The census is here again and the Atheist Foundation of Australia is running a campaign urging non-religious persons to mark the “No Religion” box rather than identifying as Jedi or Pastafarian. The reason for this is that the Australian Government counts these as religions and records them as “Religion: Other”. Therefore the number of non-religious people become under represented in the census.
Since the Australian Government relies upon census data for policy and funding decisions anyone identifying as Jedi or Pastafarian is inadvertently tipping the statistics in favour of religious interests.
While filling the census with bullshit can be a lot of fun. When powerful religious lobby groups begin to pressure the government (Marriage Equality, Religious Tax Exemption etc), policy makers must rely on the census statistics to try and determine the interest of the population.
So if you don’t follow any mythical fairy tale it is important that you mark “No Religion” on August 9th to ensure that you are accurately represented in government policy and decision making.
More information on the Mark No Religion website.
For what ever reason you have decided to reach out for people not to go down as a jedi or other joke religion will in fact gain the opposite reaction from “atheists”. People like to use Atheism as a way to summarise not wanting to do as they’re told. We will believe what we want sort of thing. So by you doing this is just silly. Its like telling a bunch of children they can’t have something and then in turn making them want it more. You will see numbers go up this year, because now the Atheist community seems like a controlling big brother, much like any other religion. Rules and bullshit. When in actual fact what we should be doing is creating a church of the force and being able to rack in the benefits of freedom from tax and other benefits that go along with the money making schemes associated with religion and churches. If you cant beat them join them.