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Jedi == Religion In NZ
An unnamed correspondent writes: "It's census night tomorrow in New Zealand, and an email is doing the rounds asking all Star Wars fans to enter their
religion as JEDI :) Should be an interesting experiment to what sort of momentum email can make over just a couple of days. It will take a few months to garner the results though." As the story says, though, "this could land potential Jedi in hot water as those who record false information, don't fill out census forms, or destroy them, can be prosecuted."
"Do you seriously expect us to believe you're a Jedi? Do you know the kind of trouble you can get in for falsifyin....ggggghhhh"
"Minister, I find your lack of faith....disturbing."
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What's the point?
Is this supposed to be some sort of practical joke? It's just like a bunch of kids ordering 20 pizzas for a false address and laughing with their friends. "Ha ha - some dumbass is gonna have to pay for all those pizzas", but of course they never find out what happens because they're not there! To which the response "uh, let's not and say we did" usually makes the instigator feel like the dumbass.
Or is it to be rebellious?
Geek 1 (overly-excited): "Hey, let's say were JEDI!"
Geek 2 (grinning): "Yeah, we can really stick it to The Man. All those years of invading our privacy..."
Geek 1 (ready to piss his pants): "Oh my GOD! That would be SWEET! Just imagine the look on the clerk's face she has to enter it into the database!"
Geek 2 (suddenly serious): "I'm imagining it now: anarchy! The government would collapse! The country would be ours for the taking!"
Geek 1 (bouncing off the walls): "Let's send out a mass email! Everybody always does everything an email tells them to do, especially when breaking the chain will bring seven years of bad luck!"
The rest is history.
If only someone had been there to say "uh, lets not and say we did"...
I dunno... What do you wanna do?
accept his fate, timothy will.
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I understand what you're saying, but The Force is probably the closest thing that my life comes to religion. I don't believe any of the others and the I have icons of the Jedi religion (read : action figures), I worship regularly (vhs), and I talk about it excitedly with my peers.
Therefore, where I asked, my answer might be the same. I'm a lot more Jedi than I am Christian or Muslim.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
You can't just put "Jedi", that's as meaningless as "Jehovist". You have to pick a sect, dammit!
Midichlorist - Old Republic conservative, based on solid scientific principles and prone to much sitting around looking grim and warning about Prophesies.
Immaculatist - Believer in the Immaculate Conception of Anakin Skywalker, marking the end of Midichlorianism rationalism and the beginning of a New Age of "anything goes" psuedo-mystical twaddle.
Intuitist - Imperial period Jedi, eschewing all knowledge of earlier abominations such as Midichlorians and Immaculate Conceptions; a much purer, simpler religion.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
No, it's an illustration of why a constitutional elected government works better than pure democracy.
A mandatory referendum with a 3% trigger is a mechanism that virtually guarantees that the majority will run roughshod over the rights of unpopular minorities. The general record of the Canadian Alliance Party implies that this was a feature, not a bug, in the proposal.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
E-mail is proably the best way to spread stuff like this I can think of.
A few months ago in Canada we had a really good example. During our last election, Stockwell Day (leader of the Canadian Alliance Party) said that if his party formed the government they would enact legislation wich would put any petition wich was signed by 3% of the electorate (about 350,000 people) to a referendum.
The nice people at This Hour Has 22 Minutes, a TV show on CBC that does political satire, put a petition on the web. It stated "We demand that the government of Canada force Stockwell Day to change his first name to Doris."
By 9:30 the next morning I had at least 5 e-mails from friends asking me to go and sign the petition, mnay of which had been forwarded 4 or 5 times. I know that I also sent this on to at least 10 people my self. If I rember correctly the petition was at well over 350,000 names by that afternoon, and well over a million in 4 days. It was really funny, his party didn't win, thank god, but it would have been great to see him run away from that promise.
I don't think the people behind this idea will have any problems getting to word out, its' so easy to forward a message like this to a ton of people. I understand they only need 8000 to actually do it, and I hope they pull it off. Man that would be sweet.
