Ursharona's List: interesting stuff

• city of Uppsala
• main pagan center of Sweden, famed for its temple to the Old Norse gods
• home to Isak Gerson,
• he spiritual leader of the
• Missionary Church of Kopimism
• last week became Sweden’s newest registered religion
• hotbed of online piracy and anti-copyright activism
• central sacrament “kopyacting,” wherein believers copy information in communion with each other, most always online,
• “We see the world as built on copies,”
• In Sweden, the separation of church and state became law on January 1, 2000, the day that the Lutheran Church of Sweden stopped being the official state church
• a government agency called the Kammarkollegiet has accepted applications for the legal recognition of religions
• don’t make any kind of assessment of what the beliefs are, and the association is not sanctioned by the state,” Anders Bäckström, a professor of the sociology of religion at Uppsala University
• The most comparable previous effort was in 2008, when Carlos Bebeacua, a Uruguayan artist living in Sweden, attempted to register the Church of the Madonna of the Orgasm. The Kammarkollegiet refused his application, and in 2010 the Administrative Court of Appeal upheld the rejection, arguing that the “madonna” (but not the “orgasm”) part of the church’s name would “cause offense not only in the broad groups of the population that have Christian roots, but also in society as a whole.”
• Kopimism is hardly the only faith to have been inspired or shaped by a particular political cause. The Rastafari movement, for example, is as much an anti-colonial resistance movement as it is a religion.

12 more annotations...