English learning Podcast: religion without god?

Hello and welcome to Green-Eyed English, a podcast for intermediate and higher English speakers. Interesting topics, with real, understandable spoken English.

Now, today, I want to talk to you about religion. This is probably going to be a challenge for both me and you. For you, this episode will be longer and will use some harder vocabulary. For me, I am going to try to use clear, understandable English for a topic that is not very clear, and which is hard to understand!

So, with that said, let's get started.

I had a semi-religious childhood, which means that parts were religious and parts were not. My family were not very religious, although if you had asked my mum at that time, she would have said she believed in God. But I went to a Catholic primary school, meaning that it was a Christian school. This school had a small church inside that we went to each week, and it also had a priest, a man who I remember always wearing black and white clothes and who talked to us about God or read from the Christian religious book, the Bible. The school also had a convent, which is the name for the place where nuns live. Nuns are women who choose not to get married and who, instead, live together and work for the church. In a way, they marry God instead of someone else. These nuns used to serve us lunch at school and, because the nuns also black and white, we used to call this “penguin feeding time,” which I still think is a pretty funny name!

When I was going to that school, I was religious. I listened to the priest, I believed the things he told us, and I believed in God. In fact, I remember that I actually wanted to be a priest for a while. But – and this is a big but – I was only religious because I was told that God was real and, when you are very young, you believe everything you are told by adults.

When I became a teenager, I stopped being religious. Like all teenagers, I became very rebellious: I started to break rules and do the opposite of what I was told to do. I remember going on a school trip to an old church when I was maybe 12 or 13 years old. The church was made out of beautiful old stone and the inside had soft orange light from candles on the walls. We all sat down on wooden benches that were the same colour as old whiskey and listened to a friendly priest talking about God and Jesus, the son of God. At the end of his talk, I put my hand up and said “But, how do you knowJesus was really the son of God?”

The priest smiled and said that he believed in God and Jesus because he had faith, which means to trust in something.

Then I said, “but why do you have faith?”

And he said, very calmly, that he had faith because of the Bible.

He wanted to hear questions from some of the other children there, but I kept asking things like “Who wrote the Bible?' “How do you know they wrote it?” “How do you know they were not lying?” Basically, I was quite rude to him.

I remember all the other students leaving, but the priest was polite and stayed with me to answer my questions until it was time to go home.

After that, from my teenage years all the way through my twenties, I was an atheist, which means someone who does not believe in any God or religion. In fact, I was a very rude, very angry atheist. Every time I met a religious person, I would argue with them about their religion. I would tell them about all the wars and killing that people do because of religion, and would basically try to make them become an atheist. But to be honest, I was not angry at these things; what I was actually angry at was myself because I had used to be religious. I was angry that I had believed everything I was told without thinking for myself.

But, even then, I still wasn't thinking for myself. I had read several books about how bad religion was and I was repeating the things inside those books.

One example that I really regret was when I was at university. There I met a girl called Ingrid. Ingrid came from a very religious family and really believed in God. She was also a very polite and open girl who often talked about God. But my friends and I used to argue with her and try to make her look stupid because of her religion. Of course, we were still very young then, and I am sure that Ingrid has forgotten all about it, but if I meet her again in the future, I will apologise for how rude we were.

Now that I am older, my opinion of religion has changed a lot. I still think that many horrible things happen because of religion – we still have war and killing done in the name of different Gods – and I still do not believe in a God. But I now realise that religion and organised religion are two different things. Organised religion, when religion becomes mixed up with power and politics, has led to some very horrible things, but someone's personal religion is a different thing. For individual people, religions are about more than a God. They contain examples of how to live life, how to deal with problems, and how to find light when you can only see darkness.

In the West – the UK, US, Europe, and so on – we have been becoming less and less religious. This has taken a long time, but these days most people do not go to a church or have a religious belief. One reason for this is because of science, which has shown that religious stories about the world are ‘wrong.' For example, the stories in the Bible about how old the world is, how people were created, and so on, are obviously not correct. But I think now we are starting to realise that, actually, these stories in the Bible are not about facts and science. Instead, they are stories about what is important and about how we should behave. And, more than that, the stories are a deep part of Western culture. And, if culture is basically a set of things that we all agree on, then because we have thrown away our religious stories and our religious history, we also now do not agree on many things.

Right now, it does seem like people in places like the US and UK do not agree on many things anymore. We are fighting about what a man is, what a woman is, how to behave, how to raise children, and even what words we can and cannot say. These things used to be agreed on by most people, but now Western culture seems to have broken into many different Western cultures who are fighting with each other.

Although I am from the UK, I have lived overseas for a long time. In all the other places I have been to, I have not seen the same arguments and disagreements that are happening in the UK and the West. In China, South East Asia, The Middle East, people still have important things that they mostly agree on, and so, they seem to have stronger cultures as a result. Even in Malaysia, where I live now, and where Chinese, Indian, and Muslim Malay cultures live together, people still mostly agree on things like men, women, marriage, childhood, and other important things.

So, perhaps the West needs to remember some of the religious stories it has forgotten… This, I think, is my opinion now, but there is also a big problem: I still don't believe in God. And, neither do most people in the West. So, the real question we should be talking about is, probably: can we have religion without God?

I would really like to hear your thoughts on this topic. Are you religious or an atheist? Is your country or culture having similar problems to the West? Do you agree with my opinions? Leave a comment or get in touch.

Finally, if you are a language learner, you should visit my website at greeneyedenglish.com where you can download a learning pack for this episode. It has a transcript, a glossary of interesting language, and notes on useful phrases and grammar.

Nice talking to you. Bye bye!