2012/01/05

"Religion" is not a Useful Word in Sweden

Yesterday we had the following absurdity come to light.  A group in Sweden, preaching what seems to be the copyright equivalent of free love, has managed to get itself recognized as an official religion by at least one department of that country's government.

It is hard to say how this could get any more bizarre: the government has recognized as a "religion" a group which claims to hold law-breaking as sacred and which does not appear to have any particular religious intent as normally recognized.  Supernatural claims?  No.  Salvation?  No.  Enlightenment?  Maybe if you squint.  Morality?  Not as such.  It comes across as a lawyer's trick.

Of course, if you subscribe to current atheistic theory – religion originated as nothing more than superstition driven by a fear of death, and in our modern knowledgeable age it is no longer anything more than manufactured propaganda designed at best to bring together people with common interests and at worst to drive people to common goals through fear of (eternal) retribution – there is no particular reason to consider these Kopmaniacs as anything different, though it does become hard to tell the difference between a small church and a largish group of roleplayers.

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