This Just In!

             According to www.canoe.ca (Everyone else surfs, Canadians canoe) in a QMI News Agency dispatch,  quoting the London Daily Mirror, a man in Britain has filed discrimination charges against his employer after being asked to remove his hood while at work at a call centre. The aggrieved employee, one Chris Jarvis (How come all the whack jobs are named ‘Chris’?) alleged he was being discriminated against because he considered his hood to be religious garb.
             Jarvis is an adherent to the precepts of a fairly new sect on the spiritual landscape known as the ‘Jedi Faith’.  Ardent apostles of this denomination pattern their belief system on the hollowed traditions originally found in.... yes, I can’t believe it either, the hokey Star Wars franchise of movies that has plagued theatres and cartoon channels for the last few decades. It is akin to basing your entire spiritual structure on Chrissy from ‘Three’s Company’ or Tattoo of ‘Fantasy Island’ fame. (Boss! De plane! De spiritual plane!) By the way, I was actually going to use an ‘A-Team’ reference here but I see they have remade that show into a new movie proving once more Hollywood is bereft of original ideas. Sadly it wouldn’t surprise me to see a new religion based on the ‘B A Barracus’ character.
            So where does it end? Can ANYTHING be a religion? How does one discriminate between what is a religion and what is a cult? Is there a difference? Is it possible to be too tolerant of some of these weird new religions? Where do you draw the line? Can I create a religion around beer and claim dart night as a tax write off for religious reasons? Why do I keep asking myself questions I have no idea what the answers are?
            Let’s look at the facts. According to my prized Webster’s ‘New Lexicon Dictionary of the English Language’, which is about as large and heavy as a sidewalk block, the word ‘religion’ is defined as ‘a system of beliefs and practises relating to the sacred and uniting it’s adherents in a community’. A cult, on the other hand is ‘a system of religious worship’.  Delving into the other definitions for each word yielded no appreciable difference between them linguistically. They were as different as cantaloupe and muskmelon.
            I asked a number of friends, colleagues and relatives what their beliefs are and how they were differed from those of a cult. I was mostly told to go “jump in the lake of fire”. The bottom line for those who cared to respond was that if you didn’t believe whatever they believed, you were in a cult.
            Obviously, every religion can’t be right if exclusivity to the key to the Pearly Gates is part of their programs. But how can we know which one is the correct one? It would be awful to get to The Hereafter after a life of pious devotion to Buddha and see Saint Peter wearing dreadlocks telling all the newly ectoplasmic that only Rastafarians are allowed inside.
            Of course we talk about the so-called ‘Great Religions’; Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, as being on some higher level than your average wedding tackle-removing Solar Temple types. Still, sheer numbers of followers can’t be the criterion. When every follower of Christianity could all be portrayed in a picture dining together, you know they could use a major membership drive. But even with their humble beginnings, to those that came after who called themselves Christians, it wasn’t a cult even then.
             So what is a government to do? Unlike individuals who generally just pick one path to follow (rather shakily in many cases), governments must recognize many paths. It would be very difficult nowadays for a government to select one religion and outlaw the rest. Western world leaders pride themselves on religious tolerance, sometimes bending over backward to accommodate groups that neither require nor appreciate it.
             But Jedi-ism? I can picture them meeting in their parents’ basements where they are still living at the age of 35. To me, someone who devotes their life to a fictional faith that sprang from the mind of a cheesy sci-fi writer has got to be a half a bubble off. These people have about as much credibility as those lunatics that spend hours learning conversational Klingon.
             As disgusted as I am about the situation, I don’t know what can be done to rectify it. It may be better to allow every new religion that comes along than to lose the precious right of religious freedom. There is no government we trust enough to pick our religion for us so we must allow even the fringes. If it’s good enough for God to give us free will, surely it should be good enough for a government. It has to be ‘prayer beware’.
              Just so you know where my bias lies, by the way, I am a devout Frisbeetarian.