I have come to the conclusion that the Finnish Minister of interior, Päivi Räsänen from the Christian Democrats party has done more damage to our Lutheran church than any atheist awareness campaign. Every time she opens her mouth there is a huge spike in people leaving the church.
(Some atheists set up a website where you can resign from church easily. So rather than getting the paperwork and filing it just give them your name [Or someone else's name if you are an asshole] and they do all the paperwork for you. They also show stats of how many people are leaving the church.)
One of her latests blunders was last week, admitting in an interview that for her the bible is more important than the Finnish law. More people left the church that day than normally in a month. Later she claimed that her comment was out of context. She helpfully explained that the context was that animals have more protection in Finland than children since when animals are slaughtered it must be done without causing pain but no one dares to speak about how abortion is painful to the baby... And that is why she conciders abortions to be wrong even if Finnish law allows them.
This is not that different from the stuff on the mainpage, but I'm still annoyed when I hear comments like these in Finland.
Anyway, for some reason adding the context did not help her and people are still angry, so she went on to dig a deeper hole for herself...
She specifically explained that she did not encourage people into *shudder*
anarchy, or to break the laws, what she meant was that doctors should concider if they can work in a job where the law might require them to do things that against their morals. After all Nazi soldiers were ordered to do horribly immoral things and even if those weren't against the laws of Nazi Germany they should not have obeyed them...
She is going to need more than a shovel if she wants to dig any deeper. And this was the same person who had earlier outraged people with her comments on homosexuals.
The sad thing is that I can't even use "no-true-christian" defense or anything. I just have to face the facts that she is in the same church as I am and many christians agree with her. I don't and neither do the majority of Finnish (Not sure if majority of christians, or even majority of Lutherans though.) Funnily enough the archbishop of Finland is now trying to explain that her stament does not reflect the church's stance on the matter... While the bishop of Turku has claimed that it does. I think we are going to have to divide the church pretty soon because having a bunch of fundies and more reasonable and modern tolerant christians fight over who is representing the church is getting ridiculous.
Here a link on the matter:
http://yle.fi/uutiset/interior_minister_compares_abortion_to_butchery/6727521
