Here I will post the more relevant bits of My Story (tm), for lack of a better place to spew it. I figured some background would help give the patrons of this forum some insight into why I am so morally ambiguous, clinically insane, and attracted to Discordian thought. And I'll let this serve as my introduction here, since the "introductions" thread appears to be anything but.
For starters, I was indoctrinated into the Christian church (protestant Lutheran) from birth. In a long-unopened drawer somewhere I even have a dusty VHS tape of my baptism. There I am, a two-week-old Shtik, clad in nothing but a rather saggy diaper, as a pastor guides me through a personally meaningful covenant with God. Every single Sunday and holiday for the first fourteen years of my life (a lifetime in terms of mental development) was spent in church. Of course I had my doubts about the ideas I was being bombarded with, but Lutherans in particular have the devilishly clever knack for encouraging doubt, so long as the resulting search for Truth leads you closer to God. And anyway, my dadwas is a zealot, and every young boy knows that Dad's word is Truth, so I assumed that in my foolish youth, I was missing some important piece of the Reality Puzzle that would only come to me with age and experience.
So it was, until the ripe old age of fourteen, when I was whisked away from my father's intellectual shelter and into the juvenile corrections system (I didn't do it, I swear). After two weeks of hard time, it was my mother (she'd been out of the picture since age five) who plucked me out of that little mess to live with her. I soon came to realize that shewas is a junkie, a completely different kind of batshit from my dad. I was pretty much free to do as I pleased, so long as it didn't cost more than a dollar and I didn't get in her way.
Thus I was presented with a reality which sharply contrasted everything I'd been brought up to know: from the suburbs to the city, from the middle class to the lower, from religious zealotry to the typical American apathetic Christianity. It didn't take long for me to see the blatant errorism in my dad's version of Reality, so I was left without any real sort of anchor. I somehow decided on my own that I'd need to painfully unlearn everything I'd learned thus far, and figure out for myself, using only logical analysis of personal experiences, the solutions to life's mysteries and humanity's problems. And even as I discovered that any search for hard answers was inherently futile, I kept up the game, mulling over every detail, because the only alternative seemed to be apathy and despair.
This is how I became Me. I would not be Me were if life hadn't brought me to this eventuality, and the intervening years in which I've painstakingly waded through the existential sewage of my addled mind have widened my perspective on just about everything and made me a stronger person all around. Becoming jaded and cynical just came with the territory. Anyway, Discordia seems to posit that the resulting confusion is, in fact, the whole point of the search, and instead of stressing over the futility of universal doubt, one can laugh at the absurdity of absolute certainty. Or maybe I've got it all wrong, but the intellectual exchange I've seen around here beats the piss out of any conversation I've found elsewhere, so I intend to stick around. Or kill me.
For starters, I was indoctrinated into the Christian church (protestant Lutheran) from birth. In a long-unopened drawer somewhere I even have a dusty VHS tape of my baptism. There I am, a two-week-old Shtik, clad in nothing but a rather saggy diaper, as a pastor guides me through a personally meaningful covenant with God. Every single Sunday and holiday for the first fourteen years of my life (a lifetime in terms of mental development) was spent in church. Of course I had my doubts about the ideas I was being bombarded with, but Lutherans in particular have the devilishly clever knack for encouraging doubt, so long as the resulting search for Truth leads you closer to God. And anyway, my dad
So it was, until the ripe old age of fourteen, when I was whisked away from my father's intellectual shelter and into the juvenile corrections system (I didn't do it, I swear). After two weeks of hard time, it was my mother (she'd been out of the picture since age five) who plucked me out of that little mess to live with her. I soon came to realize that she
Thus I was presented with a reality which sharply contrasted everything I'd been brought up to know: from the suburbs to the city, from the middle class to the lower, from religious zealotry to the typical American apathetic Christianity. It didn't take long for me to see the blatant errorism in my dad's version of Reality, so I was left without any real sort of anchor. I somehow decided on my own that I'd need to painfully unlearn everything I'd learned thus far, and figure out for myself, using only logical analysis of personal experiences, the solutions to life's mysteries and humanity's problems. And even as I discovered that any search for hard answers was inherently futile, I kept up the game, mulling over every detail, because the only alternative seemed to be apathy and despair.
This is how I became Me. I would not be Me were if life hadn't brought me to this eventuality, and the intervening years in which I've painstakingly waded through the existential sewage of my addled mind have widened my perspective on just about everything and made me a stronger person all around. Becoming jaded and cynical just came with the territory. Anyway, Discordia seems to posit that the resulting confusion is, in fact, the whole point of the search, and instead of stressing over the futility of universal doubt, one can laugh at the absurdity of absolute certainty. Or maybe I've got it all wrong, but the intellectual exchange I've seen around here beats the piss out of any conversation I've found elsewhere, so I intend to stick around. Or kill me.