Just how religious is Iceland?

Since moving to Iceland and trying to learn about my homeland again, the one question which often comes up for me is Iceland's religiosity. When living in Canada, a rather secular and rationalist nation, I was always under the impression Iceland was much like its brothers in Norway, Sweden and Denmark whom are all very secularist and are often cited as the most unreligious nations in the world.

Religiosity is a complicated issue, its not simple a question anymore of "do you believe in God?" Rather we need to be specific about what people say they believe in. A great example of this is Christian's whom believe in heaven, but not hell. How many Christians believe in adam and eve, noah's ark, and many of the more unbelievable stories from the bible. I know for certain that many Christian´s in Iceland don't believe in a lot of the bible, yet if you told this to American Christians's they would simply say you are not a believer.

This is the biggest problem of questionares and polls done in modern societies, a deeper look is needed to truly see what people actually believe. If we look at Capacent's most recent poll done on this issue you'll see some simplicity on the polling questions. The problem we have is the definition of 'God' can vary widely from a personal God to a term used to describe something behind all of the known universe. Its often said Einstein was a man who believed in a force that would be behind all of the laws of physics and he used the term God. 

The problem with statistics that show such high numbers of 'believers' such as in this recent Capacent poll gives political capital to the state Church and religious groups in Iceland to speak for the majority of Icelanders. Siðmennt and many groups in Iceland are currently fighting to get the church out of our public schools and move forward on making sure our new constitution includes the all important seperation of church and state.

Iceland is still pretty new to me, but there is a great deal of promise with statistics showing overwhelming support for the seperation of church and state, but then I read a story about how many believe in little people who live in the lava fields. Its a strange country, it has all the signs of being a modern secular society, but its a country that has a state religion, high belief in invisible people, and a place where big placebo (homeopathy and such nonsense) seem to be doing rather well in the absense of evidence or rational thinking.

A book I would highly recommend, is "A society without God, what the least religious nations can tell us about contentment."  Here is the author speaking about his book, including a brief discussion about Iceland.

Building blocks of DNA found in meteorites from space

 This is a NASA Hubble Space Telescope picture of what was first thought to be a comet but is probably an asteroid collision. The inset picture shows a complex structure that suggests the object is not a comet but instead the product of a head-on collision between two asteroids traveling five times faster than a rifle bullet (about three miles per second). The collision created a meteorite that was found to contain amino acids.
CREDIT: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

The components of DNA have now been confirmed to exist in extraterrestrial meteorites, researchers announced.

A different team of scientists also discovered a number of molecules linked with a vital ancient biological process, adding weight to the idea that the earliest forms of life on Earth may have been made up in part from materials delivered to Earth the planet by from space.

http://www.livescience.com/15456-biological-ingredients-meteorites.html