Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Comparisons between the Bible and the Koran

Mercy, you asked me a very interesting question:

Let me tell you a little about my parents, Mercy. My father lost his mother when he was eight years old. His mother died of cancer. My father had to leave his home and spend several years with relatives, until his father remarried and could take him home again.

The relatives that my father spent some years with were fundamentalist Pentecostalists. I do believe they were kind to him. However, my father rarely spoke of his childhood, and he seemed relatively uninterested in religious matters. He never spoke about such things. Yes, he went to church with my mother every Sunday, but that was about it. I think the trauma of losing his mother so young and having to leave his father was so great that the religious things his relatives may have tried to teach him just didn't make such an impression on him.

My father was a member of a Pentecostalist church, nevertheless, but he left it when he was twenty-one. He never told me many details, but once he said that money had been disappearing from the congregation, and no one wanted to look into the matter because they were afraid of a scandal. My father disliked that sort of fear, so he left and joined a liberal church, the Swedish Missionary Society, instead.

Unlike my father, my mother has told me a lot about her own childhood. She belonged to a Pentecostalist family, and her parents believed in something that you can apparently read somewhere in the Bible, “you shall not sit down with sinners”. Don't ask me to find that passage for you, and don't blame me if it wasn't an exact quote. But that was the rule that my grandmother and grandfather lived by.

This meant that my mother was not allowed to have any friends who were not Pentecostalists. But since there were so few Pentecostalists where she lived, she was not allowed to have any friends at all except her sister and one other Pentecostalist girl whom she didn't like. None of her classmates were Pentecostalists, so she was never allowed to go home to any of them, or invite any of them home to her, or even spend any time at all with them outside school hours. She has often told me about a time when a circus came to her village. She stood some distance away and watched all the kids in her village file into the big circus tent. Only she, her sister and that other Pentecostalist girl were not allowed to go in.

When my mother was eighteen, she once went to church wearing a thin gold chain around her neck:



The pastor spoke to her after the service, but he didn't say anything about her necklace. But as soon as she had come home again the phone rang. It was the pastor, who wanted to speak to her father, my grandfather. And then the pastor told my grandfather that he had to make sure that his daughter didn't come to church wearing the kind of jewellery that made her look like a harlot.

Now my mother had had enough. As soon as she was able to, she left her home as well as her congregation. She moved to Gothenburg, Sweden's second biggest city, and joined a big church, the Swedish Missionary Society. She made lots and lots of friends there and had an absolutely splendid time. Later she met my father there, and they fell in love and got married.

My mother never returned to the particular Pentecostalist congregation she had left behind, but a person who still belonged there told her that the congregation kept praying for my mother's soul, Sunday after Sunday. They seemed to believe that if she didn't return to her Pentecostalist home, she would probably go to Hell.

When I was a small child, my grandfather took a very great interest in me. When I think back on my childhood, I can see what an imposing figure he was. Whenever we met my grandparents, my grandfather managed to be alone with me. And he often called, and when I answered, he would speak to me for an hour or more.

He always talked about religion with me, behind my mother's back. She never had a clue about what was happening.

My grandfather had lost his daughter to the Swedish Missionary Society. I think he was determined to win me for his own Pentecostalist church. He showered me with religious children's books about Christian little children who were almost supernaturally good and perfect. The horrible thing was that these kids didn't have to pretend to be good. They were absolutely perfect, through and through. They were never angry, petty or sullen. They were forever jubilant because God loved them, and they loved nothing better than showing God their gratitude by being wonderfully good little boys and girls in return. On the extremely few occasions when a girl did something wrong – because it was only the girls who ever did something wrong – she was tearfully happy and grateful to her parents for spanking her to save her soul.

My parents spanked me. I hated it. I never really forgave my parents for doing this to me. There was no way I could ever, ever, ever be grateful to my parents for spanking me. I was so bad. I could never be like the children in my grandfather's religious books. If people only knew how ungrateful I could be!

What would my relatives do to me if they knew how bad I was? I concluded that they would probably take me prisoner and lock me up in a small room, where they would pray with me and scold me and read the Bible to me and never leave me alone and never let me out until I folded and lost my ability to think for myself and became just like them. So I never dared to show them anything at all of my own sheer badness and my religious doubts and confusion, because if I could make them think that I was just a good little girl, they would probably leave me alone.

Up until I was ten, I spent most of my time with people from either the Pentecostalist Church or the Swedish Missionary Society. We spent the summers on an island with our Pentecostalist relatives. Those of my cousins – second cousins – who were girls had to spend much of their time doing household chores. They had to tidy up their brothers' room, hang up their brothers' clothes and make their brothers' beds, and then they had to help their mothers with things like cooking, washing up and doing laundry. When the girls were finally let out of their houses, they merged in a flurry of summer dresses and flowing hair, and then they took off like whirlwinds and disappeared where I couldn't follow.

During the rest of the year I spent a lot of time with girls from my parents' congregation, the Swedish Missionary Society. These girls didn't have to do a lot of household chores, and instead they were shown off by their parents as the family jewels they were. The girls did great at school (well, so did I), they wore splendid clothes and looked great (I didn't) and they certainly knew how to make others feel inferior. Once, when my mother had come to pick me and another girl up after choir practice, this other girl haughtily informed my mother that I had made a spectacle of myself by giggling during the rehearsal.

