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Jedi-ism Becomes a Serious Religion
An anonymous reader writes: 390,127 Brits declared their religion as Jediism in their last census — many as a joke, but some are quite serious, the BBC reports. Cambridge University Divinity Faculty researcher Beth Singler estimates at least 2,000 of them are "genuine," around the same number as the Church of Scientology. The U.K. Church of Jediism has 200,000 members worldwide. Their belief system has expanded well beyond the Star Wars universe to include tenets from Taoism, Buddhism, Catholicism and Samurai. Former priest, psychotherapist and writer Mark Vernon finds real power in the Jedi story: "The reason it's so powerful and universal is that we have to find ourselves. It's by losing ourselves and identifying with something greater like the Jedi myth that we find a fuller life."
Becomes?!
Just don't go door to door shoving your beliefs in others faces, and I won't have to shove that light saber up your arse.
"For Mark Vernon, a former priest, psychotherapist and writer, says the Jedi story has real power. "The reason it's so powerful and universal is that we have to find ourselves. It's by losing ourselves and identifying with something greater like the Jedi myth that we find a fuller life."
Speak for yourself
As if there were one :P
I can see how that would work. Without going into a whole recovery-story, I went through decades of depression, anxiety, agoraphobia - all the stereotypical symptoms picked up commonly by the nerd/social isolate crowd.
And I read a little of buddhism, read a little more, explored more out of interest and before I knew it I identified with more than a few parts. I don't go for any of the mythical/spiritual/woo parts, but I'm happy to call myself a buddhist.
And more importantly now, I'm happy. I left the shackles of the mental illnesses behind and a big part was identifying with parts of a myth. It's nice. I might have picked up Jedism if I didn't feel the movies were pretty mediocre, but different tastes etc.
390,127 Brits declared their religion as Jediism
vs.
at least 2,000 of them are "genuine,"
doesn't the difference seem a bit high ?
If they assume that roughly 0.5% of the answers are genuine, I wonder what they think about other statements from that census.
If you have to assume that less than a percent of the answers are genuine the whole thing doesn't really seem to be worth the effort.
(or the goal of the census was quite a different one than one would suspect)
I wonder if when you rank high enough in the church, you can jump start your car using "the force".
Good luck with your Midichlorian count.
Or is he Orthodox Jedi? I think they reject the prequels as heresy.
Or is that Reformed Jedi?
Neither is Scientology a church nor are they are a religion or serious. They are a serious criminal company having bullied IRS to conduct their enslaving scam tax free.
not a belief system. Some followed "the way of the samurai" (really neo-confuscianism), and others were (zen) buddhist or shinto adherents, often at the same time.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Putting aside the quality, is there really sufficient quantity of material in the six films to produce any more than the sketchiest overview?
You might as well watch the Avengers cartoons and invent a religion called "Ironmanism".
It's the kind of shit you do in an evening at the pub or for a GCSE media studies essay when you just can't be arsed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Fuck you man
Have they demonstrated the power of the force at all? or are they just genuine nutters?
If religions were operating systems, Buddhism would be LFS. LFS
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
People keep calling Scientology a religion or putting it in the same bracket as religion when it isn't.
It is a pyramid scheme, a money-making scam, it does not have any status as anything else.
The defence is usually 'oh well religions start by being made up' which is crap, they evolve with society, they don't suddenly emerge from the publisher as a complete fully-formed set of expensive members-only guide books.
Less than 400'000? Round up and re-educate. 2000 genuine? Round up and execute.
Nah, Slashdot is not a religion. But you could for example choose one of the many religions organizations represented on Slashdot like: the Sacred Temple of the Apple, the Revered and Holy Shrine of the Android, the Evangelical Church of Emacs, the First Reformed Church of Vim, the Orthodox Church of WIndows or the Open Source Church of the Blessed Saint Linux on the Desktop ... the list goes on ... those are already established religions. Slashdot is more like the plains of Armageddon where the adherents of these faiths fight their wars of religion.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The proper name is "Jedi". It is both the name of one who practices the religion as well as the religion itself.
