Census

Next year Britain is having another census, this will provide all the official population statistics used in policy decisions for at least the next decade, so it is rather important that the figures are representative of the population. As such a campaign has been started to encourage accurately answering one specific question which may seem insignificant but can have massive implications.

The problem here is people who have a cultural heritage of being Christian but do not attend church, do not believe in the biblical god and are in no way practising Christians, or those who have been baptised or grew up Christian but no longer believe have in the past answered the census question "What is your religion?" with Christian. This reduces the recorded percentage of non-believers and exaggerates the percentage of believers, leading to

More public spending on religious stuff including the last governments push to build loads of faith schools (a subject for another day)

Keeping bishops in the house of lords 'just because'

Continued ritual worship in schools

Laws on things such as equality still having privileges for the religious

amongst other things. The harm inflicted by each of these is fairly obvious so I wont bother attacking religion today that is not the point of this post.

So if you go to church week in week out. If you think indoctrination into the Christian faith is a good use of public money in this economic climate. If you believe the bible is literally true and that a morally perfect being can justify inflicting an infinite punishment on everyone who was a good person without accepting that beings existence. Feel free to tick the box for Christian, the goal here is an accurate census, not one biassed in my favour.(aint intellectual integrity a bitch)

However if you were baptised but lost your faith, if you were raised Christian but saw through the bullshit, if you do not attend church weekly and you acknowledge the Bible is a book of bronze age myths or if you have just never been convinced by preachers claims, please tick no religion. Or at the very least deist if you believe in some sort of non personal god. (I will be defining all the different types of belief systems in an upcoming post that just needs tidying up)

If you are still not sure where you stand then it probably isn't with the Christians, but the link up top has a few glowing neon links to pages that can help you decide.