Eddie Vedder, Recording Artist music 

Da http://www.cmj.com/NewMM/QandA/veddergarofalo.html:

This is Janeane Garofalo. I'm interviewing Eddie Vedder and we're at Brendan's, on the Lower East Side. 

JG: Can I ask what your feelings are about God? 

EV: Sure. I think it's like a movie that was way too popular. It's a story that's been told too many times and just doesn't mean anything. Man lived on the planet -- [placing his fingers an inch apart], this is 5000 years of semi-recorded history. And God and the Bible, that came in somewhere around the middle, maybe 2000. This is the last 2000, this is what we're about to celebrate [indicating about an 1/8th of an inch with his fingers]. Now, humans, in some shape or form, have been on the earth for three million years [pointing across the room to indicate the distance]. So, all this time, Da there [gesturing toward the other side of the room], to here [indicating the 1/8th of an inch], there was no God, there was no story, there was no myth and people lived on this planet and they wandered and they gathered and they did all these things. The planet was never threatened. How did they survive for all this time without this belief in God? I'd like to ask this to someone who knows about Christianity and maybe you do. That just seems funny to me. 

JG: Funny ha-ha or funny strange? 

EV: Funny strange. Funny bad. Funny frown. Not good. That laws are made and wars occur because of this story that was written, again, in this small part of time. 


Da http://www.addict.com/MNOTW/hifi/980122/980122_2754.shtml: 

Vedder explains in the interview that he "doesn't mind touching on spirituality in the songs," but that it's really "an individual thing; I've been open to some interesting theories, and I don't really consider it ... the word 'religion' has such bad connotations for me, that it's been responsible for wars, and it shouldn't be that way at all, it's just the way the meaning of the word has evolved to me. I have to wonder what we did on this planet before religion." 


Da http://www.fivehorizons.com/archive/articles/rs103191.html: 

Vedder has made a variety of comments about God and/or belief, at one point saying, "When you're out in the desert, you can't believe the amount of stars. We've sent mechanisms out there, and they haven't found anything. They've found different colors of sand, and rings, and gasses, but nobody's shown me anything that makes me feel secure in what happens afterward. All I really believe in is this moment, like right now." [Rolling Stone, Oct 31 1991, "Right Here, Right Now"] 


At a July 22, 1998 Pearl Jam concert in Seattle's Memorial Stadium, Vedder said about the unusually beautiful weather, "I would thank God, but I don't believe in it." 


The July 22, 1998 edition of the Seattle Times [page E3] says of Vedder: "Later he tried to keep a straight face as he mockingly confessed: 'While we were away, I found God.' He rambled on about the Bible before concluding, 'We found God. He was right in our stomachs...'" 

[The rambling had to do with finding a Bible in every hotel room, "Every hotel has Holy Bibles." July 23, 1998 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, page C3]