When I was ten, we moved to another neighbourhood in Malmö, and here I suddenly got some truly great friends. They were kind and tolerant, and they never talked religion with me. They never complained about me to my parents. They liked to be with me, and they didn't try to change me. They liked me for the person that I was! Wow! I had never come across kids like them before.

Thanks to my new friends, I was able to relax and stat looking back on my religious experiences and try to understand them. One thing that really bothered me was how the Pentecostalists and the Swedish Missionary Society people could be so different in their religious behaviour, even though they claimed to believe in the same God.

After thinking about it, I concluded that it was the Pentecostalists who were the better and the more devoted Christians. They seemed to love God more, and they seemed to be willing to sacrifice a lot more for God. The Swedish Missionary Society people, the SMS, seemed a lot more interested in worldly success, and their religion sometimes seemed to be just one more perfect little thing that they flaunted before others to demonstrate how good they were.

So I concluded that the Pentecostalists were God's favourites and the ones who were likely to enter Heaven before all others. I also concluded that while many and perhaps most SMS people would be let into Heaven, they probably knew deep down that they themselves were not as good Christians as the Pentecostalists. I suspected that all Christians somehow knew that the Pentecostalists were God's favourites.

When I was nineteen and in my last year of high school, we were given a school assignment which meant that we had to go to a religious service which was not given by the national Lutheran Church of Sweden which all Swedes were just born into at the time, which meant that practically all Swedes belonged to it. (Nowadays you aren't born into it.) We had to visit a service given by another church and find out facts about this church.

I hated that assignment, because I found it hard enough to deal with two churches, or rather three, the Pentecostalists, the Swedish Missionary Society and the national Lutheran Church of Sweden. I didn't want to find out things about a fourth church as well. But I always did what my teachers told me, so when my best friends decided that they would visit the Mormon church in Malmö, I tagged along.

The service was very unmemorable, but afterwards the pastor took questions from us. I had only one question for the pastor. What did he think about my Pentecostalist relatives and their faith?

At first the pastor ignored my question and pointedly talked to my classmates instead. But when I had repeated the question twice, he finally answered. And he told me that… my Pentecostalist relatives would go to Hell.

To say that I was thunderstruck was putting it mildly. My Pentecostalists relatives would go to Hell? Even though they had devoted all their lives to God? Even though they went to church several times a week and gave away much of their possessions in tithes and contributions to charities? Even though they uttered phrases like “Praise the Lord” and “Halleluia” in every other sentence? Even though their homes were plastered with pictures and posters and paintings of Jesus? Even though they spoke in tongues and burst out in spontaneous prayer at unpredictable moments? They were going to Hell?

I had no reason to assume that the Mormon pastor knew more about the fate of my relatives than my relatives did themselves. But then again, could I assume just like that that the pastor was dead wrong?

The other thing that was so unspeakably shocking about what the Mormon pastor had told me was that he seemed so sincere about it. He wasn't lying to me. He truly believed that my relatives were going to hell.

And finally I had to ask myself – how do I know that religious statements are true at all? Because people believe in them? But there will be other people who are every bit as adamant about not believing in them. How do I know if they are true?

The Mormon pastor told me that only those who had had the Mormon baptism could go to Heaven. What's more, the pastor also told me that now that I knew this, it was my duty to become a Mormon myself, because then I could have the Mormon baptism vicariously for my relatives and thus save them, so that they could go to Heaven. Many years later, I thought to myself that it would be sort of, well, “fun” if I had become a Mormon and baptized myself for my relatives. Because if God prefers Pentecostalists, then my relatives would go to Heaven because they are Pentecostalists. But if God prefers Mormons, then my relatives would go to Heaven because I had baptized myself for them.

Then again, what if God doesn't prefer either Pentecostalists or Mormons? There once was a Monty Python sketch where Saint Peter guarded the gateway to Heaven and told almost all the applicants: “I'm sorry, Sir, the Jews were right all along… follow this way to Hell, Sir…”

The truth is that it is not possible to know what religious creed is the right one, or if indeed there is a right creed at all. So, Mercy, you asked me if it isn't cruel *not* to steer people down the path that you yourself believe is the right one. Yes, perhaps it is. Then again, consider my mother. She was not allowed to have any friends when she grew up, because her parents firmly believed that God only loves Pentecostalists and only wants Pentecostalists to be friends with other Pentecostalists. Were her parents right to treat her this way? Perhaps you say that if she would go to Heaven thanks to the fact that she was made to shun non-Pentecostalists, then her eternal happiness in Heaven will be worth the inconvenience she suffered for a few years on Earth. But what if God doesn't care one bit if you are friends with Pentecostalists or Lutherans or Catholics or Swedish Missionary society people or Mormons or any others?

And what about Muslim parents who treat their girls in a way that we find cruel, just because the parents are honestly convinced that this is the only way for their daughters to get good lives and go to Paradise after death? Should we condemn the parents for treating their daughters in a way we find shocking, or should we say that it would be more cruel for the parents to treat their daughters the way girls are treated here in the west, if the parents thought that this could mean that their daughters will get to spend eternity in Hell?

All I can say is that if people want to deprive me of my rights for my own good, because this is the only way I can go to Heaven according to these people's own faith, then I guess I'm not going to be thankful to them for trying to help me to Heaven.

Ann