Interesting events in Finland

It seems that on Tuesday Oct 12th 2010 Finland had a rather large and well publicised television debate on the subject of gay marriage. During this debate it was made very clear that Finlands state church(attended by 79% of the population) opposes gay marriage, and their chosen representatives came across as more than a little stuck up and bigoted. This has had a very interesting result, Finland has a website where people can fill out a form and get out of all the hard work de-registering from the church(the process is legally recognised). Here are a few graphs on the subject, unless you speak Finnish or your browser has a translator you will have to trust me on this, the second graph shows daily resignations over the past 2 weeks at a base level of up to around 300 per day but (at the time of writing) since the debate aired numbers are averaging closer to 5000 and still rising with the highest being just shy of 7000, that's more than a ten fold increase.

The graph next to it shows cumulative statistics for each of the past 4 years, showing that apart from a small bump in February 2008 church leaving has been fairly consistent each year, and is fairly consistent throughout the year until the rate of leaving gently increases over the period of September to December. The thing that stands out is over the past week the number of people leaving has been around half the yearly average. This can be more clearly seen in the bottom bar chart where statistics for each year are shown split into months with Jan at the bottom.

Unfortunately I expect this trend will level off within a week or so, maybe a month if the Finnish people are lucky, then drop down to probably a little over the previous base rate as more people will be aware they can ditch the church and get on with life.

Another impact of this is that the church gets €300 per indoctrinated working adult per year, since this little boom has so far seen in the region of 25 000 additional people leaving, that is a minimum cost of €7.5 million per year. Unfortunately they get almost €1 billion so this is still minor and they can certainly afford it. I am patiently waiting the day when organisations with no benefit to humanity stop getting government handouts and tax breaks.