Source: TechEye

Sweden’s latest official religion, the Missionary Church of Kopimism, which advocates P2P cultural sharing, has been attacked by the Roman Catholic Church for being farcical.

“Bishop Peter Ingham, head of the Catholic Diocese of Wollongong in Australia, said the religion was a send up of religion, a send up of copyright and a send up of the government to register such a body as religious.

He told Torrent Freak that there should be a measuring stick against what you call religion. If religion has nothing to do with God then “it’s a sham”. It looks like it’s just a way of getting around the law of piracy and copyright. “How could a religion promote illegal activity?”

It is a little ironic that a man who lives in a place called Wollongong,  does not believe in having sex, wears a dress, and thinks his boss is infallible should label any religion as farcical. We also thought it was illegal to cover up paedophilia, so this is one particular glass house where Bishop Ingham should really not be lobbing boulders.

In Sweden, it’s possible for anyone to create a religion as long as they’re organised and the actual content of a religion is not examined.

The Missionary Church of Kopimism has no requirements for its congregation to break the law, but Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge points out that if the group sees file sharing as a religious act and the Church runs its own servers then it could be seen by the authorities as a religious confession.

It means that cops and authorities are forbidden to listen in on them and a priest can even go to jail for inadvertently disclosing something that was said under the privileged conversation of confession.