On Religion

It´s a friday and I just completed my first exam. The professor is grading them now as I type this. Last night, I dreamt in Spanish for the first time. It´s kinda interesting to dream in two different languages. Anyways, I want to use this time to talk about Chile and religion, or at least, what I´ve noticed about Chileans and religion.

Let me start by saying that Chileans are far more culturally religious than Americans, and a thousand times more so than the Spanish. On a cultural level, it´s quite appropriate to see signs and billboards with Catholic or otherwise Christian imagery. The third question my host family asked me was if I was religious. And the tests our school uses has obviously been designed by a religious person.

Take today´s exam. Well, not the exam I took, but the exam a lower level class took. The students from that class said one of the questions on the test was to identify the persons in a picture. The correct answers were any of the following: woman, mother, child, baby. The picture, in fact, was this: the Virgin Mary holding children in her arms and in giant letters below her.I will let you take a guess as to what abortó means, I am confident you will understand the actual message of the picture. As an other example, my homework sometimes had practice sentences like, when translated, ^Do you believe in God? Because I do.¨

Then again, church attendence in Chile is about the same as in America. So I think that reinforces my thesis that Chileans are far more culturally religious. I wonder aloud, now, if this is because of Pinochet (whose government was extremely religious) and Opus Dei (which is pretty popular here) or is normal in all of South America.

Update: Here is the picture. Pero no estoy seguró que toda las.