Australia Oppresses Jedi

eberry writes "Despite over 70,000 respondents (.37% of the population) replying "Jedi" to an optional faith question on Australia's census, it will not become a recognized religion According to CNN "Australian officials say respondents could face a $1,000 fine for supplying false information. Citing, and I quote, "...people of a particular religious affiliation do not provide the correct information, certain facilities might not be built that otherwise would be." Personally I find their lack of faith disturbing." And I find the fact that this is on CNN even more so ;)

Comments

Urban Legend

[gosand]

Snopes has listed this for almost a year.

Urban Legend

[rubinson]

For those not reading the article (and to provide a little background), last year a hoax circulated throughout both the UK and Australia that if enough people marked "Jedi" on their census form, that it would become a nationally recognized religion. This was never true.

What made some people believe that it was true was that, in Britain, it was eventually revealed that "Jedi" was getting a specific response code assigned to it (e.g., people who wrote in "Jedi" as their response were getting assigned a value such as "746" for their religion). The fact that the "Jedi" responses were being recorded made some people believe that the hoax was true.

However, in many surveys, responses that pass a certain numerical threshold are often assigned a distinct numerical code. This doesn't actually mean anything; it's simply to aid in the tabulation of the results. For analysis purposes, "Jedi" was always going to be grouped into "N/A" or "Other" or "Refused to Answer" (I'm not realy sure which; depends upon how they want to deal with it).

All the details can be found here.

Re:I can't blame him

[Sc00ter]

You can believe in the force and not be a Jedi.. Jedi's have some powers, the ability to "move shit around the room" is one of them.

Saying your religion is "Jedi" is the same as listing your religion is "Cardinal"

Aboriginal religions, languages

[billstewart]

The 1996 .AU census specified 7 Christian groups, plus an "Other" fill-in-the-blank. The 2001 version adds Islam and Buddhism. I couldn't find any 2001 religion results on the site - I assume they're not done yet, though they've hit high-priority topics such as population and attendance at sporting events.... There weren't any reported Jedi in 1996 :-)

Neither the religion nor the language sections explicitly mention Aboriginal religions or languages, though about 7000 people wrote that in on the 1996 form, and a number of other people wrote in "Nature Religions", which may include some aboriginals as well as neo-pagans. The Ancestry section does include "Australian", and there is also an explicit question asking if you're an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, and there are some specific instructions for Australian South Sea Islanders as well.

Jedi recognised in UK

[Martin S.]

Jedi was recognised in the recent UK census as a statically significant category.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001 /pdfs/secti on5part3.pdf (Page 18)

However what I found really interesting was some of the other choices in the ~150 different categories including:

Scientology
Nearly 100 different versions of Christianity.
Heathen, Atheist, Agnostic, Realist, Idealist, Rationalist, Humanist, Secularist.