> I didn't grow up Catholic, so never > had to do confession, but got messed > up by religion in other ways...
I was raised Catholic, although not super devoutly so. Near the end of high school I somehow wound up in the throes of some major league Protestantism for, oh, a couple, three years.
Overall, I've concluded a religion isn't a "thing" (despite my having implied such by placing an 'a' before it..) so much as a collection of ideas people assign meaning to, i.e. come to conclusions about. Whether that meaning and/or conclusions have anything to do with what any alleged original authors allegedly meant is likely impossible to know, especially since the first thing we as potential investigators of such do is assign our own meanings to said words, which... well, heh... we assign meaning to the alleged original text, and then to the words of the meanings/conclusions of others *about* such text... and... well, anyone else see a sort of house of conceptual cards forming, there?
Which reminds me... a favorite saying that came to me long ago in USENET times goes like this:
the words are mine; the meaning is you
Why? Well... after years of posting and "discussing" various topics while convinced words *contain* meaning, it bothered me - in a "makes no sense" sense - that people could somehow not understand each other when using the same words. And the best explanation to me at that time was that a given ego and the point of view it defines heavily - if not utterly - influence the meaning, significance, etc. of words.
The situation is actually so laughably dire that "the words are mine; the meaning is you" is itself similarly meaningless apart from an observer thereof's "point of meaning view".
as is the previous sentence
as is the previous sentence
as is the previous sentence
....
amen (non-ironically intended)... i've reached similar conclusions, hepled along by my linguistic adventures, exposure to Korzybski's General Semantics, and many other factors...
also love the usenet quote!