Every five years the people of Australia are asked to stay home for the night and fill out documents on how they live their lives for the country's census. Seems fair enough. But a new problem has emerged in recent years. An alarming amount of the population have indicated that their official religion is that of George Lucas' definitely fictional Star Wars films: Jediism.
But supporters of the Don't Mark Yourself As Jedi movement have taken to Twitter to ensure this census joke stops in time for upcoming 2016 census. Good luck, guy.
What started out as a statistically harmless joke has rocketed in recent censuses. In 2011, a staggering 65,486 Australian citizens marked The Force as their religion. That's just slightly less people than the Sikh community and definitely more than Seven Day Adventists, Salvation Army, most Orthodox churches and other non-made-up groups.
This rise in popularity of Jediism has prompted the Atheist community to decry the census equivalent of a donkey vote.
Apart from perpetuating a tiresome joke, it also has legit consequences for the way our nation runs. Speaking with The Brisbane Times, the president of the Atheist Foundation Of Australia, Kylie Sturgess stated that the indication of Jedi as an individual's religion of choice, even as a joke, skews the census results to make Australia appear more religious than it is. A misrepresentation of the prominence of religion is Australia is something that the Atheist Foundation is not too keen on, see.
Do we really want anthropologists of the future to delve into the mythical and colourful history of Australia and conclude that we were a nation of next level kooks?
Yes? Oh OK, never mind us then.
