The other day, I found myself in a heated discussion about religion with someone who thought religion was the worst invention ever to come out of the human race. More or less. And I found myself defending religion, a position that is kind of weird for me, being an agnostic and not particularly knowledgeable about any of the world religions. However, it wasn’t the first time, either.
I do not believe in a god. I often wish I could. Don’t get me wrong, at 15 I was just as hardcore an atheist as the next average Swedish teenager. But since then, I’ve met people. And I’ve read books. I’ve traveled, and I’ve experienced crises, both my own, in the family, and seen it in strangers.
Some of the most intelligent, truly good people I’ve met in my life have been religious. And in them, religion has not led to a narrow-mindedness. Rather, they have also been enlightened, curious about the world, honest. They have been people who have really thought things through. People who have had hard, life-altering experiences. And somewhere there, either before, during or after, they have found faith. As an anchor and a sail.
I lost my fear of death while reading the Bible to my Finnish grandmother on her deathbed. Cancer was eating up her lungs and there was no rest from the pain for her, but as soon as I picked up her Bible and slowly started reciting parts of the New Testament for her, a sort of bliss came over her face. She knew that she soon would meet Jesus Christ.
And life is hard, on all levels, both existentially in the way that we get here in Sweden, but even more so in many of the places where I’ve traveled, Bolivia, Liberia, Namibia, where the issue about identity is more or less completely overshadowed by the very pressing difficulty of surviving through the day. Having faith there is how many people survive, and I resent anyone who claims that this is mere stupidity.
Of course there are many awful things being carried out in the name of different religions. I’m not denying that. But I think blaming religion for the awful, narrow-minded things that some people do is just lazy and ignorant. There is something so militant about some anti-religious people that I find just as scary as the blind faith in some religious people.
I picked up a book the other day from the library. It’s called “Religion for Atheists” and it’s written by Alain de Botton. They only had it translated into Swedish at the library, so this will have to be my translation of something that has already been translated once, a English-Swedish-English excerpt if you will, from the first chapter of the book:
God may be dead, but the burning questions that drove us to invent him in the first place still haunt us, and demand answers that won’t loose their validity once we’ve been made to see the flawed scientific precision in the metaphor about the fish and the seven loafs of bread.
If there is anything that studying science has taught me, it is that we can’t be sure of anything. I believe in being humble, and open to other people’s worlds. And I believe that science isn’t the only source of reality that is available to us. I think existence is more than what we can weigh or measure. (I just can’t believe in a bearded man sitting on a cloud.)
I am really looking forward to reading this book.
Katja Malmborg 