"I studied Jedi at a Jedi Institute, to work towards becoming a Jedi"
Zen masters observe that too many people squander much of their lives in pursuit of the meaning of life when life has no meaning, it just is and it just exists and one should simply accept that. Furthermore, Zen masters observe that life is impermanent and the more we embrace and understand it's impermanence, the freer we are from anxiety. Thus, Zen is more philosophy than religion. Religions tend to play up on the very human need for constants in life and provide reasons for the inexplicable.
Are the jedists a large enough group to start killing each other over the "Old Testament" (episodes 4, 5, 6) vs. "New Testament" (episodes 1, 2, 3, with the midichlorians)?
Between government nannying and eradication of any sophisticated understanding of self interest from the mainstream mind, staying true to your word regardless of immediate benefits or written law has lost its meaning. To the point that it will not even be recognized by your peers, and to my limited experience, British society is an extreme example of this (correct me if I'm wrong).
At this point, the person does not really know why s/he should live by these values that transcend their individual lives. Jediism gives you the excuses, which you shouldn't really need, but also gives you a community that understands and respects these values. It's pretty much a tragedy from this perspective, and the order likely will/does degrade to superficial humanistic doctrines and political biases.
Glory and Honor to Senator Binks of Naboo!
Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.
James, 1. 27
Here is an example of one of the solemn rites of Jedi-ism as performed by one of their high priests.
http://youtu.be/HPPj6viIBmU
You are welcome on my lawn.
My best hope for the outcome of this Jedi movement is that it will finally make people realize that there isn't any rational way to judge the legitimacy of a person's religious claims. The only way one can call whatever another writes down as a religious practice un-genuine is if the claimants themselves later recant and admit "I was lying when I wrote that down". Even then, one can't be sure that the person didn't mean it at the time (and perhaps now has had a change of mind and decided to cover up their previous choice because it is now embarrassing to them), so you still can't really call their earlier assertion of religious affiliation a fraud.
Getting logical people, and perhaps even illogical legal systems, to understand this is paramount. Once they get this, the first fallout is that everything can be a religion for effectively fraudulent purposes. I can found a church with just one member tomorrow that's set up to cause a legal nightmare if someone considers it a legal and genuine religion. My new religion can require me to violate a whole lot of federal laws without directly infringing on the rights of others. For instance, it could require that I inject heroin every morning in order to maintain my faith, and it could not allow its members to pay personal income taxes to governments in the general case. These would make fantastic legal cases that I would of course lose in federal court, but would further highlight the hypocrisy of the system with regards to the "special" nature of religious practice and the idea that the country is neutral towards all faiths. None of the supposedly religion-neutral democracies in the world today are really neutral. They have a short list of widely-accepted faiths that the state backs, and the rest are claimed to be illegitimate when it matters. This is preference of specific religions and it's dead wrong.
Faith and religion are personal things: they can't be validated externally as to their genuineness, and a legal system which is neutral towards all faiths must necessarily accept that faith can be anything, and can require anything, many of which might be at odds with other laws. The only rational way for a legal system to be religion-neutral is for it to be completely blind to religion. If you decide that heroin is illegal to consume, it must be illegal to consume regardless of anyone's claims to the contrary due to religious practice. Another fallout is that religions cannot and should not be exempt from taxation.
As an atheist, I'm pretty damned tired of my tax dollars being used by the state to (a) financially assist religious institutions through tax breaks and (b) enact "moral" laws that are based on the religious practices of a democratic mob. Religion is irrational, backwards, and runs counter to progress in human ethics, morality, non-violence, and peaceful technological progress. This is just as true today when the state backs Christianity as it was when the state backed Zeus and his Pantheon. My tax dollars are being leveraged by the state to reinforce peoples' beliefs in sky fairies who tell them to stone gay people as their source of ethics :p
I gotta nail Luke Skywalker to a cross and signup!
