Written By:
lprent - Date published:
8:17 pm, March 4th, 2013 - 88 comments
Categories: humour, nz first -
Tags: census 2013, richard prosser
After reading Queen of Thorns complaint about the limited gender options in the census, I was considering the census.
For me and almost everyone else I know (apart from my brother and a few others) we are devotedly irreligious. But every census they ask us that same old rather meaningless question…
Obviously voting Jedi didn’t work.
However perhaps we can give the finger to that dickhead bigot Richard Prosser – I suggest that we vote Muslim.
They can’t ignore that. It is a major religion. And you’ll have virtuously filled in a box with something other than “I don’t know and I really don’t care” – which isn’t there anyway.
And for the rest of the census, as antiquated as its questions often seem, answer it with truth and where the truth won’t serve with humour…
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where the truth won’t serve with humour
There’s not enough space to insert humour – mostly tick boxes or short answers.
Yeah. But as I was pointing out if they ask a stupid question, then give them a answer that indicates NZ is changing – if it is largely irrelevant like religion, give them a strange answer. Speaking of which, I’d better find the code to login with.
I actually don’t agree that a question about religion is irrelevant. I’m not religious, but it’s still very important to many people. I find it interesting that it’s an important part of many people’s lives.
I always have. However I have a choice of “no religion” or having the word agnostic ignored.
I hate being ignored. They won’t ignore “muslim” 😈
OK, but what’s the relevance of the question – or the answer – to the New Zealand Government which is supposely secular and where religion is supposedly a matter of private conscience? What Government policies are affected by the numbers of the various religions or lack thereof in the Country?
I’m a Pastafarian, as far as the Govt. are concerned.
Yeah. But they don’t measure the stuff that isn’t in a checkbox. Remember the Jedi…
I hope you are being satirical.
This is a dumb idea.
On the contrary, I can’t think of a better use for answering that question. Tell me why you think it is a bad idea
Because it Is facile, stupid and childish to game the census in order to shame a no name MP who has little to no chance of being back in parliament next round. As well as the fact the question isn’t meaningless and the statistics garnered from this are used for serious purposes and are quoted frequently by everyone from Wikipedia to the CIA world fact book.
The statistics garnered from it are meaningless to me. In fact, I’d have to ask how are they meaningful to any part of the government? This is meant to be a secular state right?
Now tell me why they are meaningful to the government and why?
Basically it is a dumbarse question left over from the start of last century when it was the basis of various kinds of bigotry. What I am suggesting is to make it a travestry as a way of getting rid of the question faster than traditional wisdom would normally allow.
BTW: What in the hell relevance is the CIA handbook?
“This is meant to be a secular state right?”
Only in terms of government. Otherwise religion is a large and useful part of NZ society as a whole. Who’s been running foodbanks all these years?
Good point. There are many good Christians with strong social consciences. And many not so good Christians with no social conscience. Judge them by their deeds I guess.
Pretty much like non-religious groups then 🙂
That is a good point. On the other hand try and find salvation army or city mission on the form…
“Pretty much like non-religious groups then”. Yep 🙂
Good point about no space for salvation army. Is city mission a christian sect or denomination? I think the whole religion section is aimed at identifying who claims affiliation with the biggest, or main christian churches. Dunno how useful it is for anything except maybe tracking the decline.
“The statistics garnered from it are meaningless to me. In fact, I’d have to ask how are they meaningful to any part of the government? This is meant to be a secular state right?”
Your facileness is matched only by your hubris, Prentice. indeed, forget whether or not you find it meaningful but do you think Prosser, a nobody, a one termer, is really going to be ‘shown’ by some people he hasn’t heard of, never will hear of and doesn’t actually care about because they voted Muslim on the census?
“Basically it is a dumbarse question left over from the start of last century when it was the basis of various kinds of bigotry.”
No it isn’t – this is your hubris again. Considering the fact we are having charter schools introduced and the architect of said schools, John Banks, is a creationist I think now is the most important time to make sure the government knows we are a secular nation that rejects religion in our schools, government and public affairs.
Putting “atheist” / “no religion” on a census form won’t affect the secular nature of our democracy either, but it’s important to fill out the form accurately so the stats are useful.
For example, census data is used to measure wealth distribution, something readers of this site are acutely aware of. No idea why they’d want to try and stuff it up!
Question 41.
Take the bus or train tomorrow – support public transport.
Meh. I think Prosser is marginal, and would rather get on with the business of getting every religion out of our lives.
If I was home on census day I’d be putting Atheist for a third time.
I suspect that if there was a large Muslim census, then we’d have religion out of our life a lot faster.
