Stellan Skarsgård

Discovering Stellan Skarsgård in the 2011 film – “A Somewhat Gentleman” was a pleasant experience. Having seen him and not recognizing him in The Red October, Insomnia, Pirates of the Caribbean, Angels and Demons, Dogville and Melancholia now causes a great regret.

Skarsgård was brought up by humanist parents and had an atheist grandfather and a deeply religious grandmother. According to Skarsgård, this never led to any problems because of the family's mutual respect for each other's opinions. After the September 11 attacks, Skarsgård set out to read the Bible and the Quran, both of which he condemns as violent. Skarsgård is also a critic of religious independent schools in the Swedish educational system. Skarsgård has said he considers the notion of God absurd and that if a real God were actually so vain as to constantly demand worship, then he would not be worthy of it.

In 2009, Skarsgård, along with other non-religious artists, authors and entrepreneurs including Christer Sturmark, Björn Ulvaeus and Christer Fuglesang, wrote an article in Dagens Nyheter stressing the importance of secularity. The group also criticised the UN for its stance on blasphemy laws.

His views on religion as published in the Wikipedia was :

After 9/11, you read both the Bible and the Qur’an. What did you learn from that experience?

It’s frightening. Everybody says that all the ideas of goodness in the world come from the Bible. That’s absolutely bullshit. The Sermon on the Mount is a very nice piece about being good, but most of the Bible is a very revengeful, childish, brutal God. It’s fantastic stories, but there’s no rational reason to believe anything in it. I didn’t care about religion before 9/11, but I thought I should take a little look at it, because not only did the people who flew into the World Trade Centre claim they had God on their side, but then George W Bush stood up and said he had God on his side as well. So everybody who is religious has God on his side, which is terribly dangerous. And nobody should be sure they have God on their side.

Is there anything you have taken from it?

If you read the Bible, you realise that it’s actually good not to cut off the foreskin until it’s necessary. God came to kill Moses in the desert and Moses’s wife saved him by cutting off the foreskin of his child and rubbing it on Moses’s body and then God didn’t kill him. So always have a small child with a foreskin nearby so you can protect yourself against the wrath of God.