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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?!
"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
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."
According to some westerners who got their hands on Buddhist texts in the last century and decided to cut out what made them uncomfortable. Within the Buddhist tradition, some supernatural element has always been present, even among schools that downplayed anything but direct experience. The Mahayana Buddhism most successful among westerners inherited the entire Vedic pantheon, and in Avatamsakasutra, for example, Buddha ascended to Mt. Sumeru to chat with Indra and his buddies. Furthermore, in the Mahayana tradition the boddhisatva ideal remains, but belief in people who choose to stay in the cycle of rebirths until all sentient beings have been liberated requires that one believe in a cycle of rebirths, which is not supported by science in any way, shape or form.
Most Buddhists would strongly disagree with you.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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.
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)?
and I won't have to shove that light saber up your arse.
At least jedi's won't have to turn the other cheek!
But they won't kill you over it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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!
But they won't kill you over it.
Or more accurately, like most other religious followers, the majority of Buddhists won't kill you for it. Like every religion, it has followers who are willing to kill for their beliefs - Special Report: Buddhist monks incite Muslim killings in Myanmar
...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??
I read the article closely, and I see threats ("leave me alone or I'll kill her!") and that they incited killing, but it doesn't actually say that any Buddhist monks killed anybody.
I know, it's a fine point, but religion is nothing if not about people trying to find the loopholes to the laws of God.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
Hello James. Why are you posting as Anonymous Coward?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Somebody has never heard of the Sohei in Japan and the Shaolin in China? (Shoalin Kung Fu?)
http://jp.learnoutlive.com/the...
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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?
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?
[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.
> but it doesn't actually say that any Buddhist monks killed anybody.
You don't have to look very hard to find Buddhist warrior monks killing all sorts of people. You can quibble all you like over this example, but lets not rewrite history here.
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.
No, but I'm sure the merchandising spinoffs make George Lucas a profit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
How about putting the blame where it belongs, with shitty humans doing shitty things?
Sure. Bad people do bad things. But crazy beliefs make good people do bad things.
Trivial example, young Mormons are supposed to do "missionary" work, which generally involves them going door-to-door annoying people. Can you accept that by angering hundreds of people, day after day, you personally are making the world a worse place? Many Mormons feel that too. (I've heard some talk about the doubts they had while doing this, and the lack of effectiveness.) So why do these good people do something they feel is bad? Because it's part of their religion. That's it. If it wasn't part of their religion, they'd stop. If the central Temple said it's no longer required, they stop.
What concerns atheists is that religion essentially praises and rewards irrational beliefs. And that seems like a bad habit to get into.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I'm a Binksologist
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot killed 200M people together? That sounds high to me (Pol Pot didn't even have that many millions to kill). Religious wars killed 200K? That sounds awful low to me, and suggests that you're being selective about religious wars, as any definition of "religious war" that doesn't firmly include the Crusades is pretty well useless. Did you include the Seven Years' War, for example? Would that have happened without the concept of the divine right of Kings? For that matter, that war came about because of religious monarchs, so by the Lenin/et al. criterion that particular war was a religious one, and we have to count all the deaths from that war (you can't get anywhere near 200M deaths for your five assumed atheists without counting WWII deaths in general).
We also have to realize that the fading of Christianity as a major part of government coincided very roughly with a very large increase in population, and the reason some of those older wars racked up smaller death counts is that there were fewer people to kill. It seems hardly fair to credit somebody for murdering no more people than he had available to kill.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I have no issue with a debate, but you have to at least try and present your case honestly. The 7 year war was not a Religious war, it was a war of conquest and economic influence. Even if you artificially inflate Religious wars to include numbers, you don't get the numbers for atheists who committed massive genocide. Which was your second point, right? Taking the high estimates for the 4 mentioned people is 200M, and yes it is the high estimates. Low estimates are still close to 100M for the same 4, and whether Pol Pot was as big of a murder as Mao is not relevant to the point.
The point was, that Religion has nothing to do with the majority of wars, and just as little to do with mass killings and genocide. In fact the numbers show the opposite trend, so its completely irrational to claim that "religion kills" because facts do not back that statement.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The Seven Years' War was a religious war like the Holidomor was an atheist genocide. The Holidomor was an artificial famine Stalin created to beat the Ukraine into submission, not a direct extension of atheism. The Seven Years' War was a war started by Christians. In neither case was the point to advance a religious or atheistic cause, but rather to conquer and establish power.
You name five atheists and blame atheism for all the deaths they caused. You then ignore deaths caused by Christians as long as they had some reason to do what they did other than religion. You need to put your counts on an equal footing.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
My argument was not that Christians do not kill, or do not do wring things, go back and read the point of my post. In fact it was not that atheism caused more death (read my original post). My argument, as paraphrased in my last post was The point was, that Religion has nothing to do with the majority of wars, and just as little to do with mass killings and genocide. In fact the numbers show the opposite trend, so its completely irrational to claim that "religion kills" because facts do not back that statement.
The last bit was and is not to blame atheism for mass killing, but to emphasize how broken GP's claim of religion leading to violence is.
As to the 7 year war, the only part that could be attributed to Christians is Austria. Even that portion is easily as attributable to Economic influence and Conquest.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
You argument may have been badly phrased, but contrasting what seems to me a high value for people killed by events caused by atheists with a low value for people killed in what you consider wars of religion doesn't jibe with what you just said.
The entire Seven Years' War can be attributed to Christians, as all monarchs involved were Christian. It had little to do with their flavors of Christianity, and wasn't caused by their religion, but it's a Christian war in precisely the same sense that the Gulag system was atheist.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The entire Seven Years' War can be attributed to Christians, as all monarchs involved were Christian.
So then by your same logic, everyone Hitler killed was due to him being a member of the occult, or pagan(Wicca), or luciferian, or any of his other whacky beliefs. Since you don't seem to attribute Hitler's genocide to the Wicca (hell, perhaps you do) the argument is purely a bias against Christianity ignoring the root cause. If you do attribute his genocide to the Wicca, I suggest you take this same conversation and replace Christian with Wicca, or Christian with Jewish, or Christian with Muslim, or Christian with Buddhist (I really hope you see the point).
And fine, take the 1.5 million estimated to be killed in the 7 year war and add it to the tally for killing in the name of Religion. You still don't have any factual basis to claim, as GP did, Religion causes harm where a lack of Religion causes no harm. That belief is absolutely contrary to facts.
Providing contradictory evidence to prove someone's belief is wrong is not the same as providing my own belief regarding that specific evidence. Your claim, as written, is absolutely illogical and irrational.
Why would I change or limit facts which clearly demonstrate wrong beliefs? Seriously, that makes absolutely no sense. If you claimed "steel is lighter than water and can float" after seeing a boat, I can't show you the mountain of contrary evidence so that you can clearly see your belief is wrong? Do I withhold displacement and have my contradiction limited to only surface tension, or can I also bring in displacement so that I squash your wrong belief? I don't have to provide my own theories of why steal could float, I am merely showing you that your belief is wrong.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Like, early Christianity community in Judea?