Besides there is no atheist checkbox, and they as good as admitted with the Jedi stuff that they don’t count it anything written. If you don’t want “did not answer” as your vote, then I’d suggest you’d used the no religion box.
Question 46… ummm
There is a “no religion” option. That is the one for me.
The muslims might get a bit narked they don’t have the chance to specify which sect they belong to, like the Christians do. I’m just going to mark no religion.
The muslims might get a bit narked at this post fullstop, if you think about it.
As-salam alaykum (السلام عليكم)
Peace be upon you, brother.
Yeah, and I’m sure that members of the Tamaki adoration society (or whatever it is now called) will feel the same.
That is actually quite funny
Lets annoy QoT and vote white, aged, blue rinse, north shore, male and female doesn’t matter, and definitely hetero.
Damn thing is online now. Why don’t they ask some relevant questions that take more than 4 pages. Make 4 pages mandatory, and the rest optional but more relevant to the modern world.
Do you ever use government services online?
Do you have a listed landline? (mind you, that could seriously piss off the polling companies when the other data gets analysed against that).
Do you mainly use a cellphone for voice or texting?
Do you ever use use public transport?
Do you have a car?
What else?
Jeez, vto, did I accidentally piss in your cornflakes or something?
Well yes I think you did. But don’t take it personally – I seriously struggle with much of the lefts take on matters of race and gender and equality. That is why it is a frequent subject of mine. I bash these things back and forwards because the views expressed on here are so often at quite the odds with so many other views. I keep trying to test the walls….
(apologies for the attack over on that other thread. woops. its the anti gene again. must go about things better..).
And yet you just kept doing it, vto. Maybe you could take some of this faux recalcitrance and figure out when to pay attention to what a moderator is telling you.
lprent, i think you’re missing a rather important point here. just like the question about race/nationality, the question about religion helps to identify discrimination.
so if the question is answered correctly, you could tie in income levels to religion, and see if any religious groups are disadvantaged. you could look at education levels etc. i haven’t filled out my form yet, so don’t know what all the questions are. but the same arguments that apply to those who whine about having to define their race/ethnicity, also apply to religion. because there is an aspect of privilege if you belong to the right religion(s) and an aspect of disadvantage if you don’t. there may also be an aspect of disadvantage if you don’t identify with any religion at all (i suspect that would be less in this country than it would be in many other countries around the world, including the US, but nonetheless important).
there’s the additional aspect that certain religions are linked to race, and that some people will be visibly identifiable in terms of their religion while the vast majority aren’t. it’s much easier to discriminate against the latter, and particularly when they’re a person of colour as well.
so i don’t think this particular post is helpful in the way you’ve framed it and i’m asking that people don’t lie in terms of identifying themselves as muslims if they aren’t. i appreciate the point that there aren’t suitable options for people who have no religious identification whatsoever, and it’s a totally valid point to make if you think the options are badly put. but you’re response is going to be more damaging than not – at least to the muslim community.
Well I am still puzzled about what to answer. I don’t have “no religion” and they ignore whatever you write – like Jedi or agnostic or coptic or anything that isn’t a check box.
oh yes, i absolutely appreciate the problem. it’s a very valid concern & i’m sorry that i can’t offer you a better gimmick to highlight it to the census peeps…
I did spend quite a lot of time in my young adult life reading everything from the Koran to the book of the dead. Reading the old testament got me kicked out of Methodist Sunday school. Turns out they didn’t like my interpretation of Elijah.
I determined that I was faithless and far too interested in logical inconsistencies and stirring to follow a actual religion..
I embrace the goodness in all religions including ‘no religion’ – should I tick all the boxes?
Nah I would guess that the humorless servants of Empress Key would regard that as treason… And mark it as did not answer..
“Empress”? Really?
It *is* interesting that you can tick multiple ethnicities but only one religion …
+1 stargazer
Why not just answer the questions…
Like that retard that was on the news the other night, saying he won’t fill it in, got fined last time.
Doesn’t the Wizard leave NZ every census night so he doesn’t have to fill in the forms? Or is that someone else?
He has done, yep. Also the Laird McGillicuddy has found a few loopholes over the years: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/spectrum/20110327
The particular question I was highlighting has little significance to most people except at a general weak tribal level these days. I certainly don’t care. It doesn’t have a relevant answer. I could pick any of the available answers
The particular question I was highlighting has little significance to most people except at a general weak tribal level these days.
You just couldn’t be more wrong. Pacific communities are among the fastest growing demographics in the country and usually have religion as a cornerstone of their lives and their engagement with society and politics. Those same communities have been over-represented in lower socio-economic areas and households and they have been under-represented in higher education and high-income work. Understanding the evolution of those communities and their relationship to the rest of the population is really important for governments, and also for political parties. Those communities are a looming dilemma for socially liberal parties on the left. Accurate data doesn’t dull that, but it does provide useful insight into how things are tracking.
