Jedi an official UK religion?

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., "Tandy, Heidi" <heidit at n...> wrote:

I don't even know what counts as a religion being 'official'. Back 
in the days when zines were printed (or xeroxed, or mimeographed) on 
paper and sent through what was not specified as Snail Mail because 
there wasn't any other kind of mail, I read quite a number of chatty 
accounts by Wiccan priest/esse/s who had gone to the trouble of 
finding out what they needed to do to officiate legally recognised 
weddings in their state. In some states the only requirement was to
be over 21, and the wedding couple had done the marriage license 
stuff. A couple in New York City had an adventure; I don't remember 
what they eventually reported that the law in New York State really 
was, because Westchester County gave them their marriage license and 
recorded their marriage even tho' the ceremony was in Brooklyn, at 
her mother's house, but in the five boroughs -- they went to the 
proper gov't office, and the proper bureaucrat, a woman whose desk
was covered with (sorry!) Catholic magazines and cruxifixes, and when 
they told her what they wanted, she told them that a wedding in New 
York would only be recognized legally as a marriage if the 'minister' 
was on the Clergy Register and that there were only two ways to get
on the Clergy Register. One was, if your religion was a religious 
non-profit corporation in New York State, a member of the state 
legislature could offer an amendment that would add your religious 
corporation to some law, specifying who it recognized as having the 
authoritity to grant ordination, and then take the document from that 
authority to the bureaucrat in order to be added to the Clergy 
Register, and the other was to bring notarized statements from a 
dozen people that you were their only religious leader.

> By the way, Snopes merely deals with various countries here on 
> Earth, not whatever religion was practiced a long time ago in a 
> galaxy far far away.

Excessive limitation. I have known people who really most sincerely 
practised Darkovan paganism, based on the alien planet religion 
hinted at in the Darkover books by Marion Zimmer Bradley. 

As for the person who points out that in the movie, 'Jedi' was 
not a religion but an order of chivalry: it makes as much sense as 
most things that religions are called.