The Varsity sounds off!

Have you ever had a religious experience?

• Dude, I have spiritual experiences all the time.
• As an undergraduate English student, my days are filled with endless epiphanies as I read the collected English-language revelations of centuries, searing them onto my brain. I’m told commerce and life-science students feel that the prospect of a comfortable and rewarding life is an adequate substitute.
• As cheesy as this sounds, my most religious experience was climbing up a ridge called Angel’s Landing at Zion National Park in Utah. It’s a narrow ridge with a fatal drop on either side, and upon reaching the top, the view was astounding.
• I met Bruce Campbell once. He let me touch his chin. Does that count?
• It was in Jerusalem, the holiest city on earth. My friends and I discovered a restaurant
  called Max Brenner that offers three-course meals made entirely of chocolate. I have
  never felt more spiritually fulfilled.

Do you believe in God?

• Yes, I used to talk with him when I was little.
• I believe a higher intelligence, not personified and not sentient, is active in the universe. If that counts as God, sure.
• I’d like to think that there’s some form of higher power out there. I’ve always thought
  it’d be awesome if the polytheistic Gods existed and interfered with the lives of mortals. Man, the ancient Greeks lived in some pretty awesome times.
• No.

How would you describe your religious beliefs?

• Rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, paper may triumph over sin.
• Inspired by Dante, Hume, and Baldwin/La Fontaine, life just isn’t worth it if you can’t have faith in other people.
• Religion has made for some great art and literature, but other than that, I believe it serves to fulfill our need for some kind of transcendence controlled by an outside source.
• I’m intrigued by the mystical possibilities of butternut squash.
• When you die, everything stops forever.

Who’s your favourite deity, and why?

• John Ray’s God: “The Providence of Nature is wonderful in a Camel”—the Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of Creation, 1691. Come on, the wisdom of God is manifest in a camel! How awesome is that?
• Gods with multiple arms trump all.
• The Hare Krishna (does he count?). If he’s good by George Harrison, he’s good by me.
• Osiris, the Egyptian god of life, death and fertility. Dude was able to get Isis pregnant with Horus after he had died. Talk about a resurrection!

Did you go to church (temple, etc.) as a kid? Any striking memories?

• Nope!
• I’m not an Anglican, but I went to an Anglican school for eight years. If you’ve read anything by John Irving, you know what I’m talking about. By Grade 10 I was used to going to chapel every morning. I remember once I had just come from marching in the snow—I was on the Track & Field team—and we were singing a hymn in chapel. The sun came streaming through windows the way it does on a very clear winter morning, and as I sang my lungs felt full from having just exercised in the cold air. I felt so alive. It wasn’t a religious moment, but it is one of my happiest memories.
• I went to synagogue. It was a little sitting, a lot of standing, and a ton of a singing in a language I don’t understand.
• No, but I did go to a Hebrew day school until I was eight, and every Friday, we’d have budget-style “Shabbat” with Dixie cups half-full of grape-juice (wine) and a loaf of challah more yellow than Big Bird. I hated grape juice, but we had to drink it if we wanted to go home. One day, it was too much for me and I threw up all over the vinyl (easy to clean!) floor. Everything was very very purple.
• I was in a “reconstructionist” Jewish temple. It was like an All-Star league of Jewish intellectuals and misfits. We had a female rabbi named Debbie (Reb Deb) and there was a big gay clown that would get way too into Purim

What’s the holiest place you’ve ever visited?

• I was in a comics shop in San Francisco once where people took things very seriously. Also, St. Peters’ Cathedral—impressive.
• The holiest? I’ve been to the Vatican, as well as Canterbury Cathedral. I’m not trying to knock either of them—they’re both very impressive—but there are other, less holy religious sites that have inspired me with greater religious feeling.
• A Zen Buddhist temple.
• Once, I went to the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre all in one day. (Ed: And boy was I tired!)

Do you have any friends/family members that are religious? Describe them.

• I have one friend who was a fundamentalist Christian until high school, then nothing. Now she’s an economist. I also know a girl who wears the full-body veil, with just an eye slit. I keep hoping that one day she’ll put an LED bar in there and go out as a Cylon for Halloween. Yeah that’s right, I watch Battlestar Galactica.
• My mom dated a man for three years who was super Jewish. Before they ever dated
  (and while my parents were still married), he was my Bar Mitzvah tutor. He also took tons of acid and hitchhiked through most of the ‘60s only to find religion and move to Israel in the 90s. I’m still friends with his daughter Susannah, whose mom is a devout Christian and Gospel singer. She practices both religions pretty regularly.
• My dad believes very strongly in atheism. I’m not sure which came first, his belief in atheism or communism, but each has come to reinforce the other. I can see where he’s
  coming from on a lot of points, especially when it comes to all the awful things that have been done in the name of organized religion, but religion is one of the few things we don’t see eye-to-eye on. We can’t really even have a conversation about it.

Do you think you’re going to heaven or hell? What’s your idea of both?

• Isn’t there something about heaven already filled up, according to the Bible? Plus, journalists are hell-bound for sure. We’re not supposed to be good people.
• I am going to hallucinate a really elaborate afterlife in the split second before I die, and that’s good enough for me.
• I don’t know what I’m doing next weekend, let alone in the afterlife!
• I don’t believe that either is a place you go. I’m totally with Dante when it comes to heaven and hell being experiences we live through in our own acts in this life. The punishment of sin is the act of sinning itself. Virtue is its own reward.
• There is no such thing. Hell is standing in line to see your registrar with a question you know they will be unable to answer so they refer you to another line, and it goes on like that forever.
• Hell is people who read too much Sartre.

Favourite deadly sin and why?

• The one I’m most susceptible to is wrath. I’ve really got to stop doing that.
• This is purely Christian bias. I refuse to answer.
• Lust. But it’s better to actually go somewhere with it, rather than to just feel lusty. That seems more like torture.
• Gluttony—there’s too much good food in the world not to eat excessively.
• Sloth (Bradypus variegatus)—Too bad it’s an endangered species.