Hi all. I am Jori Mäntysalo, member of Freethinkers of Tampere, which is part of the Freethinkers Union of Finland. I am writing about eroakirkosta.fi, which roughly translates as leave-the-church.fi . It is a website that helps people to resign from the church. More than 150,000 have already done that! == Religion in Finland == The population of Finland is about 5,000,000. We have two state churches here, one Lutheran and other Orthodox. A little more than 80% of population are members of the Lutheran church, about 1% are members of the smaller state church. The most common statement of faith here is probably "I guess that there exists some kind of higher power or spirit." Most members of state churches do no go to mass, do not read bible etc. There are several ties between the state and the church(es). Most important is the right to tax, and then parliament opens with a mass, public TV shows some religious programmes etc. == Some laws == There is a special Law of Freedom of Religion in Finland, passed on 1.8.2003. Before the new law one could resign from the church only by personally going to the local register office or to the church office. Now one can just send a letter to the local register office to resign. On 1.2.2003 we got another new law. It is about electronic submission of juridical papers to the authorities. Basically you can write emails about your taxes etc. just the same as normal letters on paper. == Eroakirkosta.fi == Petri Karisma and I created eroakirkosta.fi in the fall of 2003. It was opened on 21.11.2003. The site asked for your name, personal id (every Finn has one) and home town, and then generated a paper for resigning. We paid the postage. The user only printed the paper and put it to mail. Fast and easy! It was grand success. Withing two years we paid for about 15,000 letters. It cost us about 10,000 euros - not much for 15,000 people and all the publicity. We were (and are) active in putting out press releases. It was like a circle: we got n thousand resignations -> press release -> more resignations -> another press release. Then we continue by emailing resignations. It was not easy: local register offices didn't want to accept email resignations. We wrote to the ministry that controlled register offices and then to the Parliamentary Ombudsman. At last all the local registry offices accepted emails. That was BIG thing. We didn't have to pay postage anymore, and anyone can resign by just few mouse clicks. Eroakirkosta.fi was changed so that it asked the same things as before and then sent an email to the register office. At the same time we got more people to work with our web service. Now we have about 5 people in the core team and about 20 people in a bigger team for making comments, doing press releases etc. For example, one professional graphic designer made a new version of the site. == Some law cases == In 2004 we wanted to advertise our web service on local buses in Tampere. It was not allowed. We made a complaint under administrative law and then to Supreme Administrative Court. Still no permission, but the media were very interested in the case. Actually we got tons of free advertising! Another case was when we tried to send advertisements to young people just turning 18. (For example some political parties do that here.) And again: no permission. This time Supreme Administrative Court voted 3-2 against us. And again it was like free advertising to us. == About statistics == Our person id is like "102030-456A" and from that we can read that one was born in 10.20.1930 and is female (because second last character ('6') in id is even). We compile statistics about those who resign from the church. With those we make press releases like "60% of resigners are male", "resigning in Tampere has grown more than in Helsinki", "Most resigners are younger than 30" etc. == Other notes == The website now uses https, not plain http, so it is secure. Formerly we got some negative feedback about plain http. We do not save personal information about resignees. It would be illegal to do that. We have made service as easy as it can be. For example, it checks from your person id that you are old enough, and if not, tells you that resigning needs permission from your mother and father. We target only state churches. People belonging to other religions really believe their doctrines, so a simple web service is not enough for them. And then, we want to remind people that the state churches have privileges that other religious groups do not have. We have a church tax calculator in our service. We do not try to convert anyone, nor to get resigners to join our own organization. The whole service is made with one and only one thing in mind. We always talk about "web service", not about "website". == Leave-the-church.TLD in your country? == Already Sweden has http://www.uturkyrkan.se/ and Iceland has http://www.vantru.is/. I am very interested to know if there are others. I am also willing to tell more and help if someone is going to make web service for his/her own country. At least I think that every freethinkers organization should open a special website for resigning from the church. If it is not possible to help resigners, at least the site should tell people how to resign.