I’m Becoming Religious.

I’ve got a tight grip on my school backpack with my small hands. The world rushes by me. I try to distinguish faces, but they look more like pink stains flying by. My blond hair waves in the wind. I’m even blonder than normal thanks to the blazing sun. I’m on the back of my mom’s bike in the kid’s seat. Her red hair dances wilder in the wind than mine and I look at it with childish wonder. A question is asked from the front.
“How was school, little mouse?” she asks. My mom always called me mouse.
“Fun.” I respond.
“What did you guys do?”
“The teacher told us a story.” Getting a meaningful answer from young kids about their day is almost impossible.
“Oh, was it a nice story?” she goes on.
“Yes.”
“What was it about?” if my mom wants to know something, she won’t quit.
I look around me before I answer the question.
“About God.”
Silence in the front.
“Oh, and… What did you think of it?”
“Nice.”
“Okay.” She responds as objectively as possible. It remains quiet for a little bit.
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“God doesn’t exist does he?” I ask.
“Some people think so, some people don’t. What do you think?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay. That’s fine. You can decide that yourself.” she responds, but I hear surprise in her voice in wake of this premature declaration of unbelief.
I can’t picture this moment because of my amazing memory. Everyone who knows me longer than ten minutes knows my memory isn’t the most reliable source of youthful information. My mom told me this. It was one of the first days I was shipped off to elementary school and we listened to a story from the children’s Bible. The story was of course the well known one, where God created the world in six days so he could rest on the seventh. I was four years old when I said God didn’t exist on the way home.
I was never forced to be religious or not. Not even my grandfather, who was religious in his own way, steered me in the way of the spiritual. They thought I should figure that out for myself, and figure out I did.
Since that day I always had a strange curiosity for everything religious. Even during my teenage years. I was introduced to people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins during the first years of Youtube. They destroyed arguments made by the religious with their logic, knowledge and facts. All the feelings and thoughts I had against religion were so clearly explained that I could not do anything other than worship those two people.
But, those are the teenage years. Absolutism is a phase for most of us, I hope at least. It’s this or that during that period. You or me. All or nothing. Now that I’ve grown older and more mature I see things differently. Absolutism fades away and is replaced by the insight that all is not black or white. The world is grey, and the same goes for religion.
Now I’ve become a dedicated student of Jordan Peterson. I can’t shut up about him, I know, but bear with me. LINK In an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast Jordan admits he is a religious person. How he explains why that is has turned my idea of religion upside down.
It’s not that religion is scientific truth, nor is it scientifically false. We created religion as a way to explain the unknown world around us. The creation of order in chaos. Chaos that was once much larger and stronger than it is today. They’re stories about the shared human experience in their essence. Take Harry Potter. The hero and titular character is an example who we should act in good ways, and how we shouldn’t act in bad ways. Take a hundred thousand Harry Potters, boil them down to their essence, and you have a figure like Jesus Christ.
It’s not scientifically true, but true in a transcendental way. The stories in the Bible tell you not what things are, but how you should be. We look at Harry Potter, something completely unbelievable scientifically, but we believe it. That’s because in Harry Potter there is a core of human truth. How else could you explain that similar motives and stories appear in different parts of the world? People who’ve never been in touch with each other, but still come up with the same stories. That is something we have in common as a species.
I am not religious in the way that I’ll go to church or try to convince other people to join the cause. I will also not convince people that it is all scientifically false, and that the only door to truth is opened through atheism. That’s also wrong. Religion and belief is something deeply private. Where everything went in the wrong direction, I think, is with organised religion. But, that is a subject for another time which I will surely write about, believe me.
For now I think that with the explanation provided by Jordan Peterson I’ve become a religious man. I don’t believe they’re scientifically true, but what else can you do as a writer, than believe in the truth of story?
