But that doesn't necessarily mean that the people themselves are religious, it's more like pure tradition at this point. I basically never see people talking about how they're praying, for example, meanwhile I've heard that "Now I lay me down to sleep" or "Now let's say grace" thing in English a bazillion times in my life.
My wife's mom has a picture of Jesus in her room but it's not because she's Christian, it's because she think the picture looks nice. For the same reason, my wife's cousin (who, if she were religious would also be going straight to hell LOL) sings gospel songs. So if you look at it without, say, knowing the language and culture, or if you were to just send out a survey and as "are you Christian, Y/N?", you'd get a very different opinion from how it really seems to be. It's like when you go to buy Christmas decorations or dress up for Halloween - you might get something with an angel on it, or dress up as an angel, even if you don't believe in angels.
I really think that a lot more Nordic people are slowly "reverting" and believing in the Norse gods nowadays, as I keep seeing it all over the place online as the internet gets larger... In Iceland it's relatively really big because they have practically zero foreigners so they also don't have to worry about all this "you're racist!" nonsense that comes with it.
In the past, the Christians worked REALLY hard to erase the Norse religion. Really, really hard. Basically they moved all the Norse holidays to the weekend, changed as many gods as they could to demons/devils, what they couldn't change or remove they said was due to Christ or whatever instead of due to the original Norse gods (ex. Christmas).
Because there was no organized educational system at that time, the church took up teaching everyone and since the church used Latin with the Latin alphabet, they started erasing the Norse alphabet and started teaching the young people stuff like "well you're educated and your grandma isn't - those stories your grandma tells about those Norse gods are just lies, we have the real story" basically. And it was also helped a bit just because Scandinavians love "outside stuff" and love to copy other countries for the most part. So Norway could, say, look and see that Germany was becoming Christian and then the Norwegian king would want to hop on the bandwagon a bit more (then force his people to, no matter what THEY thought about it). Then Sweden would do it just because Norway did it (a sad thing that still happens today).
But this place is still different from most places in the world and is way different from the kind of places that are described by the bible (of what little I know of it). Very little grows here, there's few people, winters are harsh, it's mostly forest and water. There are still people who travel to work on skis in the wintertime and there are no "snow days" off from school, blah blah. When you live in this kind of place you have to (traditionally) be super practical, and a lot of things having to do with other religions or cultures from other countries aren't actually fitting, they may be fads for a while but likely they're very pale or edited in comparision to the original.
Speaking of that, in the past five or so years Swedes have started "celebrating Halloween" (thanks to American TV and places like Toys R US having "Halloween Sales") except no one even knows which date it's supposed to be on so even newspapers print the wrong date for it. I overheard a conversation in a shop where some girls around my age were arguing about whether Halloween was on November 30th or October 1st etc.
(As for my family, my dad isn't religious, I don't know about my mom, my grandparents are Christian but I only found out about it like five years ago by chance due to grandma explaining to my cousin what different people think about how the world was made, likewise my great-grandparents have never said anything but I assume they're Christian)
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2015-09-27 06:30 pm (UTC)My wife's mom has a picture of Jesus in her room but it's not because she's Christian, it's because she think the picture looks nice. For the same reason, my wife's cousin (who, if she were religious would also be going straight to hell LOL) sings gospel songs. So if you look at it without, say, knowing the language and culture, or if you were to just send out a survey and as "are you Christian, Y/N?", you'd get a very different opinion from how it really seems to be. It's like when you go to buy Christmas decorations or dress up for Halloween - you might get something with an angel on it, or dress up as an angel, even if you don't believe in angels.
I really think that a lot more Nordic people are slowly "reverting" and believing in the Norse gods nowadays, as I keep seeing it all over the place online as the internet gets larger... In Iceland it's relatively really big because they have practically zero foreigners so they also don't have to worry about all this "you're racist!" nonsense that comes with it.
In the past, the Christians worked REALLY hard to erase the Norse religion. Really, really hard. Basically they moved all the Norse holidays to the weekend, changed as many gods as they could to demons/devils, what they couldn't change or remove they said was due to Christ or whatever instead of due to the original Norse gods (ex. Christmas).
Because there was no organized educational system at that time, the church took up teaching everyone and since the church used Latin with the Latin alphabet, they started erasing the Norse alphabet and started teaching the young people stuff like "well you're educated and your grandma isn't - those stories your grandma tells about those Norse gods are just lies, we have the real story" basically. And it was also helped a bit just because Scandinavians love "outside stuff" and love to copy other countries for the most part. So Norway could, say, look and see that Germany was becoming Christian and then the Norwegian king would want to hop on the bandwagon a bit more (then force his people to, no matter what THEY thought about it). Then Sweden would do it just because Norway did it (a sad thing that still happens today).
But this place is still different from most places in the world and is way different from the kind of places that are described by the bible (of what little I know of it). Very little grows here, there's few people, winters are harsh, it's mostly forest and water. There are still people who travel to work on skis in the wintertime and there are no "snow days" off from school, blah blah. When you live in this kind of place you have to (traditionally) be super practical, and a lot of things having to do with other religions or cultures from other countries aren't actually fitting, they may be fads for a while but likely they're very pale or edited in comparision to the original.
Speaking of that, in the past five or so years Swedes have started "celebrating Halloween" (thanks to American TV and places like Toys R US having "Halloween Sales") except no one even knows which date it's supposed to be on so even newspapers print the wrong date for it. I overheard a conversation in a shop where some girls around my age were arguing about whether Halloween was on November 30th or October 1st etc.
(As for my family, my dad isn't religious, I don't know about my mom, my grandparents are Christian but I only found out about it like five years ago by chance due to grandma explaining to my cousin what different people think about how the world was made, likewise my great-grandparents have never said anything but I assume they're Christian)