And Islam would be MS DOS. Antiquated, restrictive and occasionally crashing violently.
...advertising campaigns start off soft.
Like a year or so in advance.
Planting stories tangentially related to the product in order to slowly build up awareness and interest among the general population.
Hey! Did you know they are making a new Star Wars movie?!
And it's done by that guy who made that last Star Trek movie everyone loved?!
And it has all the old actors from the original movies, not the new ones from those prequels!
And OH MY GAWD! Did you know that they're gonna put Sherlock the Smaug the Khaaaaaan Cumberbatch in it?! He's soooo cooool/sexxxy!
IT'S GONNA BE GREAT!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
As long as they're willing to prove they really know about the Jedi identity.
By telling us what they did to piss off the Sith.
Why not worship another sci-fi creation? IMHO L. Ron Hubbard is probably the greatest Sci-Fi writer of all time.
Think of it. To be able to create fiction that people actually believe is real???? Who can top that??
As Umberto Eco wrote:
"G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.
"The "death of God", or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church ..."
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Their belief system has expanded well beyond the Star Wars universe to include tenets from Taoism, Buddhism, Catholicism and Samurai
That many Gods and philosophies? They are Hindus now. Hindus who believe Shiva is the only God and all other gods are Shiva's manifestations would happily coexist and accept the Vishnu worshipers who do
sed -e 's/Shiva/Vishnu/g' shiva_theology > vishnu_theology They can accept all of the above and jediism without any problems.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Funny... they don't look Jedish. ;^)
What do those Jedis have that Kopmists do not? We'd like to copy it.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Jediism, Judaism.... how many people just checked the wrong box?
and as darth priministerious i outlaw and seek allies ot help me destroy all jedi world wide
Does that make George Lucas a prophet?
In the movies the Jedi knights seems to go out of their way to fuck up everything they touched. So it kinda makes sense people would want another religion to blindly follow.
Have gnu, will travel.
The Jedi were, in the end, a bunch of idiots who were so blind that they (1) didn't notice they were spending billions of credits a year building a clone army, (2) didn't realize, even after some kid mentioned it to yoda, that all their systems were compromised, and (3) were so bad at tactics that they dropped 100% of their forces into - some dumb arena to fight someone.
Their last practitioner, Obi-Wan, left his best friend to die after cutting off both of his arms and his legs, and spent the rest of his life as a trapdoor spider waiting to turn his best friend's son into a weapon pointed at his old friend.
Why would anyone want to be like these yo-yos?
The word "pistos" is the word translated sometimes as "faith" and sometimes as "belief" in the New Testament of the Bible.
However, the actual Greek meaning is much more literally "trust." The connotation was distinctly emotional, and distinctly non-intellectual. Our modern concept of "faith" as a simple intellectual act of believing something (evidence or no) is actually very far removed from what this word meant in archaic greek.
It would make sense for someone of a mystical persuasion to say something like "I am not sure if Jesus was a man or a God or what....but inasmuch as Jesus represents a beyond-human-comprehension forgiving and nourishing aspect of the ground of being, I trust Jesus." Such a statement does not imply the sort of rigid dogmatism that accompanies Fundamentalism, and is very much in alignment with the meaning of the word as it was used in the Bible.
Of course, this only really matters to people who are neither Atheist nor Fundamentalist and who have an authentic interest in Christian mysticism; a small group that is capable of taking the good without the bad from religion but who wind up being misunderstood and disliked by the more popular groups.
I'm sure all your ignorant pals will slap you on the back for such a witty comment, however it's delusional and false.
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were all atheists. If you combine their estimated death tolls and compare that to the Religious wars, there is no comparison. These four people are estimated to have killed nearly 200,000,000 people, compared to all of the Religous wars through recorded history which sits at approximately 200,000.