What's the Jedi religion? Belief in a mystical paranormal "force" of good versus evil? With a "dark side" mirror-image, don't forget it! What's this "force" anyway?
Sorry, this ain't a religion, folks. A full on religion needs lots more than some vague outline of mysticism. Sure, mysticism plays a role, but there have to be some ways to connect that to the psychological makeups of the intended converts.
An effective religion has to engage people within their lives, offering ways to address their real issues, not just a bunch of supernatural garbage that they can't relate to (light sabers? where?).
George Lucas' myth-spinning Star Wars exploitation of mass love of recast Arthurian sword-and-sorcery tales doesn't begin to come up to the threshold of a religion. It's just a slick, hyped, and very crass commercial scam, complete with cheap molded plastic action figures in Kmart stores near you.
But someone thinks New Zealand will fall for it.
I've been to NZ. Nice clean place. Lots of level headed, interesting, and fun people live there. I don't think many of them will be signing up for a dumb Jedi "religion."
Besides, the NZ yobbos are all off grokking up the Lord of the Rings books (lips moving as they form the words), not realizing that their parents read them 30 years ago.
Don't mistake my attitude about NZ though. They have more productive folks than Britain. Reasons for this are large questons, though. Let's not go there right now.
Children practicing on fairy tales is appropriate, but when they grow up, they should attend to real issues, not obsess on mind-control abominations like Scientology, EST, Mindspring (that former "human potential" scam is now recast as a national ISP that is run by a Scientology member), vacant TV series, exploitive commercial retellings of old stories (like Star Wars and Star Trek too}.
I could go on, but I suspect you all get my drift.
Salsaman.
I haven't decided on my ethnicity yet, I'll come up with something.
Ewok?
Seriously, I'm not sure I'd want to mislead the census takers; it was considered important enough to put in the US Constitution, but maybe people elsewhere take it less seriously. The government takes it seriously because it's in the Constitution; I take it seriously because it determines my congressional district.
--
I had A census guy come to my house while I was sleeping, so i invited him in and I laid back on my couch. He asked me all the questions and I'd answer them wrong because I had sleep giddiness.
:)
guy - "how many people are in your household"
me - "2, me and you"
Then I'd proceed to laugh at myself. It was fun
I don't think the government could get away with listing any sort of religion as 'false information'--because if they do, they can be accused of religious persecution.
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
Simply wave your hand and say, "You have no need count my household."
--
At any rate, even though GL says it's just a fantasy thing, is sounds an awful lot like the currently popular so-called "New Age" spirituality.
From about.com
Let's look at that list for a minute and compare it to StarWars:
Spiritual exploration (The "Force") and Ben Kenobi as a spirit-guide
Advanced technologies - Death Star, AT ATs, X-wings, Personal Robots, Land Speeders, Light Sabres, robotic appendages
Multiculturalism - how much more multicultural can you get than the Galactic Senate?
and Speaking of the Galactic Senate - Global (universal) peace it's the home of 'just government and freedom for thousands of years'
ancient mysteries - What do you call Yoda and the whole study process to become a Jedi?
As far as 'religion' is concerned:
(I'll admit that it's definition #4), but that says: "A cause, a principle, or an activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion."
Star Wars embraces new age philosophy, and "Jedi" seems to meet the criteria for a reliigon (in my opinion, anyway.)
So, if you want to report your religion as Jedi, go ahead.
Regards,
Anomaly
BTW - there is a real, personal God, and He longs for relationship with you.
If you want to know more about Him, please contact me at tom_cooper at bigfoot dot com
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
The US census questions asked for each member of the household "what race does he consider himself?"
So I asked my wife what race she consider herself, and checked of "white".
Then I thought about what race I consider myself, and checked off some variant of mixed, I forget which.
Then I asked my three-year-old son what race he considers himself. Then I asked him to spell it, which he did, and I dutifully wrote in "BRLZMB", just like he said. It's pronounced bwerrlich, I think.