July 24, 2011
In the past ten years the percentage of Dutch Christians who shop on their prescribed day of rest has risen, FOK reports.
In 2000, almost 39 % of the Roman Catholics shopped on Sundays, in 2010 that was more than 50 %. Sabbath shoppers among the members of the Dutch Reformed Church made up 21 % a decade ago, and are now up to 25 %. The numbers for the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (yes, there is a difference) are 12 % and 16 % respectively.
(more…)
Tags: Catholicism, shopping, Sunday rest
July 20, 2011
After the barrage of other plagues (kids on drugs, alcoholic teens and fighting strippers), the quirky religious town of Urk, the butt of many jokes, has yet another faith-related problem: people stealing free electricity.
On Sundays, in the harbour, due to religious reasons, the harbour people cannot ask for money to others charging up their boats. And losing tens of thousands of euro is a good reason to ask the city to allow them to make an exception on Sundays, a day of rest for nobody except the bureaucrats in Urk.
The answer was simply that asking people for money on Sunday was not OK. Of course, the bureaucrats don’t see any change in their salary, so it’s OK to let business people choke. Love thy neighbour.
(Link: rtl.nl)
Tags: Urk
June 28, 2011
Warming big old churches and cathedrals are a costly affair in the Netherlands. And when it’s too cold, sometimes they even cancel services. Sustainable consumer platform Nudge in Haarlem held a contest called ‘Holy Warming’ to collect ideas about how to warm up Sint Bavo Cathedral in a sustainable way . The winner was ‘Church on a cloud’: heat the Cathedral by putting a data centre in the cellar. The Cathedral keeps the racks cool and the computers keeps the flock warm. Amen!
(Link: bright.nl, Photo of the Saint Gertrude cathedral in Utrecht by Wikimedia user pepijntje, some rights reserved)
April 8, 2011
Every country in the world has that one town that people make fun of and in the Netherlands, that town is Urk, Flevoland.
The former island (that could explain some weirdness) seems to attract attention by making decisions based on its strong religious beliefs that are akin to fighting windmills because nothing they do seems to work, it just seems to get worse.
After banning strippers, attempting beer confiscation and littering the rest of the country with creationist folders, it’s now time to score some drug sniffing dogs to enforce the town-wide marijuana ban, which ironically is illegal. Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten warned Urk’s city council that it cannot declare the entire village a drug-free zone because that’s illegal. But hey, when you do things based on your religious beliefs the law goes out the window pretty fast and you can get away with murder.
The word on the Internet is that the kids in Urk are some of the most messed up youth in the area not because of some sort of preponderance of drugs and booze, but because of the very religious city council constantly making them the object of their problems. We’ll save the hard drug use and unwanted pregnancies stories for later.
Slightly unrelated, but I had to.
Lard – I want to be a drug sniffing dog
(Link: dutchnews.nl)
March 17, 2011
A generous Dutch churchgoer donated an entirely built church organ to the Reformed Protestant church in Diever, Drenthe. In true Dutch fashion, we have to tell you the price of it: about 350,000 euro. The Neo Baroque organ has 1147 pipes and will be officially put to use this weekend.
The organ photo here is of a Catholic church in Barcelona.
(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)
Tags: Drenthe
February 7, 2011
Diederik Willemsen has put up a page outlining how to get rid of being labelled a church member. Apparently, it’s not as easy as one would think. You need to convince the following organisations to stop counting you as a church member:
Willemsen believes it’s important that the number of registered members reflects the actual number of members, because churches apparently enjoy certain benefits for having many members.
Recently, 23,000 people have cancelled their membership to the Roman Catholic church in protest of its child abuse practices, NOS Headlines reports. Statistics Netherlands shows that in recent years the number of people that call themselves religious is in decline. This appears to be a function of age—the older age groups are more religious, and as their members die the percentage of religious people decreases.
(Photo by Johan Wieland, some rights reserved)
Tags: statistics
December 22, 2010
The owners of a few pubs in Weert, Limburg have decided to give free beer, wine and even kir (how classy) on the house to girls, so that boys stay away from those illegal beer-serving non-pubs called ‘zuipketens‘, modern-day Dutch speakeasies that have apparently increased in popularity since the smoking ban. By stay away I do mean come to their pubs instead because they have tipsy girls in them.
Free drinks are sure to get a few more girls into the pub, but at a cost and not on the long run. And then there’s the morally questionable idea of getting girls to drink more, knowing they get drunk more quickly, and all that jazz. The drinking age in the Netherlands is 16, an age when kids are not legally responsbile adults, which is also a major problem in smaller communities where there’s not much to do but drink — like in Weert, Limburg.
Back in 2008 we wrote about beer confiscation in Urk, a very religious town in Flevoland whose youth is drinking their youth away because there’s nothing to do there.
(Link: telegraaf.nl, Photo: me at Oktoberfest. If the Telegraaf can use a German picture for a Dutch article, so can we.)
December 9, 2010
In mid January next year, a chaplan and a priest, both Elvis fans, will be holding a unique two-day conference in Huis ter Heide near Utrecht just for military personnel called ‘I Did It My Way,’ featuring life lessons from the King himself. Lessons will be learned from songs such as “Suspicious Minds”, “Where could I go but to the Lord” and “How Great Thou Art”. Using film and documentaries featuring Elvis, parallels will be drawn with daily life. Oh, and “participation is open to non-fans as well”. Just mentioning that gives me the creeps.
I knew Elvis was a religion for many people after a friend of mine went down to Graceland and saw people crying over Elvis’ grave as if he had been Jesus Christ. We know that there are people obssessed with Elvis, but this is just weird.
(Link: elvismatters, Photo: drbristol.wordpress.com)
November 27, 2010
Sculptor Ton Mooy has revealed to Omroep Brabant that he is a working on a statue of an angel with a cell phone. (Photo and video)
The angel is to replace a worn out statue in the cathedral of Den Bosch. The cell phone will have just one button: for a straight line with God.
According to Mooy, he also wanted to give the angel jet engines, and a skirt instead of pants, but those ideas went too far for the church’s art committee, NOS Headlines reports.
Tags: angels, cathedrals, cell phones, churches, Den Bosch, sculpting, statues, telephony
November 2, 2010
Two Dutch women artists decided to test the limits of what HEMA (major chain store) would accept to reproduce on a cake from a photo in the cities of Enschede and Deventer. They ordered seven cakes, of which three were rejected.
An authentic old picture of a Hitler greeting wasn’t a problem and neither were tompouces with ‘Islamic culture is backwards’ on them, a well-known phrase uttered by murdered politician Pim Fortuyn a few years back.
What didn’t make the cut was a man with an erection and a woman with her legs open and a heart hiding anything indecent. So erotic is out (the store claimed that was porn), but ‘fascist’ politics are in. Now you know too. Let’s be fair, both cities are far from the country’s capital and have different values and political views. That’s my polite way of saying people there are more shocked by sex and clearly vote more to the right as of late.
The General Terms and Conditions of HEMA say that the pictures, “cannot go against the law, must show good morals and cannot have any religious content”. Obviously the people who made these cakes at HEMA never read any of that or don’t understand what it meant.
(Links: welingelichtekringen, ad)
