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you are quoting a heck of a lot there.
[QUOTE]blah blah blah[/QUOTE] to reply to Headbanging_Man.
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[QUOTE="Headbanging_Man:1336270"]Look, if you don't understand that some of the most secular nations in the world, with the highest proportion of NON-believers (i.e. atheists and agnostics) in their midst, happen to have old but politically impotent religious establishments with inflated membership statistics, then I think you need to reconsider the value of parochial school education. Your posted statistics don't illustrate Christian dominance in any area other than statistics. And they're matched (in the same damn Wikipedia article!) with more relevant statistics about how important the church is to most Norwegians (i.e. not very important at all). If the fact that Norway isn't littered with as many diverse denominations of Christianity as the U.S. means that its citizens have been denied religious options, I think you should at least be able to cite a single example of the state of Norway suppressing a religion or denomination. If I recall correctly, it was a brutal stabbing death, NOT the government which caused the shut down of the Satanic metal shop in Oslo which formed for awhile the social core of the Norwegian Black Metal scene. Likewise Neopaganism and all manner of Christian offshoots have been tolerated in Norway, they just haven't flourished as much as agnosticism and atheism. If you think that a modest portion of tax revenue going to the state church represented someone being "dominated" by Christianity (rather than being simply an objectionable national fiscal decision), then you should probably read the rest of the sentence you cited from Wikipedia, which points out that citizens could simply join another religion or a Humanist association, to which those tax monies would then be re-directed. In light of recent "faith-based initiatives", we're in a similar boat in the U.S. now anyway. Granting that two decades can be a long time and see great changes occur, doesn't it seem a bit of a stretch to suggest that the church in Norway was super powerful in the 1990's, yet was almost unanimously stripped of its official status by parliament earlier this year? I'm really not particularly passionate about Norway's religious and political climate; however I'm certainly not coming to the table ignorant of history or world cultures. I do appreciate that you've been relatively diplomatic, despite my own meager efforts in that department... But I really think you would be better off doing a little research into a subject before suggesting that others need to "read up". Hell, you may even want to read the full Wikipedia articles you claim support your views! You might also want to reconsider the idea that 7 years of parochial school is key to understanding world cultures and global religion... Especially if it left you with the idea that the 1990's were a relevant period in the assimilation of Norway into Christianity. That assimilation happened a thousand years earlier and Christianity has receded, as in most Northern European nations, in the Industrial age and to the greatest degree since WWII. We HAVE been arguing to a certain degree at cross purposes, and maybe I've overemphasized the word "stranglehold". However, a large part of what you're saying is truly untenable. While obviously the lack of official religion and the precepts of the 1st amendment have been a great boon for us non-Christians in the U.S., there's simply no factual way to claim that Norway's culture is more religious than that in the U.S. (nor has it been in recent decades). ANY Modern World Religion 101 class would make quite clear: the established power structure of Christianity in Northern Europe and especially the Scandinavian countries, has been on the wane for many decades and the local populations have increasingly defined themselves as non-religious. The church remains as a historical and cultural vestige, a distant great-grandfather who is kept on the public dole out of tradition, not public interest. By contrast, evangelical Christianity in the U.S. has created a boom and bust cycle of religious prominence in our political life, and the role of religion in the public sphere advances and recedes over time. For what it's worth, here's why I think Varg's church burnings were "better", though I wouldn't go so far as to say "justified": Aesthetics (i.e. he didn't look like a Juggalo, and the old architecture of the churches must have looked pretty splendid ablaze, as they did after the fact. See: Aske) Media coverage (which stemmed from the age/history of the churches and the relatively small population of Norway) Those are the biggest differences I see. Did it prove anything? I doubt it. Dude on the Cape would have "proved" just as much if it weren't for the fact that the specific church had no significant history and if church burnings weren't old hat in the U.S. since the civil rights movement days. If there's no racial motive and no one dies in the fire, it's just not a national media event here.[/QUOTE]
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