Personal Questions

[Rev. Powell]

I was a teenager when I stole the comic books. Christmas tree? How do you steal a Christmas tree?

There was a big stack of them at a store like Big Lots. Drove up in a pickup truck, jumped out, grabbed one, threw it into the truck bed, rode off. Alcohol may have been involved.

[RCMerchant]

 ^May have, huh? 

[indianasmith]

I stole a Snickers bar from the store as a kid.

[ER]

What was the attitude toward religion in your family when you were growing up?

[RCMerchant]

Dad and Mary Joe sent us to a holy roller church. I HATED it. They never went, of course. It was just to get us out of the house for a couple of hours.
I lived in a Catholic orphanage for a short time as a small child. The nuns were very sweet.

[Alex]

We were forced to go to church every Sunday, and then Sunday school. Must have been 4 hours all in. I used to spend most of it trying to think of ways not to get bored. My family were the only people in the building who weren't past retirement age. Other than Sunday religion wasn't a big factor in our lives though. No saying grace before dinner etc. Once my mum left my dad, it would be many years before I'd set foot in a church. I went for a couple of months in my mid-20s, but still found it spiritually dead.

[indianasmith]

My Dad was a Baptist preacher and my Mom played the piano for church services, so I had little choice about attending.
But I enjoyed church, and the people there, and what it taught me about God and the Bible.
I still attend every Sunday to this day.

[Trevor]

What was the attitude toward religion in your family when you were growing up?

Mom was brought up in an Afrikaans language church and when she met Dad (raised in the Jewish faith) he had to very quickly leave that faith as her Dad didn't want his little girl marrying a Jewish person so he became a Presbyterian and so did she.

I was raised to believe in a higher power and was even a Sunday School teacher in 1986.

[ER]

My mom was raised in a Catholic family so devout that growing up she was told there was no salvation outside the Church, and while she was never that severe herself, she did come over with notions that were beyond those my dad was raised with in the US (his background was church on Sunday morning and that was mostly it) and so I grew up with her trying to guide me toward what she thought was right, going to church on Sunday and days of obligation, saying the rosary with her about once a week, keeping Lent, going to Catholic school, and to confession.

She also was artistically talented, though, and had good taste in rock, and wasn't a Bible thumper, she just had it drilled into her brain that you had to live under Church doctrines or else you weren't doing what you should be doing. Mostly she let me read what I wanted and wasn't unreasonably strict about anything, and I enjoyed being with her. She was so pretty and so kind, and honestly very young, (and apparently, secretly, unhappy).

My dad could take or leave religion growing up and later but didn't disregard it either, and told me to listen to my mom when she told me to go to church or things like that. When he was in school and his teachers got wind of how intelligent he was the Jesuits tried HARD to recruit my dad, and got absolutely nowhere: he liked girls way too much, lol.

My mother believes there's a good chance I am going to go to Hell, and that disturbs and saddens her.

[Jim H]

What was the attitude toward religion in your family when you were growing up?

I was given zero instruction in any direction.  Not dissuaded from it, not pushed into it.  My mom is from a very Catholic family, so I'm pretty sure that was a deliberate decision.  

My parents answered questions I had honestly, but were generally neutral.  My dad was skeptical of organized religion, but more vague on the possibility of God, he was agnostic but possibly leaning slightly in a deistic kind of direction.  I quite liked it all around really, I think it was a good way to approach it.  Myself and both my sisters are non-religious as adults.  

There was a big stack of them at a store like Big Lots. Drove up in a pickup truck, jumped out, grabbed one, threw it into the truck bed, rode off. Alcohol may have been involved.

Hah, we did that one year when I was a teenager.  We (my mother and I, I couldn't drive yet) went to buy a tree Christmas Eve, but the place closed early!  So we parked near the edge of where the trees were, grabbed it and quickly tossed it into our van, and drove it home.  The leftovers just get woodchipped anyway, so I can't say I feel bad about it.

[RCMerchant]

What do you call soft drinks?
Some call it Pop (like me). Soda? Soda Pop? a Coke?
And what's your favorite flavors? I like Grape. I can't find Welch's grape pop no more, so it's Grape Crush. Or a Grape Stewarts if I can find it.

[Allhallowsday]

What was the attitude toward religion in your family when you were growing up?

The Catholic Church was the one true church.  All of us received sacraments through Confirmation.

All 5 of us went to Catholic schools.  My oldest brother and sister both graduated from Catholic High Schools. 

My father was a school teacher and made little money; yet they found tuition for 5 of us. 

My father had a "falling out" with the church after my mother left and then he felt my other brother had been mistreated by the school.  He pulled us out and we went to public school.

The Catholics are my tribe.

[ER]

What do you call soft drinks?
Some call it Pop (like me). Soda? Soda Pop? a Coke?
And what's your favorite flavors? I like Grape. I can't find Welch's grape pop no more, so it's Grape Crush. Or a Grape Stewarts if I can find it.

Just call/called it soft drink. For some reason my son calls it soda, but I'm not sure where he picked that up. (I know a lot of people do, I just mean no one else at home does.)

For a while in the "90s I'd drink Mountain Dew sometimes, which along with Snapple was a fad, but most of my life I didn't drink much soft drink, and today I won't touch the stuff because I think it's worse for people's health than is generally acknowledged.

[RCMerchant]

I rarely drink pop either. When I do, it's grape. Or Verneer's. I prefer tea or ice tea. Unsweetened. With a little lemon in the ice tea. I usta like Big Red, but don't see it around any more.

[indianasmith]

What do you call soft drinks?
Some call it Pop (like me). Soda? Soda Pop? a Coke?
And what's your favorite flavors? I like Grape. I can't find Welch's grape pop no more, so it's Grape Crush. Or a Grape Stewarts if I can find it.

We always just called it Soda.
I drank regular Dr. Pepper for years. Shifted to Diet about 10 years ago.
Drink a ridiculous quantity of it daily.