"Jedi" doesn't matter a lot

[jack]

I don't know this for sure, it's just my guess, but it seems likely to me that:

(1) People who check Jedi on the census are commonly (though not always) non-religious, or not especially observant
(2) The census people know this

In which case, I expect them to have a pretty good idea of the breakdown of the country whether people write-in Jedi or not. Apparently some people take it very seriously, and think you absolutely have to follow this silly meme. And some people take it very seriously, and think it's totally disrespectful to do so. But to me it seems like the meme's a bit dated, was funny at the time, and is still a bit funny and practically an anglophone tradition, so it really doesn't matter much.

If they had check boxes which gave a creditable attempt to distinguish between "atheist", "agnostic", "non-religious", etc, etc, then I'd assume they were trying to compile exact demographics for those[1]. But it seems (am I right?) they mainly care about named, widespread religions -- and everyone else.

[1] Eg. you can be atheist or agnostic, but it doesn't try to categorise people who might be one or the other, or both, or who are atheist but also follow a religion, supernatural or not. If they actually cared, it would as bad or worse as the problems with the "gender" box.

Comments

[liv]

I definitely sympathize, but I think they're asking about affiliation, not belief. The option is not Christian, Jewish... atheist, but Christian, Jewish... No religion. So if you were atheist but followed a religion, you could quite happily tick that religion. If you were some particular shade of non-theist but weren't happy with the term atheist, you're presumably expected to tick "No religion".

[jack]

*hugs* Good point, I think "affiliation" is an excellent description, which I didn't manage to evolve when trying to describe. Yes, I agree that is what they are (and probably should be) asking about, and given that, the intended responses are fairly clear and essentially as you describe, and thus, as I say, it doesn't really matter, although your description explains a lot better WHY it doesn't matter, why people with other belief systems not affiliated with a widespread culture are not really included.

(That is, if they tried to distinguish religious beliefs, as I described, rather than affiliations, as I should have said but didn't think of, then it would be a can of worms. But they didn't, so it isn't :))