2000+ people left the Finnish EL Church in 24 hrs

[Feck]

Church tax ...does everyone pay or just the Xians ?

[Ronja]

Church tax ...does everyone pay or just the Xians ?

The members of the ELCoF pay a direct church tax, which is based on income and varies from 1 % to 2 % (the average now is 1.3 %). Also members of the Orthodox Church pay church tax, but I don't know the details of that. However, a small part of the community tax, that businesses pay, goes also to the two state churches. You can imagine how much this irritates people - even a number of those who are church members themselves. One (xian) owner of a building enterprise once exclaimed in a conversation "And am I supposed to drive the digger into the church on Christmas Eve, seeing as I pay church tax for the damn machine, too?! What's the church got to do with my machines, anyway?"

So, separation of church and state is a big question here also historically, and with elections coming...

A bit more details at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelica ... nd#Finance
More about church tax in general, especially in European countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax

[Ronja]

This xian "lady", Päivi Räsänen (you may have seen her name spelled Paeivi Raesaenen somewhere), who together with the sissy bishop was the possibly most unpleasant participant in the Gay Debate on TV, is starting to give me really chilling deja-vues:

-she is a bigoted xian who leads a splinter political group that insists their interpretation of one religion should define how the whole society lives http://www.paivirasanen.fi/fin/in_english/?id=31
-she has uttered and published claims that are demonstratively false, yet she continues to push them http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Christ ... 5261035020
-she enjoys shooting animals http://www.ekokonservatiivi.net/index.p ... metsaellae



Does this remind you of anyone? Or is this just my paranoia kicking in?

ok... she looks a lot like Sarah Palin.. or a lot of chretin nuts in the US.

What bother me is that with a head like that, I'm starting to wonder where is the "democrat" in her party... good thing they got so few people in parliament

And the unpleasant news is that her "Chistian" and "democratic" party now claims to have gained 900 new members since the TV debate. Well, the resigners from the ELCoF since that very same TV debate now number 36,600+ so I'm not too worried.


Edit: for clarity

[Ronja]

19 days later...

October ended with a higher daily number of resigners than the latest trend "predicted": 618. There were a number of church related news items in various newspapers on Sunday (not surprising, seeing as early voting for local/regional church councils starts today), and this really does seem to lead to higher numbers of resigners.

The attachments show 1) histogram: October 2010 (red) compared to October 2009 (blue) and 2) monthly/yearly resignations from 1st January 2007 to 31st October 2010.

[JimC]

Looks like the resignation rate has stabilised at a much higher level than before the "spike"...

Excellent!...

[Robert_S]

I think this is great, not only for separation of church and state, but also because:

In religious circles there is now regret that individual opinions and the position of the church have been conflated in public discourse. Four clerics interviewed by YLE said that they didn’t recognise the position of their own church during the discussion programme.

“In my opinion matters have been confused to the point where some party’s MP has been interpreted to be the voice of the church. In reality, the church has a much more diverse, warmer and more tolerant voice towards sexual minorities also,” explained Wille Riekkinen, Bishop of Kuopio.

It seems that the public expects the church, and probably other institutions, to be firmly anti-homophobic rather than merely having "warmer and more tolerant voice" in order to wield moral authority now.

I like it.

[Ronja]

If anyone still needed evidence of that every time the ELCoF is in the news (visibly - no difference if it is good, neutral or bad publicity), people remember that they really don't have that much in common with the church and resign in higher numbers...

The first (upper) graph is the daily cumulative, the latter the per-hour number of resigners. The funny thing is that I checked the curves either after 12 noon or after 1 PM today, and then the prediction was then barely over 300.

Edit: more clarity (I hope)

[Ronja]

Time for another illustrated update, methinks. I have posted the same on RationalSkepticism.org, so if you already saw this there - nothing new here to see, just move along.

The peak in the resignations has definitely passed. The "tail" that follows the peak has thinned down considerably, but we are still a bit above last November's numbers. The big questions, AFAIK, are:

1) Did that "peak" contain (almost) all the resignators who otherwise would have resigned under late November and December, or was there a genuine surplus? (the reason people resign towards the end of the year is that one pays church tax for the whole year, if one is registered as a member on 1st of January that year (I honestly don't know how they do the math for people who join in the middle of the calendar year).

2) What will the effect of the national parish elections on 14th-15th November be? IMO, if the conservatives win big, the likely outcome will be more resignations. But if, by some miracle, the liberals win big, then at least all my bets are totally off. If it is pretty much a draw, more resignations are likely due to frustration, I would guess.

3) How big a dent in the numbers of kids who are baptized will we see next year (and after that)?

4) When will the ELCoF fall below 4 million members?

For 3 & 4, these numbers can give some base for speculation. On the 31st December 2009 the ELCoF had 4,266,755 members. Thus far, during 2010, just over 68,000 have resigned. During 2009 40,410 people resigned, 48,494 kids were baptized, 12,195 people joined the church otherwise, and 47,877 dead were blessed (though it is uncertain if that covers all the dead members, and besides, also some non-members are certainly included in that number - I have heard about many enough bitter family feuds, when some of the siblings want a vicar to to bless a dead atheist parent, and other siblings fight that tooth and nail ).

And so to the attached statistics, the source of which is http://www.eroakirkosta.fi/static/ek-tilastot/ : The all-red histogram is the last 31 days of resignations. The red-n-blue histogram is a comparison between November 2009 and this November thus far. The multi-colored histogram is a summary of all resignations 2007-2010, per month (blue for the winter months Jan, Feb and Dec, green for Mar-May, yellow for Jun-Aug, and brown for Sep-Nov).

Hope the attachments work...

[Ronja]

One year since the "Homo-evening" on TV, and what is the situation?

* a bit over 84,000 people have left the ELCoF, both counted for the calendar year 2010 and counted for one year since 12th October 2010, when the television program aired. This is about 34,000 more than during the previous peak year 2008, when almost 50,000 left, and over double the numbers from 2009, when a bit over 40,000 left. source1 (fi = in Finnish) source2 (fi)

* last year, 2010, was the first year ever when less than 80 % of the newborns were baptized (by ELCoF) - OK, so it's only just under: 79.3 % but still - YAY! source3 (fi)

* the ELCoF is contemplating letting foreigners who live in Finland become members - I am of course biased, but to me that looks quite a bit like clutching at straws source4 (sv = in Swedish)

* if mine eyes are not deceiving me, the average number of daily resignations from the ELCoF has stayed higher than usual for about a week or two now (see the pictures below), so the typical end-year "rush" might be starting early. Here's hoping it will be as strong or stronger than usually!

The pictures:

1) the yearly sums, each colored part of each staple represents one month

resignations-per-month_2007-2011-Oct-19.png (58.74 KiB) Viewed 271 times

2) daily resignation's for the last 30 days

resignations_last-30-days_19-Oct-2011.png (53.19 KiB) Viewed 271 times

Source of pictures: http://www.eroakirkosta.fi/static/ek-tilastot/ (there's more there, too)

More graphics here: http://www.eroakirkosta.fi/static/aikasarja/

[JimC]

Extracted from "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold...

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

[klr]

My Finnish freethinker friends are right now joking on Facebook that the woman who gave the most revolting comments, Päivi Räsänen (leader of the Finnish "Christian Democratic" party), should get the "Promoter of Freethinking" award this year... Unofficial pre-information about the statistics hints that many of the people leaving today were women in their 30ies (a statistically typical leaving person has just turned 18, i.e. does not need their parents' permission any more).

That reminds me of an old Soviet Union-era joke, about the Politburo considering giving a posthumous award to Tsar Nicholas II, for "Services to the Revolution".