We’ve posted about Priest Harm Schilder from Tilburg who had bell ringing issues a few times, attempting to defy the law using freedom of religion as an excuse.

Having lost that battle, he’s now moved on to ‘naming and shaming’, athough he insists this is not what he’s doing, by asking his congregation to pray for people who have decided to dechurch themselves. Schilder also calls these people up, a bit like a marketeer does, to find out why they decided to opt out, but can rarely convince them to change their minds.

The reasons people have apparently given the church for leaving is all the hate speech the Pope dishes out against homosexuals. I’m certain the bottomless pit of child abuse cases that keep cropping up involving the church is not exactly helping their brand name, either.

UPDATE On his blog, Schilder blames the media for twisting his words and blowing things out of proportion, but has caved and decided not to go ahead with his wall of lost sheep, calling it ‘risky’.

(Link: opmerkelijk.nieuws.nl)

After weeks of debating the ‘Zwarte Piet’ tradition during Sinterklaas, which involves blackface considered a tradition here but racist abroad, a steady number of Dutch people on Facebook are now pissed off at the Pope.

The Pope’s famous Dutch saying, “bedankt voor de bloemen” (“thanks for the flowers”), is often the first thing that pops to mind if you mention the Pope to a Dutch person. The Facebook page Geen bloemen naar de Paus (‘No flowers for the Pope’) wants to stop sending flowers to the Pope at Easter and is venting its anger at the Pope’s heteronormative Christmas speech, which angered Foreign Affairs Minister Frans Timmermans who lashed out in the media at the Pope’s ‘homophobia’:

“If every person is unique, as the Pope’s representative said in Dublin last week, then why should that unique person not have the right to stand up for their own sexual orientation? Marriage between two people of the same sex is having respect for the uniqueness of the individual.”

I for one will never, ever get over the amount of child abuse reported from the Catholic church since I was old enough to understand what it was.

The Netherlands was the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriages, although some controversy remains over municipal officials who refuse to marry gays and lesbians on religious grounds.

Regardless, to quote a gay friend back in the 1990s inspired by the American’s first Bush administration: “Hate is not a family value”.

(Link: www.gaystarnews.com)

On 27 July 1668 lawyer, doctor and libertarian wunderkind Adriaan Koerbagh was convicted for heresy. His crime? Writing and publishing a dictionary* two years earlier.

Koerbagh was a religious man, but he held no truck with (too much) superstition. A thing that irritated him was the use of foreign (Greek or Latin) words in the Bible to obfuscate their often simple meanings. In his dictionary he pointed out that ‘angel’ merely meant ‘messenger’, that ‘devil’ meant ‘slanderer’ (“the devil was invented by theologians**”) and that Jesus Christ ought to be called Jesus the Anointed. He felt that theologians, lawyers and doctors used foreign words on purpose to keep the common man from seeing through their dogmas.

According to Pim den Boer, Koerbagh was the first Dutchman to publicly denounce miracles: “Theologians claim that a miracle is something that stands above nature or goes against it, but that is not true, because nothing can be above nature or go against it.”

In 1993 lexicographer Ewout Sanders published an anthology of Koerbagh’s dictionary, but now DBNL.org has published the whole thing. It is not clear to me if the book is still forbidden.

About the Bible Koerbagh wrote: “If the word would no longer be protected by fire and sword, it would deteriorate in no time.” The author would feel the force of that fire and sword. Two years after his conviction he died in prison at the age of 37.

*) Titled A Flower Garden Full of Loveliness Without Sadness.

**) I should point out that the common Dutch word for theologian, theoloog, is also derived from Greek. Koerbagh of course uses the Germanic form godsgeleerde.

(Link: Marc van Oostendorp)

Put aside what the media is saying, forget what people think, good or bad, about the group of mainly Somalian rejected asylum seekers who cannot go back to their country, and ignore Sinterklaas, your gift giving urges, your ‘aah how sad, those cold asylum seekers’ and let me tell you what it’s like. This national drama is playing out 5 minutes from my warm office, so I gathered some food and beauty products for the women (more fearful of going out than the men) and took a walk.

There’s some snow falling from the sky on a dark and dreary Amsterdam day in December. A neighbourhood church abandoned for a long time is currently housing a group of about 30 asylum seekers who have exhausted their right to appeal. The church is just a cement block and it’s cold. There are tents being set up inside for the men and the women have separate quarters with beds. There are no children. The mood is neutral and grey, much like the inside of the church. Some Dutch women are serving hot soup, there’s a café bouncer at the door of the church to make sure the ‘wrong people’ don’t come in. There’s a Dutch girl bundled up in a chair next to him who I suspect is doing the Twittering. I run into an acquaintance bringing food.

I had a few laughs with one of the men heading out to the supermarket with a young Dutch woman and said he should tell her what he wants for dinner so they could get more rice and less macaroni. I wished him good luck and thought about coming by again, hopefully with more useful supplies.

Follow what’s going on in De Vluchtkerk on Twitter as well, especially to find out what they need.

(Link: De Vluchtkerk)

The Church of St. Nicholas in Amsterdam, located right across from Amsterdam Central Station, is being upgraded to the status of basilica according to the Catholic church. It will be officially given the status as of 9 December, making it the 24th basilica in the country.

To be given the title of basilica, a church has to have a lot of regular clientele and has to be a unique work of architecture.

Saint-Nicholas is the patron saint of Amsterdam and of many cities worldwide, as well as the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, thieves, children, and in some places, students.

