Helvetin Pastori/Pastor of Hell

I thought I could have let this topic be for a bit longer, but apparently no. Earlier today, news broke that Jussi Niinistö, Finland's minister of defense is worried about financial problems the military will see in the near future. His solution, among other things, included temporarily suspending, or at least limiting, the possibility for women to volunteer for military service. According to him, by not taking in volunteering women into service for a year, the military could save up to 4 million euros. Not surprisingly, this has led to a massive backlash against him. If you've read my blog before, you can probably see why this is a stupid idea. Finland still retains conscription for men. And I mean men. Women are not forced into service, meaning that every woman serving in the military is doing so of their own free will. On the other hand, the system has received a lot of criticism from international human rights bodies, most notable ones being the UN Human Rights Committee a...

Considering that May 17 is the International Day Against Homophobia, Trans-phobia and Bi-phobia, I thought it would be a good time to talk about the recent, rather depressing developments in Finland: the response to a song about gay people in ice hockey. Some background for this controversy: In early May, Tuure Boelius, a 17-year-old Finnish youtuber, actor and singer (which I didn't know until this whole situation), released his single "Lätkäjätkä-Ville". The title roughly translates to "Hockey Guy Ville". The song itself is nothing special. It's pretty much the usual stuff you would expect to hear from somebody his age: a simple beat and, in my opinion, rather cheesy lyrics. To his credit, he seems to have a decent voice, but it's not my type of music. The music video for the song has over million views, which is about 1/5 of Finland's population. It also has 36 000 dislikes, compared to only 16 000 likes. However, this situation is not just a...

Up to this point, I've made one post on religion, where I took a look at how religion presents itself in Finland, and shortly mentioned my personal views on it in the introduction to this blog. Apart from that, I really haven't talked about it, even though I feel pretty passionately about it. So, I've decided to change that. This post, as the title suggests, will. I be about my personal experiences with religion and how that led me to abandon religion altogether. The motivation for this post is the fact that many people still find it weird that somebody would leave their religion. There are also a lot of misconceptions about the reasons behind the decision to leave religion. So, I really just want to put my experiences out there to try and fix some of them. In my previous post on this topic, I mentioned that around 73% of the Finnish population are a part of some religious group, with the overwhelming majority, around 71% adhering to the Lutheran branch of Christianity....