PAGANISM AND THE AUSTRALIAN 2001 CENSUS
On Tuesday, 7 August 2001 another census by the Australian Bureau of Statistics was held. In an article run by the "Herald Sun" on 1 July 2002, entitled Witches win Converts, (by Jason Frenkel), it mentioned that Wytchcraft is the fast-growing religion in Australia with nearly 9,000 people describing themselves as Wytches. This figure is up from fewer than 2,000 in 1996. The number of Pagans has also more than doubled, with there being 10,632 Pagans in Australia. The number of Druids, animists and pantheists, also Pagan traditions, has increased between 1996 and 2001.
The paper goes on to mention that "religious experts" believe this shift towards nature religions was consistent with a growing emphasis on the esoteric beliefs in Australia, with "a smorgasboard of religious expressions" to quote Dr Neville Knight, a sociologist at Monash Unversity.
It is interesting to note that most of the major Christian denominations have actually lost followers during the past six years.
But despite this, the truth of what Wytchcraft, and indeed Paganism, is really about, still seems to misunderstood by the general public, not to mention some Christian churches.
The following day, 2 July 2002, the same paper ran an article entitled Witches' ban faces axe which mentioned that the Victorian State Parliament were considering repealing the Wytchcraft section of Victoria's 1966 Vagrancy Act, which bans sorcery and the occult. In the article, Reverend Monsignor Peter J. Elliot, the Catholic Archdiocese's episcopal vicar for religious education, mentioned that endorsing Wytchcraft could be harmful to young people, and that he thinks the decriminalisation of the law "reflects the collapse of values and sanity in our society that this mishmash of superstition and fraud is to be recognised".
While the Temple of the Dark Moon considers that this is could just be a case of "sour grapes" on behalf of the Reverend Elliot, the comment just proves that there are some areas of the community who should really look at themselves first before critising the practices of others.
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