📚 And I Thought That Made Me Smarter
I grew up in a society that erased religion.
Not questioned it.
Not reinterpreted it.
Erased it.
Religion was framed as mythology. Fairy tales for the uneducated. Marx’s “opium of the masses” wasn’t edgy – it was baseline thinking. I absorbed it early and thoroughly.
Bible stories? Myths.
Rituals? Social control.
Faith? A substitute for critical thinking.
That worldview worked – until something didn’t add up.
🔍 The Problem I Couldn’t Explain
During the pandemic, I barely saw someone I’d known for over a decade. When we met again, she was… different.
Not naïve.
Not manic.
Just deeply, unmistakably at peace.
So I asked the obvious question:
What changed?
She didn’t preach.
She didn’t persuade.
She just said: Come with me to church.
⛪ Culture Shock, Not Conversion
I struggled. A lot.
🤍 Strangers hugged me.
🤝 Kindness without strings.
🧑⚕️ Dentists.
📐 Math teachers.
⚖️ Lawyers.
🛠️ Engineers.
People who were clearly not stupid, not desperate, not uneducated.
And that bothered me.
One day I came home from church genuinely confused and called my partner – an engineer, a rationalist like me.
I said:
“I don’t get it. These people are book-smart. Like us. How can they believe in fairy tales?”
💡 The Sentence That Changed Everything
He answered calmly:
“Religion is like everything else in life.
Simple people relate to it in a simple way.
Book-smart people relate to it differently – and get something different out of it.”
That was the crack.
🧩 The Mistake I Had Been Making
I had assumed belief was about intelligence.
It isn’t.
It’s about which layer you’re engaging with.
I had been arguing with the surface version of religion – literalism, symbols, stories – while missing its deeper functions:
🧭 Meaning
👥 Community
⚖️ Moral orientation
🧘 Peace
🪞 Humility
📏 Accountability
I thought faith replaced thinking.
For many people, it disciplines it.
Not everyone reads poetry the same way.
Not everyone experiences music the same way.
Not everyone needs philosophy wrapped in footnotes.
Religion is no different.
📖 Some hear stories.
🏗️ Others see structure.
🧠 Others extract values.
🤫 Some finally hear silence.
🚧 I’m Still Not “There” – And That’s Fine
This isn’t a tidy conversion story.
I still question.
I still struggle.
I still resist easy answers.
But I no longer confuse skepticism with superiority – or faith with stupidity.
What changed wasn’t my IQ.
It was my arrogance.
And once that cracked, I could finally see what I had dismissed without understanding.
✨ Sometimes the fairy tale isn’t belief.
✨ Sometimes it’s the story we tell ourselves about being too smart to need meaning.
❤️ A Quiet Thank You
And to my partner – for answering a hard question without mocking it, for offering clarity instead of certainty,
for reminding me that intelligence doesn’t disappear when humility shows up.
Thank you.
