Montreal Singer Recalls Being Told By Her Religion Going To NASA Space Camp Is Unbiblical

“Falling in love and religious experiences I’ve had are often tremendously similar,” said Laurel Sprengelmeyer, the Montreal musician known to her fans as Little Scream. “You have this feeling of a huge awakening, and the surge of endorphins. Religion and the cult of love – they’re not unrelated.”

Sprengelmeyer’s experience of the phenomenon may be deeper than most, thanks to her years as an enthusiastic Jehovah’s Witness. For her, a love song is almost bound to have a sacred undercurrent, as if finding the One and meeting the one were almost the same thing.

“I think there’s a cult in relationships, where we have an idea of what we’re interacting with, and it’s not the reality,” she said, sitting in her bright studio in Montreal’s Plateau district. “We subscribe ourselves to an idea of what the relationship is, and then it becomes a cult, which everyone around you confirms socially. It becomes a real thing that has power over your life.”

“I always did well in standardized testing,” she said, “and I got chosen to go to NASA space camp. I was so excited, but the woman I was studying the Bible with said, ‘Laurel, you’re going to be hanging out with worldly people, who are going to tell you things that aren’t in the Bible. What would Jehovah want you to do?’ So of course I didn’t go to NASA space camp, and in subsequent years I dropped out of all my honours courses, because the church discouraged education and I wasn’t supposed to go to university.” She eventually did study studio visual art on a full scholarship at the University of Iowa, following in a long familial line of painters. Cont

Story from - Globe And Mail
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