Thursday 17 January 2013

May the (Gay) Force be with you



England is turning towards the Dark Side! Details of the 2011 census, published last month, reveal that the number of people who identify themselves as ‘Jedi Knights’ has fallen by more than half since the census of 2001. The Force, sad to say, is weakening, with a mere 176, 632 classifying their religion as Jedi compared to over 330,000 light sabre wielders ten years ago. Master Yoda, noting the trend, said “Concerning, this is. Look for the Sith Lord, we must.”

Yes, indeed, the trend is alarming, though it is encouraging to note that Jedi still tops the “alternative faith” stakes, only behind Christianity, Sikhism, Judaism and Buddhism in popularity. They are well ahead of the true Dark Knights, the Satanists, who managed a mere 1,893 adherents, and the Scientologists, with only 2,418 Thetans. My, my, that's all, despite Tom Cruise.

But the prophet who must be most pleased by the figures is Master Richard Dawkins, the atheist-in-chief, whose religion is clearly the fastest growing, with as many as 14,000,000 people in England and Wales of no faith. On the contrary, dear ones; your faith offers the greatest certainties of all!

Mainstream Christianity is still top of the pops, though the number of people identifying themselves as such has fallen from seventy-two to fifty-nine per cent since 2001, leading to claims that their number could fall below fifty per cent of the population in six years time.

The other downward trend is in marriage. It seems that gays have fallen in love with that venerable institution when everyone else is falling out of love. For the first time since the national census was founded in 1801 married couples are in a minority. Never mind; soon the homosexuals will come and make up the numbers.

Now there is a thing.  We had decade after decade of gay liberation, a mighty struggle that brought forth…a pathetic mouse.  Gay marriage is now a flag ship Tory policy, Prime Minister David Cameron waving his little rainbow flag.  Gay love and gay marriage go together like a horse and carriage.  Oh, but there are dissenters, and they are not all Christian fundamentalists.  There is Rupert Everett, a gay actor or an actor who is gay, who said recently that he loathed heterosexual weddings;

…the wedding cake, the party, the champagne, the inevitable divorce ten years later, is just a waste of time in the heterosexual world.  In the homosexual world I find it, personally, beyond tragic that we want to ape this institution that is so clearly a disaster. 

Not so, says Cameron, who hopes that gay couples, all complacent and middle aged, will soon form the backbone of the modern Tory Party, a new rainbow county set.  Who else, one has to ask, is left?   

Meanwhile, back in the heterosexual world, the Daily Telegraph reports that Sir Paul Coleridge, a High Court judge who started the Marriage Foundation campaign group to promote the institution, said the decline in the number of married couples was a “worrying” trend likely to lead to more family break-ups. He has previously described the scale of family breakdown as a “complete scandal” and warned that people were “recycling” partners instead of trying to fix their marriages.

Oh, well, recycling is the great trend of the age, bed-hopping non-Christians leading the way. This, I have to say, includes Pagan and Wiccans like myself, behind the Jedi, yes, with a professed 68,386 adherents, but making a steady ascent. The beauty of my religion is that it has no rules, other than to take pleasure in pleasure. When we start to follow gays into a parody of Christian marriage I really will know that the game is finally up; that knitting, bring and buy sales, a semi in the suburbs, the rotary club, dogs, slippers and the Tory Party is all that remains. 

May the Force be with you, in whatever shape it comes.

10 comments:

  1. We Time Lords are highly amused by such primitive beliefs. I'd give you a hint as to when Earthlings will eventually learn the truth . . . but that would spoil the surprise :)

    BTW - that bow tie thing? Not realistic at all.

    Toodle-oo for now. I'll pop back to see how you're getting on later . . . and earlier.

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    1. Ah, in and out the cycles of time and fashion. How wise you must be. :-)

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  2. Ana, how do pagans tie the knot? What happens with taxation, pension rules etc?

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    1. Damo, those that I know do not tend to bother. There is, however, a traditional ceremony known as handfasting. Those concerned by the kind of legal niceties you allude to would back this up by marriage before a registrar, the ultimate pagan ritual. :-)

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  3. I am not the least bit interested in the gay marriage debate. We have far more important matters to attend to. Who does what to who and under what arrangement is of no importance. What the debate really is about is whether modern day society's standards and values are better or worse than before although I doubt anyone other than me would see it that way. Gay marriage is just the convenient battleground on which to pick this fight. The conservatives and traditionalists are going to lose not because they are wrong and the progressives are right but the fight has been picked on the ground of the progressives choosing they have already sowed the battlefield with anti-homophobic mines. In fact the progressives have found this tactic very useful in debates on other issues where ant-racist and other such mines have been successfully used before. To me on the question of societies standards and values they have indeed fallen to dismal lows. The progressives did have a point that society did need to change on gay, race and feminist issues on which they were very successful. In many cases too successful and in the process trawled in too many other things and ended up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So for all the good changes that society have gone through it has been negated by overzealousness and imprudent actions in areas that should have been better left alone.

    I see no mention of the Muslim faith in your article is that an oversight or is Islam really such a minority religion that it does not come above many of the others you mention and below Christianity or are Muslims not bothering to fill in censor forms? Richard Dawkins once said that mankind was making progress because once we believed in many gods now only one so the next step has to be none.

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    1. Antistehenes, I for one see it exactly the same way as you. Now we have reform for the sake of reform; now we have Nick Clegg.

      The Muslim point is a good one. So far as I know it's never been raised. Nor, for that matter, has orthodox Jewish marriage. The assault, for assault it is, is on traditional notions of Christianity, rather an easy target these days.

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  4. The world has turned, what was is no more, just find yourself a comfortable 'place' in the scheme of these 'New' things.

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    1. I think I already have, Anthony, thank goodness.

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  5. On the other hand, reproduction is important for a society.

    http://www.toqonline.com/blog/the-coming-chinese-superstate/

    The nice thing about the Heathen religion (or rather, world of stories), is that it promotes both sexuality and fertility. Some of the Gods, although faithful to their partner end children in marriage, have recreational sex outside the marriage. Especially Odin and Freya know how to have some fun.

    So there you have it: Christianity has made such an issue out of sex (and nudity) that it has made marriage look bad as well. For many Heathens living 2000 years ago, and for many other people even today in other cultures, a marriage is not primarily about love and sex, but about some arrangement to raise children in a stable environment between two family lines that economically cooperate. And because I like to promote this Heathen view on marriage, I also don't like gay marriage. I guess the pre-Christian Greeks had the same view on marriage as I do. Gay sex was Ok for them, but at the same time they were married to a woman. That's another thing that puzzles me: I know quite a few people who are bisexual, but it's still a taboo, even within gay circles.

    All of this brings me in the strange position that I support the Christians on some of their views on marriage, while I detest parts of their worldview that normally are associated with a Christian view on marriage.

    Oh, and this is why I prefer the "Heathen" term over "Pagan" and so on:

    http://www.toqonline.com/blog/the-coming-chinese-superstate/

    Ana, about your article: superb written, informative but with humour. I also agree that some modern Wiccan views do better fit with the new emerging world than old, agriculture-based views.

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    1. Thank you, Evert. I love the ancient virtues. :-)

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