Blatant Religious Discrimination

Just read This article, about a man claiming that Tesco discriminated against his belief (Jedi) by asking him to remove his hood while walking around a Tesco store.

To my mind, Tesco aren't taking him seriously at all, and why? Do they think his religious beliefs are completely stupid and made-up? Perhaps because the Jedi religion is relatively young, and comes from a non-traditional source?

I'd love to see someone come up with a checklist as to what constitutes a stupid religion and what doesn't.

The traditional source for many religions is, of course, private revelations to 'the chosen one'. You don't need any kind of background check to the chosen one, the only qualification seems to be that you get enough people to believe you. In fact, some of the chosen ones have decidely dodgy backgrounds.

I mean what the hell was the god of the Mormons doing choosing his prophet Joseph Smith? He couldn't read or write, was a wanted con-man, and huckster, yet was given some golden tablets with most of the Mormon gospels on them - which er, no-one else was allowed to see or they'd die.

Or what about the founder of Scientology? L Ron Hubbard. Scientologists actually get away with getting charitable status all over the world. With their belief system boiling down to: Don't use psychiatrists, give us all your money instead and we'll spout a load of crap at you. While psychiatrists are bad, they do seem to love lawyers though.

Not that these two examples are, to my mind as an atheist, particularly outrageous examples of ridiculous beliefs.

So given those hugely unlikely methods of bringing the word to the masses, you have to wonder if there's not a much more efficient way of reaching millions with your religious message. Maybe some kind of modern media would be good, a film say?

Maybe a whole series of them? you'd need to reinforce that message for each generation of course, so maybe you'd use your force to have 2 or 3 created then 20-odd years later another 3. That kind of thing.

Certainly also, in terms of oddness of belief, some religions are an incredibly tall order, ask a catholic about the holy trinity sometime, or the Mormons about, well anything.

The 'Jedi' religion is actually comparitively simple and therefore believable.

More people should be complaining about being offended because they believe in something stupid. It's quite a ludicrous thing to complain about anyway, but for some reason, when religious types complain, it's treated 100% seriously. If I start a religion which hates the number 7 - would we expect the right to have it covered up everywhere we go?