Vantrú, the Icelandic atheist organization, has unilaterally decided co-opt all the children born in that country and automatically enroll all Icelanders as atheists. I guess that means the percentage of atheists in Iceland will leap from roughly 10% to nearly 100%.
“You, dear reader, will be a member of Vantrú, unless you specifically deregister yourself from membership,” reads a statement from the atheism society on their website. “Those who have children after March 1 do not need worry that they will miss out on this lively community, as we will automatically register children in Vantrú at birth, regardless of whether their parents have registered as members or not and without their knowledge or consent. That is obviously the best way to go about it. And also the fairest.”
I hope they’re also slow and reluctant about following requests to strike names from the rolls.
Although, actually, declaring that everyone is enrolled in Vantrú doesn’t actually make them atheists — that’s a personal decision. But it does a fine job of illustrating the silliness of declaring babies at birth to be Catholic or Lutheran or whatever.
The statement highlights what happens to Icelanders at birth. By law children of mothers registered in the National Church are registered in it by default and – once they begin working – a portion of their taxes is appropriated to said church.
Oh, wait. Can Vantrú also get a cut of everyone’s taxes by default?
That is beyond brilliant! Mind you, the various religions in Iceland are going to scream about losing funding.
Definitely another impressive thing from Iceland. They’re good at that. They told the banks to go fuck themselves during their crisis, too, and protected the citizens instead. Yay Iceland!
Very good, I wonder if someone here in Germany will duplicate this, as we have a similar system.
Officially a child enters the membership roll with baptism, which is stupid enough, but a friend of mine found out, that even without baptism or his parents being church members themselves he was a member when the church tax was taken from his first paycheck. Of course he had to declare his “Kirchenaustritt” the official way, the church does not need to prove you entered the club as an infant. If, on the other hand, you cannot present the official document for leaving the church, they sue you for the taxes!
Huh! Wait ’til the elves hear about this.
Opt-out is always the best policy to skim massive amounts of funding, because you automatically capture cash from the lazy and uninformed (i.e., the majority).
If nothing else, they would do well to outlaw any such (mis)use of taxes. Make the organizations opt-in only or GTFO.
It was apparently satire.
But the shit still hit the fan like you wouldn’t believe.
Vantrú? Is that a pun on Ásatrú?
Here in the U.S. you don’t get a choice about supporting the churches. Because of religious tax exemptions, everyone who actually does pay taxes gets to support them whether we want to or not.
tax exemption only advantage is that it is not a direct payment of money from the government. at least they have to get the money they need from their actual believers and supporters. as practiced they run very close to being a political organization all too often. it also seems to be going in the opposite direction some politics seems to be moving toward being some kind of religious organization. Lets not forget how corporations are people now and have religious beliefs.
Just where is all of this leading?
Personally I hope it leads to meaninglessness of religious belief but i am pretty sure that is not the intention of some religious believers.
uncle frogy
I’m curious about the organization’s name, Vantrú. It is very similar to Vanatrù, a branch of Heathenism that worships the Vanir (deities of nature and agriculture) rather than the Aesir (deities of war and combat.)
As for Vantrú’s approach, I think it is brilliant. In the US, at least, challenging religious privilege by having it claimed by “undesirable” religions has worked quite well.
#7 No and yes, “tru” is the word for “belief” Så Åsatru means “belief in Åsa” or more correctly the “Belief in Æser” Æser=norse gods. “Van” is similar to the english prefix “dis” as in disbelief., thus Vantru=disbelief. Vantru or atleast the norwegian equalent “Vantro” traditionally has a negative ring to it, and is used by religious people about those who do not comply with religion, the same way “Infidel” is used by muslims. Good on the Icelanders for taking the word back!
I am of course speaking as a Norwegian, not an Icelander, but I expect the origins and meanings to be similar. “van” as a prefix is used in many norwegian word, like vanære=dishonor, vanry=bad reputation vanvittig=wild/unbelievable etc.
Oh. Interesting.
*lightbulb moment* Poetic German wahnwitzig “utterly batshit crazy”, from Wahn “delusional mania”! Wahn is the word that was used to translate “delusion” in “The God Delusion”, unfortunately shifting the meaning from a potentially harmless delusion to raving madness.
In that regard, there’s the fact that the Vanir are a group of gods similar to the Asir (or whatever the anglification is). I’m not sure how it works out in Icelandic (I’m Danish myself), but it might still work as a kind of pun on the revivification of heathen religion.
JamesHeartney@#8
Here in the U.S. you don’t get a choice about supporting the churches. Because of religious tax exemptions, everyone who actually does pay taxes gets to support them whether we want to or not.
It’s worse than that. Ever since the Bush administration discovered they could buy votes from the christian right by handing out bags of unaudited taxpayers’ money in the form of “faith based and community programs” about a half billion dollars has gone to replacing church and church school roofs, building parking lots for church schools, and teaching abstinence. Under Bush when the program started abstinence was over $400million/year.
Since Obama didn’t want to utterly piss off the religious right wing, he kept the money-valve nailed open.
So they tax you and give it to churches to spend tax-free. Makes you want to go up to Boston and dump bibles in the harbor or something. Except, actually, nothing makes me want to go to Boston.
(Addendum: under Bush, there was a link to a list of the hand-outs given, off the Whitehouse.gov main site. Under Obama – presumably in the name of “openness” it’s harder to find out where the baksheesh is going)
It does make you want to go around and start submitting the paperwork for dead members of the LDS to quit the church. Since they believe in an afterlife, I guess they’d have to argue that they knew that ole Billy didn’t really tell the spiritualist “hell no, I’m in the afterlife and it’s full of buddhists who look at me funny, I want out!”
Being Icelandic, and a member of Vantrú, I can shed a little light on both our name and what we just did (or didn’t).
Vantrú means disbelief and Anders has it right. Van- is a prefix akin to dis- in english and trú does indeed mean belief in this context. We took our name from an Icelandic poem. I rather like it. Sort of a ‘does what it says on the tin’ thing.
And yes, it was satire. We wanted to show how insane the current registry laws are. We are still recieving requests from extremely angry people demanding we remove them from our registry and have also been threatened with lawsuits, even though it should have been obvious from the start that we weren’t serious. It has also shown very clearly which side of the religious debate is the more ill-adjusted and rude, which is also something of an debate here in Iceland (although we don’t shy from being opinionated and straight-talking when needed).
But the national media picked it up and it opened up the debate.
Who says satire is dead?
You say that because you haven’t been to the collection of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. (I know, I know, technically Cambridge is a separate city, but, LOL.)
Maybe it’s only dead in the US. :-)
It’s not dead, it’s just pining for the fjords… luverly plumage squire
Reference approved!