Should not the question be formulated thus: what is your religion? And I have no pre-knowledge how the question on religion will be formulated on the census form: But I will answer, Christian, or to be specific, Presbyterian if necessary. I was well educated with the concepts of Christianity, and, As some cynics would probably confirm, brainwashed during the critical first seven years of childhood.

But that would be difficult to prove, since during those formative years, I lived in an isolated community with no churches of any description! ( nor electricity, nor sewage or water systems, no hospital, no doctor, only my good mother who was the only nurse in the village).

Yes, I'm a Christian, a practising Christian, but don't attend church! How's that then?
Because, in my formative years I learned the art of Christianity well enough to fly blindfold!

I will answer yes I am Christian to the census question! And proud of it!

"For those who want a genuine separation of church and state, and who don't belong to any particular religious order, "No religion" is an easy choice."

Those who want a genuine separation of church and state, whether or not they belong to any particular religious order, should not answer this question!

I don't see a check box for pastafarianism!

The fact that secularism has dumbed down enough people to believe that something comes from nothing, that their are no absolutes, that order came from chaos and that design does not require a Designer does not change the truth. It simply means more people are irrational and have been dumbed down by so called 'rationalist'. Of course they will claim they are absolutely right despite the fact they deny absolutes. The void left by the idiotic dogmas of secularism will be filled. The extremism in Europe is largely thanks to irrational secularist who were to blinded by their ideology resulting in few sensible policies in place. In fact it was hatred of anything decent that blinded them. Kinda of like the dumb down getup team who have adopted the gw lies as science.

A good take down of the absurd attempts to broaden the definition of religion to such an extent as to render the concept meaningless.

On another note, those on Facebook will probably have noticed the Christian scare campaign from the last census doing the rounds again claiming that checking ‘no religion’ will mean mosques will start springing up everywhere. This, however, is a non sequitur that assumes that an indifference to Islam necessarily follows from no religious affiliation, or that Muslims will start randomly spawning around the place to fill a Christian void.

Non-believers who fall for this scare campaign and check off a Christian religion will be handing power to, and legitimising, lobby groups like the ACL by allowing them to claim to speak for, and represent, a larger group than they actually do when they fight to deny women their reproductive rights, the terminally ill the right to die with dignity, and the important medical research done with stem cells.

Furthermore, people need to stop mindlessly checking off the religion that they attended RE classes for in primary school. Nobody cares what religion your (sometimes even non-practicing) parents labelled you for the purposes of a half-hour-per-week RE class. Having the ‘No religion’ option at the top of the list this time around will hopefully prevent this happening to some degree.

This one change in the census form has dredged up so much more misinformation, fear, bigotry and pure nonsense than anyone could ever have predicted. The purpose of the census is to gain information in order that the government can make decisions informed by the truth about the people who currently inhabit our country. All people have to do is tell the truth, but there is a remarkable number of people (many of them claiming to be religious) encouraging others to lie. Placing the "no religion" option at the top of the list will hopefully encourage everyone to examine their own belief system and decide if it falls within the commonly accepted definition of a religion. This is a great opportunity for all Australians to think seriously about the basis on which they make their moral judgments.