Religious Oppositon

Religion obscures Blomkvist’s search for truth by acting as an uncrackable, cryptic code due to his disassociation with religion. By encountering faith in such negative ways, he becomes inclined to distrust religion, illustrating the controversy that it causes in Blomkvist’s universe. When he seeks out the Vanger’s pastor during Harriet’s lifetime, Otto Falk, he is confronted with messages from the mentally-decaying old priest, of which Blomkvist is unable to decipher the meanings. Falk speaks of the “sola scriptura,” the “sufficientia scriptura,” and the “sola fide,” all of which refer to Catholic scriptures and Catholic faith. “Blomkvist [understands] nothing of this”(442), further revealing his lack of religious knowledge. These scriptures outline the necessary steps to gaining sola fide, or the single faith: Christianity. The fact that Blomkvist is completely lost when these scriptures are mentioned illustrates his disassociation from the Christian faith and how it gives him an outside perspective of the religion and its practicers while acting as a barrier that restrains him from knowing more. All of these religious references overwhelm Blomkvist, who does not understand the pastor’s words until Strandh explains them to him. Blomkvist encounters a similar situation when the mystery Harriet’s journal is solved by his daughter. To Blomkvist, the seemingly random assortment of names and numbers is almost impossible to crack; when his daughter solves the puzzle for him by revealing that they were all passages from the bible, Blomkvist is able to make an “intuitive leap”(347) that allows him to analyze the murder cases with more clues in his pocket.   It is obvious that all the recent contact Blomkvist has had with religion has changed his mentality as a reporter and an investigator, but it is possible that he assigns too much fault to religion.  When Salander she tells him that she thinks he’s “wrong” and that it’s not just an “insane serial killer who read his bible wrong”(418), it exposes the possibility that Blomkvist is been caught up in an illusion that Christianity is to blame, assigning meaning when there is none.  His searching for conclusions rooted in christianity is an example of religion’s obscuring properties; he believes that religion is the basis of the murders even when the evidence does not necessarily fit.  Salander’s clear interpretation of the murders as committed by someone “who hates women” makes Blomkvist reconsider his stance by making religion seem less important than it had been, previously.  It still, however, proves that Blomkvist is influenced negatively by religion due to its obscuring of Blomkvist’s search for answers.

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