I could pick any of the available answers
Having already claimed to be faithless, unless you arbitrarily subscribe to the dogma of any of the listed religions, you’d have to be a bit of a dick to pick one of them when they’ve provided three options which would seem to fit your position better (“No Religion”, “Other” and “Object to answering”). Objecting to answer the question on the grounds that you have a problem with the structure of the question seems a perfectly reasonable outlet for your curmudgeonliness. But honestly, they’re pretty up-front about how broad a category “No Religion” is, and the semantic difference between atheists and agnostics while valid and important to individuals is pretty transparent from a policy making perspective, so it’s not entirely unreasonable to try and simplify the question to focus on the essential data that policy-makers need.
And could you stop putting about that Stats NZ don’t count the other box. We know how many people called themselves Jedi (c.53,000), we know what percentage of the population that is (1.5%) and we know that our government statisticians have the ability to filter memes from their data. It seems to me that being pissed that they did that isn’t a good reason to advocate undermining the integrity of data collected this time around. It’s worth noting that whiel it’s not broken out, the Other column is included in all the quick tables from 2006, as is the total of people “not elsewhere included” (Jedi et al).
This
This x2
Yeah this is just bloody silly. Observing the changing demographics in our society is something I would have thought was useful and interesting in many ways.
But religion? I find that hard to see as major demographic….
If they left the question out I reckon it’d pretty soon show up as major demographic.
Yeah there is that. Measuring what people put in the text box like Jedi or agnostic or atheist or don’t care would help… In the case of the latter three, a checkbox could reduce their measurement error…
Yeah I agree that it’s sloppily designed. They could have put more effort into identifying more particular denominations and subsets. But I’m an agnostic too and I don’t mind ticking no religion in the absence of a box for agno. I don’t think they’re interested in knowing how many are atheists and how many are agnostics. I think they just want to know how many belong to the major organised religious groups.
The religion stats sheet from the 2006 census is pretty useless but I guess you can get detailed tables. I personally find it of interest to know what the non-religious/religious component of our society is, and how the religious component is changing. If you couldn’t get that data centrally from the census, where else could you get it from?
I reckon it’s not a good idea to check yourself off as adhering to a religion you don’t though. Why screw the results?
Longitudinal data is better to be sloppily designed but consistent, rather than any dramatic change in question format.
Particularly when some mouths with fringe religious views like to claim significant support because they all get together in one place and protest.
Prosser probably thinks he is a typical New Zealander. The Census helps demonstrate he isn’t.
“But religion? I find that hard to see as major demographic….”
Too simplistic. Think about possible correlations between a particular religion and (for example) location, job type, income level or amount of children and you can see how it can become useful.
How do you manage to get italic formatting into your posts?
Like this: http://thestandard.org.nz/faq/comment-formatting/#simple_html
Ta.
Oh yeah. I used to use the self description of “household manager” as a surrogate for Nat. But correlation isn’t relevance. Of more relevance would be “do you have a listed landline” (for obvious reasons)
Correlation can certainly be relevant. For example if a particular faith has a high correlation with large family sizes then anyone involved in medium-long term planning would like to know if an area has an influx of people of such a faith who are of breeding age.
Lynn: But religion? I find that hard to see as major demographic….
A little over half is not a major demographic? And the significant religious affiliation of Pacific peoples?
Stats from the 2006 census:
And census-derived stats are incorporated in the wikipedia page on religion in NZ, and includes the census Jedi “phenomenon”. It has a section on Religion in Politics:
As a social scientists I am interested in the relationship between people, groups, communities, religion and politics. The census provides some useful information, including on those antagonistic to institutionalised religions, as shown by Jedi and other responses on the census.
I think is could be useful for discussion of proposed Charter schools to have statistics relating to culture, income, education and religious affiliation, and the changes in these over time.
Edit: I am only one social scientist, not the many.
Apart from the Richard Prosser stir, I’m mostly questioning why this question is in the census at all. The underlying purpose of the census is to provide the basis for the allocation of resources for everything from laying out of electoral boundaries to the determination of regional economic anomalies.
The space in 4 pages of the census is at a premium.
There is no particular structural relationship between churches and the state. We don’t allocate monies based on religion except for the subsidies paid to private schools. Why are we bothering to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort to measure self-professed religious affiliations when it serves no meaningful role in the allocation of resources and effort by the state?
What other more relevant questions that could have used that space got bumped to provide space for this rather useless question?
For instance I remember a not that many censuses ago where there was a section about access to phones. There was a economic reason for that. Perhaps these days a question about access to the internet would be useful for determining where there significant economic holes.
