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[–] 11 points 3 months ago (14 children)

I was laughing because I thought you meant this: ❌

TIL there are religious emoji. That's crazy. Is there a rule of how big a religion has to be before they get an emoji?

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  • [–] 17 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    I actually just learned about the "Elephant Test" recently. Apparently the Unicode Consortium compares a suggested emoji to an elephant when considering notability; only something that's about as well-known as an elephant passes the test. So I think the religion has to be as well-known as an elephant to get an emoji, which feels like a fever dream of a sentence to type.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    That actually sounds like a good test.

    Question is, is there an elephant Unicode character?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I got curious and tried to look up all the different religious emojis. After Judaism (with 14.8 million Jewish people per Wikipedia), from what I can tell the next smallest religion with an emoji is Sikhism, with the khanda: 🪯 Wikipedia says there are 25-30 million Sikhs, so I guess somewhere between ~15 and 25 million? Big hurdle for an upstart religion to overcome.

    Although that doesn't seem to have helped the Mormons, who have ~17 million followers. But I also don't know of any special symbols they have outside ones shared by other Christians (like crosses).

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