Now would you like to add in similar historical non religious campaigns, like the Mongols? How about campaigns that had absolutely nothing to do with Religion, but conquests for power. This would include Hitler, Napoleon, Norse and Celtic campaigns, Roman, etc...
You can't blame Religion in the real world, the numbers don't jive with that thinking. Surely there have been some people in power that did things in the name of Religion which were absolutely retched. I find the Catholic protection of pedophiles to be higher on the list of wrong doings than the crusades, because a huge part of the crusades was conquest for land and resources and not really religion (Religion was the cover).
How about putting the blame where it belongs, with shitty humans doing shitty things? Yes, that's right. People with power tend to crave more power and will use all available resources to gain more power. This is not limited to Religion, more often it's people with political power that are allowed to build up military power. I fully realize that facts may hurt your head and do not support your delusion, but facts make up reality.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
[rant on] It really gets tiresome reading the same drivel over and over and seeing it marked as "insightful" when it is simply repeating statements that are provably false. It's like watching the KKK guys all pat each other on the back for using a racial slur, it's old and pathetic. [rant off]
Consider Pascal's wager. Even if there is no God, what is the harm in society practicing Christian beliefs? Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet they neighbors wife or property.
7 out of 10 commandments are exactly what we call "Natural Law". The other 3 deal with respecting the God that provided those commandments, which is interestingly a circular logic bit to make sure that people continue to respect the 10 commandments. Wow, there is absolutely nothing parasitic with the beliefs, and there is nothing toxic with the beliefs.
People in power have used religion to manipulate people, but that's not a problem of religion it's a problem of people abusing a system for power. You know, the same abuse that we have with people in political offices, loaning money and exchanging money, owning/controlling land and resources, etc.. etc.. etc.. They can do this because people are ignorant and believe what they are told, even when you can prove their belief wrong. (I really hope that rings a bell for you)
Claiming that Religion is a problem does not fix the issue, education fixes the issue. There is a 50/50 chance that the Universe needs something to create it (I really hope you are not one of those that claims science solved the question, which is another false statement often repeated). This is why a large number of scientifically minded people have at least some faith in some religion. At the same time, the educated can easily pick out the nonsense that people add, or have added to a Religion for gaining power. I have yet to see a crowd of PHDs or Nuclear Physicists run off and join Al Quada or ISIL/ISIS at any rate, go ahead and prove me wrong.
Instead of telling people that Religion is something it's not, why not teach them what their Religion really is? I fully agree that it's an uphill battle, entrenched power is extremely problematic to remove. Trying to counter lies with lies is a no win proposition.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The Mormons and COS were both intended as money making operations to gain power. Hubbard wrote several papers before Dianetics stating that the easiest way to get rich was to start a religion, so he did. To them it was not a joke or satire, it was about money and domination. The story of Mormon religion is similar, but harder to track and requires reading lots of anecdotal evidence.
The masses looking at the founders of these religions for the most part laughed and snickered, but as PT Barnum is attributed with saying "a sucker is born every minute" (re-read that statement before trying to correct the quote)
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
congratulations, that's the least coherent thing I've read today!
I'm a Binksologist
Table-ized A.I.
Wake me up when they start levitating shit with the force. Until then I call BS on this.
I believe I will have another beer.
...omphaloskepsis often...
humans have a spiritual need (Matt. 4:4). They're going to try to fill that need some how.
Scientology any day. It's based on much better sci-fi and far less wacky.
It's this type of moderation that harms sites like Slashdot. Every post in this thread modded up is anti religious, even when they are wrong. When the position is demonstrated to be wrong the post is censored.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
WTF? What next? Serious delusions, serious fantasies, serious lies, serious...by definition, none of these are "serious", if language still means anything...
You are confusing spirituality with religion.
Religion really is a way for powerful people to manipulate the weak minded.
Faith is a way to train children from an early age to accept that not all things require a rational explanation, so that later in life these same people can easily be manipulated without asking questions.