(Link: www.katholieknieuwsblad.nl, Photo of Church of St Nicholas/Sint Nicolaaskerk by Judy van der Velden, some rights reserved)

HEMA, one of the country’s favourite stores, has started selling headscarves — the only major Dutch chain ever to do so. They are selling an ‘easy to wear’ version and a ‘traditional’ version, both at difference prices and in a range of colours.

Ironically, last year in Genk, Belgium a HEMA employee was threatened with the non-extension of her work contract for wearing a headscarf and refusing to take it off. In their defense, the Belgian shop said they didn’t want employees with any kind of religious symbols, not even heavy tattoos or piercings.

The Netherlands has no problems with employees wearing headscarves, and in many other stores they have colour coordinated ones that match the corporate image, making it a non-issue.

I recently bought some stuff at HEMA and the male employee had a visible ‘Live fast die soon’ tattoo that attracted my attention, but didn’t diminish the good service.

(Link: www.z24, Photo of Women wearing head scarves by http://www.flickr.com/photos/limbic/, some rights reserved)

Maxime Verhagen, Minister of Economic Affairs, has written a letter to evangelical Internet access provider Solcon that their filtering system does not run afoul of the Dutch net neutrality law that was recently passed by the Senate.

Solcon provides filtered access to the Internet for clients who do not want to be exposed to values other than Dutch Reformed ones (the Dutch Reformed Church is part of the Protestant Church).

When the law was passed, Solcon threatened to sue the state, although it first wanted to talk to the minister. According to Computable, Maxime Verhagen has now sent a letter (PDF) to Solcon telling the provider that the way it has set up its filters, with clients being in full control of switching the filters on and off, and clients not getting to pay less for filtered access, does not violate the law.

Back in May I outlined three conditions that I felt could guarantee net neutrality while at the same time allowing providers to filter. They were 1) the provider should offer an unfiltered service no more expensive than the unfiltered one, 2) the service should get equal prominence in advertising, and 3) users should be allowed to switch between these services at no cost. Given the nature of Solcon, a provider with evangelical rather than profit seeking goals, my second condition is obviously of less concern, so this seems like a good decision.

The tricky bit for lawyers of more profit-motivated providers to decipher is whether the minister’s answer now leaves ways to sell filtered Internet access to clients without giving them a straight discount. The minister does not single out Solcon in his letter, but speaks of ‘Internet providers’ in general, and though his second condition seems to suggest that he will not allow the use of rate differentiation to lean on clients, the fact that he explicitly mentions lower rates seems to leave room for other forms of enticement or coercion.

Since I’ve been back to visit family in Québec, the comments about the Netherlands have been reduced to coffeeshops, whores and cheese, which are polite jabs, but also pretty accurate. However, a recurring theme is chips or crisps, or even ‘croustilles’ for the proper French word. The proper Dutch word is ‘chips’, following the North American tradition. Szechwan, that’s pretty exotic. Salt n’ vinegar, nothing special. Mesquite BBQ I had to look up, and has something to do with a style of BBQ sauce in Texas.

One interesting trend was that many of these Canadian chips were advertised as kosher. Canadian food products have always had kosher symbols on them, but there are many different ones (COR, K, MK, etc.) and seem to me to be more prominent. It was swiftly pointed out to me as well that these products (not all junk food by the way) are in fact more expensive to produce because a rabbi has been part of the process. In other words, these kosher products cost more for people who don’t eat kosher. The press has written that regular people are being had for more money at the expense of people who choose to eat kosher and even halal foods, as it is a life choice and not a health issue. The conclusion was that there are tons of symbols for gluten-free, no nuts and low-sodium products, which can even be life-saving for many people, even religious people, and may even cost more to produce, but they are for the benefit of society as a whole, not a select religious group.

I am amazed this discussion hasn’t popped in the Netherlands yet, albeit regarding halal foods.

The Greek authorities discovered icons stolen from a church in Greece in 2009 on the website of a Dutch art dealer who claims he didn’t know they were stolen.

The seven Greek icons, with values ranging from 50,000 to 100,000 euro, were seized by the police in April last year, placed in the Rijksmuseum for safe keeping, and handed over to the Greek Ministry of Culture on December 5, 2011. They date from the 18th and 19th centuries and play an important part in the country’s cultural and historical heritage.

The police explain that works of art are usually sold many years after they have been stolen, and so this discrepancy probably makes it sound like the dealer could be telling the truth. I’ve been told there are international sites to check and see if works or art have been stolen and then I would imagine that the dealer was not very knowledgeable in icons or is not telling the truth.

Even Wikipedia has a page of stolen works of art, with a few Dutch ones as well.

(Link: Trouw.nl, photo: politie.nl)

As of this summer, female football players will again be allowed to wear headscarves during professional football matches. Thanks to a highly functional design from Cindy van den Bremen of capsters.com (see range of headscarves) headquartered in Eindhoven, football governing body FIFA has decided to drop its 2007 ban on the hijab aka headscarf and the girls can now hit the pitch and play.

Back then traditional headscarves were said to be dangerous, which they probably were, but a proper Dutch design has now helped to reverse the ban, allowing women from predominantly Muslim countries to play more football.

Van den Bremen felt the ban was a big fuss over not much and didn’t see the difference between a headscarf and having a pony tail in one’s hair. You can also pull really hard on the collar of a male player’s T-shirt too she explains.

“The sporting headscarf is not just a commercial success. It has won a Good Design Award in Japan and a place in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.”

(Links: www.rnw.nl, www.ad.nl, Photo by Wikimedia user Carolus Ludovicus, some rights reserved)