It is all very well satisfying peoples curiosity. But this is a hell of an expense to ask a poorly worded badly limited question.
Has anyone ever asked them why they include a question on religion?
I haven’t looked. However I suspect that you’d find that the stats department is required to from some arcane legislation originally promulgated when the census was first set up in NZ.
I thought they had both phone and internet questions in this census?
Yes, it’s on the Dwelling form qu 17, not the individual form. The cell phone option is a problematic one though. Mine goes where I go, but the question asks if its in the dwelling all or most of the time. I haven’t decided whether to mark that option yet.
The wording of both the religion & communications questions could be improved, but I think a religious question still yields valuable information about NZ society – it may not directly inform government funding, but it does indirectly impact on state provisions.
Turn off, disconnect all phones and internet while you are concentrating on ticking the boxes. Then answer “no” truthfully.
BTW telephone numbers are legally personal property why are we required to hand personal property over to the government to use without charge.
The catholics showed a 4.7 % increase at the 2006 census. I think all the other denominations had declined. Be interesting to see the catholic numbers next time round. I was raised as one but these days I’m agnostic and I prefer not to mention my former religion at all any more. It just invites attack.
This is a terrible idea, as if there is a large jump in census numbers of Muslims it will play into exactly the sort of bigotry Prosser espouses. A huge part of anti Muslim xenophobia is the idea that they will somehow demographically swamp Judeo Christian civilisation, if they have census numbers to back them up all of a sudden more idiots might buy into it.
What if if no one at all ticked ‘muslim’? It might lift the Prosser paranoia level to Froth Con 1!
Oh, the other thing is that this won’t annoy Prosser in the slightest, attention whore that he is.
Ha.
Ended up doing the “Jedi” thing, simply because it gets lumped in with “non-christian” anyway, and that’s the main thing.
Might get up to 47 or even 50% this time!
” simply because it gets lumped in with “non-christian” anyway,”
No, it doesn’t. Jedi, Pastafarian, X-man, etc answers get counted as “question understood, answer invalid” and are completely excluded from the data.
That is what I understand as well,
piffle.
no worries anyhoo.
Does your household have that religious artifact known as a “light saber”.
What a bizarre post. Religion may have no place in your or my life, but by hijacking someone else’s you’re showing them profound disrespect.
If anything, a sudden influx in Muslim identified population would only play into Prosser’s bigoted hand.
I really think you have jumped the shark with this one…
Question 18: What is your religion?
Can’t all us non-religious people just tick the first option ‘no religion’ instead of making up a religion or picking a religion to push. I believe New Zealand would be a more caring society if more people ticked ‘no religion’ if they aren’t really religious.
http://www.humanist.org.nz/
Actually I an irreligious, not non-religious (which is far more specific).
As you can see to simply dump everyone as non-religious is kind of broad brush. The question really is what is that question in the census for if it is so narrow and unrelated to anything that the state needs to know.
Because I think telling the truth is important, I’ll be answering the question honestly.
Because I think the truth is important, I have no religion.
I ticked “No Religion”.
What about asking about “philosophy”?
Then I could tick “Humanist”.
Why isn’t Humanism given a look in? After all the whole concept of a census is derived from a Humanist perspective isn’t it?
Read ’em and weep
A
http://www.jesusradicals.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Christian_anarchism.png
K
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ni/ChristianAnarchy_300.jpg
Q
http://abcsofanarchy.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/anarchyjesus.jpg
J
http://khanya.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/jacov.gif
10
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cc/Crass_logo.svg/170px-Crass_logo.svg.png
J
http://getfile0.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2012-06-22/CcIAngBzrwpFwEqnlkrCliBaBBqrErqHyjwakfttfgtrhCeovqIykCHGomcb/johnny_rotten_210451s.jpg.scaled1000.jpg
speaking of denominations,
-at the evangelical i support, we feed everybody
-at the “methodist derived”; “feed the deserving”
(it’s enough to drive a joker to drink), still, perseverance.
Card up the sleeve;
http://0.tqn.com/d/taoism/1/0/0/-/-/-/yinYang.gif
Yep there’s a massive diversity of views in the Christian tradition. Liberal/socially aware churches tend to get less publicity than the Catholics and weirdos like Brian Tamaki. Meanwhile the Sallies and good people like yourself soldier on.
Perhaps we should have the “church of no asset sales” and that way the census could double as a referendum.
Lolz, besides all of us becoming Muslim we all should remember to ‘accidently’ tick the box for inclusion in the lowest income groups,
The deciles for school funding are gained from the census and your local school would benefit by your inclusion in the lower income bracket…