irritated were people I truly didn't have any desire to impress. Over time, that is. At first I always felt a little bad until I got to know them better.
Anyway, I'm getting away from the topic now. During the production of that I was learning about Mormonism from a couple really great Elders. Elder Tidwell could play guitar better than I still can. Great guy.
I had a Bible written towards teens. I remember reading parts of it and seeing the little full page drawings with messages on them. The messages were interpretations of passages. But it wasn't just an interpretation usually. It seemed like a completely biased, sometimes not even on base message with usually off topic imagery. Like it was preaching it's own agenda. I flipped through it and realized it was tilting the message I had gotten from reading it in a different direction. Towards a more opressive and somewhat irritatingly watered down fake feeling plastic agenda. Putting words in the bible's mouth, clearly. I got so pissed I went and found a large empty box. I tore out and crumpled up every single page of it. I felt a huge weight lifted and ended production of that album. It was yet another case of various tracks near completion with vocals and guitar work on it that ended up shelfed and eventually lost with a harddrive failure.
