Claim: Marking 'Jedi' as your religion on census forms will force your government to grant it official status.
Example:[Collected on the Internet, 2001]
As some of you may know there is a census coming around on August the 7th. For those who don’t know, a census is where the government collates general information about it’s residents (number of people living in your house, religion, etc) If there are enough people in Australia, who put down a religion that isn’t mentioned on the census form it becomes a fully recognised and legal religion. It usually takes about 10,000 people to nominate the same religion.
It is for this reason that it has been suggested that anyone who does not have a dominant religion to put "Jedi" as their religion.
Send this on to all your friends and tell them to put down "Jedi" on their census form.
And remember . . . If you are a member of the Jedi religion then you are by default a 'Jedi Knight'.
So If this has been your dream since you were 4 yearsold . . . Do it cos you love Star Wars, If not . . . then just do it to annoy people.
"May the Force be with you!"
Origins: The 7 August 2001 Australia and 29 April 2001 United Kingdom censuses have afforded pranksters an opportunity to wreak a little mayhem by messing with the official results.
E-mailed incitements to list "Jedi" as one's personal religion began appearing in inboxes in March 2001 with the incentive to do so offered as the living out of one's childhood dream of fighting for interstellar justice, light saber in hand.
Truth is, marking down "Jedi" isn't going to change a thing, least of all what officially gets considered a religion.
It is not up to the Office of National Statistics to decide such a question. They may be an arm of the government, but it doesn't fall within their province to confer official status (whatever that might be) on a religion any more than it would be up to the Boy Scouts to designate New York City a national wildlife preserve.
The situation for hopeful Jedis in Australia is even more forbidding than it is in the U.K. Not only won't marking "Jedi" in the appropriate box gain official recognition for a non-existent religion, but the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics census program, John Struik, has stated that anyone who falsely provides information on a census faces a $1,000 fine.
Mr. Struik said that a putative religion must demonstrate a formal organizational structure and a belief system to be recognized. "If we get 10,000 Jedis, they will go down as no official religion," he said. They might lose a thousand bucks each as well.
New Zealand weathered a similar Jedi incitement during its 6 March 2001 census. In an e-mail reportedly sent to thousands, Star Wars buffs encouraged New Zealanders to declare their religion as "Jedi", claiming if 8,000 did so it would be officially recognized, along with the others listed: Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Jewish. Once again, wishful thinking met up with cold reality: According to New Zealand census office representative Elizabeth Clements, there is no magic number that will put any religion on the list for official recognition.
So why are people so hot to participate in such a scheme? On the plus side, there's the fleeting joy of tweaking bureaucracy's nose and the possibility of momentarily revisiting childhood fantasies about saving the galaxy from the evil Darth Vader. The other side of the ledger, however, is considerable:
The premise of the call to arms is flawed; there is no official status to be gained. That part was purely the invention of the prankster who wrote the original letter.
Even if there were official status to be gained, none of these governments would be swayed by a number of yahoos writing "Jedi" into a blank space on their census forms. They'd want to see tangible proof of an organized and thriving religion before they handed out the brass ring.
At least in Australia, those who decide to take part in the leg pull are risking a $1,000 fine.
Demographic information gleaned from censuses is used to allocate funds in such a way that the identified needs of taxpayers are met, thus providing false information does everybody a disservice in that the funds don't go to the right places.
Marking "Jedi" on a form doesn't make anyone a Jedi any more than writing "I can fly" will turn that person into a bird. Religious belief is a matter of what's in your heart, not what you jestingly inscribe on an official-looking piece of paper.
It's natural that the very human resentment against having to provide a wealth of personal information to the deeply mistrusted government would spark a desire to screw with the
process. Our chafing at having to be part of this enumeration finds expression in this "Let's all be Jedis!" nonsense; it's a way of at least feeling we're asserting a measure of control over a situation that otherwise makes us feel powerless. The census, as well, is seen as dehumanizing in that it appears to reduce each person's hard-won reality into a series of impersonal numbers and checkmarks. Messing with it thus becomes a way of taking back a measure of one's humanity.
But at what price? Accurate census information is vital if social programs are to be properly administered or even to determine where a particular service should be located. Giving whimiscal responses as a form of protest over feeling like a number might provide a momentary sensation of empowerment, but the long-term cost of such unthinking behavior is almost beyond reckoning, if enough people choose to engage in this form of acting out.
Luke Skywalker would not approve.
Barbara "may the farce not be with you" Mikkelson
Update: In October 2001, several news outlets erroneously reported that, based on the results of the 2001 census, "Jedi" has now been established as an official religion in the U.K., and "Jedi Knight" will henceforth appear as an option on future census forms. It hasn't, and it won't:
The Force will not be with you despite many Star Wars fans registering their religion as Jedi Knight in this year's British census.
Officials said on Thursday there was "absolutely no possibility" of Jedi appearing as a choice of religion on future census forms after officials created a code for Jedi to help them analyze responses to the 2001 population survey.
"Because a certain number of people were likely to have put Jedi Knight as a response to that question, it has been included as a code simply to help speed the forms through the machine-readers," a spokesman for the Office of National Statistics told Reuters.
"All that will happen is that it will be recorded as 'Other'," he said. "It certainly does not mean it is recognized as a religion."
The Office of National Statistics simply assigned the response "Jedi Knight" a numeric code to simplify the
process of tabulating census results, as is typically done when many people answer a question by writing in a response not offered as a choice on the census form. This no more means that Jedi is an "official" religion than the election bureau's assigning a numeric code to "Mickey Mouse" (who usually receives at least several hundred write-in votes in every major election) means that a cartoon rodent is a qualified candidate for political office.
Additional Information:
The 2001 Census, Religion and the Jedi (Australian Bureau of Statistics)
Last updated: 14 July 2007
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/religion/jedi.asp
It is not up to the Office of National Statistics to decide such a question. They may be an arm of the government, but it doesn't fall within their province to confer official status (whatever that might be) on a religion any more than it would be up to the Boy Scouts to designate New York City a national wildlife preserve.
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