Chris Betcher

This is part two of my Beyond Belief project, where every month during 2019 I plan to experience a different religion that I know nothing about. This month its Sikhism . I have to admit, this one I knew absolutely nothing about. There is a large temple-looking place not far from where I live so I dropped in the other day to see what it was about. Turns out it is a gurdwara, which is a temple for Sikhs. The only thing I really knew about Sikhs was that they typically come from Northern India and they wear turbans (at least the men do). I'd never really thought that being Sikh was a stand-alone religion, and just assumed it was some offshoot of Hinduism. That's definitely not the case. When I dropped into the gurdwara to take a look, there was a guy with a beard and turban near the entrance measuring up a noticeboard, so I approached and explained that I am trying a different religion every month this year. He put down his measuring tape, then spent the next 90 minutes showi...

Here we go with part one of my Beyond Belief Project , where I plan to experience and learn about a different religion every month for all of 2019. I'm a little late posting this one, as it was for January, but better late than never. I spent nearly five week in Bali over the December/January period, so Balinese Hinduism seems like an obvious place to start. As part of Indonesia, a predominantly Muslim country, Bali is a religious outlier with nearly 85% of the island's population identifying as Hindu. Its version of Hinduism is a little different to that traditionally found in India, which is polytheistic (believing in many gods), and it has quite a different feel to the other Muslim parts of Indonesia. Balinese Hinduism claims to be monotheistic, with only one god, although it seems to me that in practice this is not always the case, based on so many different statues I saw everywhere. There were statues of Vishnu and Ganesha and many, many others that I didn't recognis...

For a couple of years now I have tried to take on some kind of interesting project each year. In the past it's been relatively simple things like doing a 365 project where I take and post a photo every day, or take one second of video every day, or even a daily creative challenge where I tried to make something creative every day for a year. For someone who can get easily distracted, the act of developing enough discipline to do something every single day has been quite a challenge, but for most of these projects I managed to stick to it all the way to the end of the year. Regardless of what the project is for the year I usually I learn a lot about the world and about myself. And it's been surprising that some of these daily projects have opened all kinds of interesting doors for me that I could have never foreseen. The daily discipline has paid off in other ways too. I'm trying to learn a second language at the moment - Esperanto - using the Duolingo app , and I've su...