Oslo - The rooftops here may now ring to the sound of Muslims chanting "Allah is the greatest" and atheists countering with "God does not exist", after a city council decision on Tuesday.
The council officially authorised the Norwegian Pagan Society to broadcast its message from loudspeakers installed on a building close to a mosque and two churches in the Gamle Oslo neighbourhood of the capital.
The permission was given in response to an earlier decision by the council in January to permit Muslim priests to broadcast the call to prayers five times a day from the 18 minarets in Oslo, punctuated with the words "God is the greatest" (Allah Akhbar).
The Norwegian Pagan Society, which now will be allowed to extol its anti-God message once every Friday afternoon for up to three minutes, said before the council vote that it also planned to broadcast extracts from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights along with speeches extolling laicity.
Its secretary, Harald Fagerhus, said that one's religion was a personal matter, but that "since the church bells and the preaching from the mosques have taken over the public space, we want to be able to do the same".
The atheists had demanded the right to broadcast five-minute calls between 8.30am and 7pm on Mondays and Tuesdays, up to 10 times a year.
Oslo has a population of about half a million people, 36 000 of whom are Muslims.
The municipal official in charge of Gamle Oslo, Oeyvind Loenna, who was given the task of verifying the pagan demand, ruled that it did not infringe on good neighbourly relations.
Founded in 1974, the Norwegian Pagan Society claims 300 members and calls itself "an anti-religion liberation movement whose only weapons are humour and provocation".
In 1994, during celebrations of the millennium of Christianity in Norway, pagan militants rolled out a banner in front of King Harald V and other dignitaries, proclaiming: "A thousand years are more than enough."
The group noted recently that church congregations were on the wane, and proposed recycling churches as concert halls, "because," according to Fagerhus, "the acoustics are often remarkable".
"We are not against religious freedom. But this freedom means that one can be free of all religions," said Fagerhus, speaking in his office decorated with posters reading "Laugh at God, fear religion," or "Get rich, create your own religion"
Lutheran Protestanism is the dominant religion in Norway, where the king and at least 50 percent of government ministers must be members of that church, according to the constitution. - Sapa-AFP