Helvetin Pastori/Pastor of Hell

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....

Based on the name of this blog, you can probably guess I'm not the biggest fan of religion. While I was raised in a Christian family, for the last three years or so, I've identified myself as an atheist and even before that I doubted the whole thing for years. Also, while members of my family work, or have worked in various roles for the Finnish Lutheran Church, I've personally left the church (and btw. we still get along just fine). That being said, having been involved with this for most of my life, I can say there are some questionable aspects regarding religion in Finland. First some general information. Finland is overwhelmingly a Christian nation, as over 70% of the population are at least nominally considered Christians. In practice however, Finland is one of the most secular countries.. The largest groups are the previously mentioned Lutheran Church, which claims about 71%  as members and the Finnish Orthodox Church, with 1.1% as members, both of which have a speci...