The whole point of the article is that God isn’t relevant anymore in New Zealand. Do you anything to show that God is relevant in New Zealand? Your pronouncements add nothing to the discussion. Put up data, facts, or well thought out arguments to counter this articles claims.
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Yes, the ancient works you mention have no relevance and value in 2019 New Zealand. Most New Zealanders couldn’t care less about the treaties of ancient astronomers and mathematicians of ancient Rome. Me also.
He may not be in people’s consciousnesses, and thus not relevant consciously, but saying that he is irrelevant is like saying gravity is irrelevant.
Is gravity relevant in New Zealand? What holds them down down under? 
I thought that they would fall off into space.
So here’s one for you to ponder: Does God exist in a person’s conscious if the person has no conscious recollection of that God? Or is God the figment of one’s imagination? Even if he has no such imagination?
Helen Keller wrote of being conscious of God as a child even before she was able to communicate with other human beings.
So what? I can be conscious of Santa Claus as a child but doesn’t make it true. Children have great imaginations and can be conscious of just about anything. “I feel the Spirit in me”
That’s not the question you asked, Patrick! You asked:
You appear to have moved the goal post.
Nobody here claimed otherwise. You are answering a straw man.
In your case, perhaps it is indigestion.
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You’re welcome. I’d clarify your statement slightly by saying that New Zealand for its short history has always been a country where no membership of an organised religion has dominated society, culture, law, and individual life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. We also have by far the highest youth suicide rate in the developed world. Correlation doesn’t equal causation of course, but still, be careful what you wish for.
Actually there I would have to politely disagree. I don’t want to bore you with a long history lesson, but the history of New Zealand has followed a very different trajectory to that of the USA, and you may find some of the concepts and categories in the USA do not fit so well in a completely different country.
In brief, there is no evidence of humans in NZ until around 1350 AD when it was settled by Polynesians from Eastern Polynesia. They became the people known today as the Māori. When Europeans discovered and began settling in New Zealand, many Māori embraced Christianity, either through the church of England or the Catholic church. Missionaries helped broker a treaty between the British and the Māori to try and protect them from some of the disastrous examples of colonisation that had occurred elsewhere. A noble ambition, but sadly this treaty was not honoured by subsequent Europeans settlers, and this led to much strife known as The New Zealand Wars.
Around the 1980s the situation began to change, in what we now call The Māori renaissance. Awareness of the history of the treaty and abuses by the early colonials has triggered a movement by many to honour the treaty and redress Māori grievances. NZ is currently wrestling with what this means and will look like for the future of our country. Suddenly understanding what those missionaries had in mind has become more important. Also Māori movements such as the Rātana Church have more political clout then their official numbers would suggest, as can be seen from the visits to Rātana Pā by our Prime Minister and other political leaders.
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Ah, I also see that apparently we have 20,000 Jedi in NZ 
Our first online census has been a disaster.
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Thank you for sharing about New Zealand history and today’s situation. You brought up youth suicide. I agree that this is a problem worldwide and more should be done to lower suicide rates around the world. In studying of suicide rate in “Enlightenment Now” by Stephen Pinker it was clearn’t if organized religion was a help or a cause of increasing or decreasing suicide rate. I have seen arguments on both sides. What do you think about the linkage in New Zealand between suicide and the decline of organized religion in New Zealand?
I have no answers, only questions. My grandfather took his own life when I was young so this is not a subject I would discuss flippantly. Also both sides of that question are extremely complicated, and as your own H. L. Mencken has observed, “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong” and “If there is one mental vice, indeed, which sets off the American people from all other folks who walk the earth … it is that of assuming that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that ninety-nine percent of them are wrong.”
So my philosophy is that life is complicated, and I am automatically sceptical of easy obvious answers.
For starters, I am not sure that the census data does represent a “decline in organised religion”. Even ignoring this latest one which has been acknowledged to be an unreliable failure, there is certainly a rapid decline in previous censuses. But I suspect that it really represents a collapse of the idea of “christendom”, that countries have a religion and that merely being born in that country automatically makes you a member of that religion unless you “opt-out”. Because I grew up an atheist (easier in NZ than the USA apparently) I perhaps see this differently from many Christians who have grown up in the church, but I don’t like the idea of christendom, and I believe that Constantine made a terrible mistake when he made Christianity the “official religion” of the Roman Empire. The world of the gospels which you decry as irrelevant today is a multi-religious world where Christianity is merely one of many options, and not even the dominant one. So I see the gospels as getting more relevant as christendom declines, not less.
But since my definition of Christian is a personal commitment, how do we measure that? Regular church attendance? Even that is unsatisfactory. You don’t have to be a Christian to go to church, and I have met quite a few people in churches who attend for cultural or habitual reasons, not because of belief. I also know many believers who choose not to attend an organised Church service, sometimes because they find it stifling for their faith. An NZ sociologist has documented this phenomena and I attended one of the groups he started for non-churched believers for a while. His book a churchless faith is good, and one day I’d like to read his Ph.D thesis.
Thats all I have time to write at present, and I feel like I have only scratched the surface.
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I would think the hobbits would outnumber Jedi in NZ 
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This is incredible - think about the sheer numbers of midichlorians that would be required for this many jedi!
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Yes, that is more true than you might realise:
For those who don’t know, Hobbits are simple, uncultured, rural folk, who are more interested in large regular meals than gold or power. They live in a tiny insignificant country so far away from anywhere important that most of the major powers have no knowledge of their existence. They have some knowledge of the major powers, but they aren’t really interested because it all seems so far away, and that suits the Hobbits fine as they just want to be left alone. They do have hidden courage and resilience, but most observers can’t see that under their thick layer of complacency on the outside.
An apt metaphor for New Zealanders indeed. Possibly even better than our national icon the Kiwi*, a shy timid flightless bird that only comes out at night and is hardly ever seen, completely helpless against any predator that has come from another country!
(* not to be confused with kiwifruit which are rough and hairy, come from China, and too many will make you run to the bathroom. Not what we want as our national icon.)
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