”Nyfiken på
Gud” (Curious about God) is a peculiar Swedish TV series about religion and
spirituality, aired in 2001. Some of the episodes have been ripped on YouTube.
Of course, you need to understand Swedish to watch them. Somewhat unexpectedly,
the series is narrated by Peter Wahlbeck, a rowdy comedian not usually
associated with anything even remotely spiritual. However, he turns out to be a
fairly orthodox and even somewhat cranky New Age guy!
The series was shown at
the public service channel SVT, and it sure was interesting to see what kind of
religion or spirituality *they* decided to promote. Wahlbeck says virtually
nothing about Islam and most Christians interviewed are fairly liberal or
heterodox. The main emphasis is on New Age and Buddhism, and is often so uncritical
that I´m surprised no angry atheist filed a complaint against the show. Are we
to believe that secular public service TV, at least 20 years ago, regarded New
Age and Buddhism as harmless and therefore “legitimate” paths, while monotheism
and more traditional polytheism were no-nos?
That being
said, I did find the interviews in “Nyfiken på Gud” interesting, although
perhaps too short. Wahlbeck has met Sture Johansson, the world famous Swedish
medium who channels a spirit named Ambres. He interviews Göran Grip, who
promoted Raymond Moody´s books in Sweden, about Grip´s own near-death
experience at the age of five. One episode deals with Martinus Kosmologi, a Danish
version of Theosophy developed by Martinus Thomsen, which has some
supporters in Sweden (Wahlbeck seems fascinated by it himself). The inevitable
Anthroposophists and their weird art and architecture are featured, and so is
Swedish pop singer Thomas Di Leva and Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. The
worst interview is with a crazy woman who claims to be able to live on pure
light, but if you follow her words carefully, she actually admits that she
sometimes drinks juice or eats a candy bar…
The biggest
scoop of the series, or so Wahlbeck claims, was an interview with the 17th
Karmapa of Tibetan Buddhism – or one of them, specifically Ogyen Trinley Dorje,
who was only 20 years old at the time, having just escaped from China to
Dharamsala in northern India, the center of the exiled Tibetans. (There are
apparently two claimants to the position of Karmapa, the head of the Karma Kagyu
lineage within the Kagyu sect of Vajrayana Buddhism. The Dalai Lama belongs to
another sect, the Geluk-pa.) Wahlberg´s talk with one of the older lamas was
actually more interesting.
The most
comic part of the series is Wahlbeck´s interview with a Dominican sister, who
tells him to get down to earth instead of dreaming about angels, space aliens
or whatever. Wahlbeck asks the sister what she would do if a “being of light
radiating magnetic energy” would appear in her room, at which the sister
responds that she would go out and have a good steak in order to recover from
the experience!
What a
shame Paul (the apostle) never thought of that…
OK,
seriously. If you´re Swedish and curious about spirituality, I think “Nyfiken
på Gud” is worth watching, but to a large extent for shall we say “ethnological”
reasons. As already indicated, it´s an interesting question to ask why TV in
the most secularized nation in the world chose to make a series about “God” in
exactly this way, and no other…
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