For Muhammad’s birthday I was very exited to do something big. A part of me feels that the Muslim holidays are especially worthy of attention. I feel that Islam is currently receiving too much negative focus and is in need of some more positive and possibly normalizing interest from the general public.
As it happened, we had guests staying over and they were not altogether happy with the emphasis on religion. I think they are of the opinion that religion should be separated from education, maybe because it belongs to individual beliefs and cannot be applied universally. People have very strong opinions about religion related questions, which I can understand, but I now feel the need to explain my position.

First of all, I am doing this in the name of learning. I want to learn as much as possible within a short period of time and I believe that by practicing these six religions, and their holidays, this will make a strong imprint in my head. Secondly, I have a strong interest in pedagogics and at the moment I put my efforts into figuring out the best way to teach religion. I believe that learning through celebration is good because of the focus on happy times that we can all relate to. World religions are only taught in the first part of secondary school so the teaching material is not heavy with theology or morality but the focus is on tradition and cultural practice. This opens up the opportunity to bring in more practical techniques into the teaching.

This is also connected to where I think people go wrong when they judge religion in schools as being dangerous and too dogmatic. If we instead realized the extent to which religion is connected to the way we do things; to our traditions, our way of thinking and to our culture at large, then religion can become the route to access the multitude of different cultures in the world. I do think that it is a mistake to say that since religion involves a complicated set of regional beliefs that sometimes cause frictions between people, we should overlook it altogether. There is no such thing as ‘no religious belief’, we can all relate to the content of religion one way or other; we just have to put our minds to it.