[Helena]

Something that's occurred to me a few times in the past: Why do Star Wars characters describe the Force as a 'religion'? I mean, it demonstrably exists in their universe. It follows consistent, easily testable rules (the Prequels even tell us that it functions through some kind of micro-organisms in the blood!) As far as they're concerned it's scientific fact, not a religious belief. Sure, they may not understand exactly what it is or where it comes from, but that's true of a whole lot of things in real life (gravity, for example) and we don't regard them as articles of religious faith.

Come to that, shouldn't a society as advanced as the Republic know everything there is to be known about the Force? You'd think that in 25,000 years, they'd have got a little further than "it's a mysterious energy field".

Yeah, I guess I'm just overthinking things again...

This post has been edited by Helena: 19 January 2008 - 03:36 PM

[KurganX]

Well presumably what the Jedi and Sith call "the Force" is like quantum physics... something poorly understood by the general public (for all we know, information about it may be restricted by these groups).

The "religion" is the Jedi Order's practices and understanding of the Force. As a metaphor for real life religion and faith, the Jedi/Force is the obvious connection in the first movie. As the series goes on, there's less of this approach, as we see all kinds of crazy stuff going on and assume it's mystical, or else everyone could do it (in fact, until ROTJ it's implied that with proper training, anyone can become a "force adept"). The Jedi/Sith aren't some special species after all, so where does their power come from?

[Helena]

Well presumably what the Jedi and Sith call "the Force" is like quantum physics... something poorly understood by the general public (for all we know, information about it may be restricted by these groups).

In a primitive society that might make sense, but in one that's so incredibly advanced in every other way? For a thousand generations? That's just plain impossible. And while it's true that most people don't understand much about quantum physics (myself included), that doesn't mean it's viewed as a religion.

The "religion" is the Jedi Order's practices and understanding of the Force. As a metaphor for real life religion and faith, the Jedi/Force is the obvious connection in the first movie.

You have a point about the Jedi's practices, but Vader isn't a Jedi - besides, I can't think of any real-life religion that doesn't have at least some kind of supernatural element. If it simply involves living and behaving in a certain way, we call it a 'lifestyle' instead.

As the series goes on, there's less of this approach, as we see all kinds of crazy stuff going on and assume it's mystical, or else everyone could do it (in fact, until ROTJ it's implied that with proper training, anyone can become a "force adept").

Actually, I'm not sure this is the case. Vader says in the very first movie that "the Force is strong with this one," implying that it's not as strong with most other people (i.e. they would find it more difficult to use).

I'm not trying to claim this is a major flaw in the movies or anything, it just amuses me. I am an equal-opportunity nitpicker.

[Despondent]

What was your first response to "the force"? I'd heard about it before I saw SW and it sounded religious enough. Seeing Luke call to a higher power and be granted with special abilities was proof enough for me. I mean seriously, how could some farm boy who'd only flown a crop duster, climb into a fighter spacecraft and blah blah Otherwise?

And the old guy at the end (Gen. Dodonna) asking the force to be with his fighters. That wasn't some lame saying, they were actually asking for a higher power's help.

--how a skeptic can be a star wars fan at this point, is beyond me.

Once Leia of Hoth dismissed her troops with a sigh of "good Luck", we had turned from the Lord. And look how TESB turned out for our heroes.

By the time Admiral Ackbar called on the Force in JEDI (ok, I can accept part of ep 6 in the canon), we were good with God again. With awesome, terrible events. You could say that Luke was finishing his spiritual journey also, but I wouldn't buy it now. Not with what I can't forget.

There's this secret of a legend based on the Christians' saviour actually fathering children? About the story of protecting that secret while hiding it in Leonardo's paintings? I read that and can still feel how repulsed I was. Don't get me wrong- it was a good story, and Dan Brown was going for shock value.

Midichlorians? Sacred fluid running through the boy who was born of a Virgin Mother? Nice shock there, Georgie. You beat da code but guess what. Your story sucks.



I haven't a prayer for the future of SW.

This post has been edited by Despondent: 19 January 2008 - 05:21 PM

[civilian_number_two]

I say this all the time when this topic comes up. What made me like STAR WARS more than BATTLESTAR GALACTICA - I watched both for the first time at a drive-in in in 1978 - was that STAR WARS was based on old serials and sci-fi stuff that Lucas had grown up with, and BG was based on the book of Exodus. I can't say for sure why I prefer one form of homage to another, but there it is; while I really loved STAR WARS, I thought BG was outrageously hokey and dumb.

At one time there was a story treatment floating around that was supposed to be an episode three. In this, there was an effort made by the Emperor to slaughter all of the newborns in the EMPIRE! The transparent ripoff of Exodus embarrassed me and I was sure I'd never watch any of the prequels. Later it became apparent that Lucas had no interest in that story treatment, so I held out a small amount of hope. Then came the actual prequel, with the Virgin Birth. As much as I thought the Midichlorians were stupid, the Virgin Birth was BG all over again. STRAR WARS had crossed over from a fun and sometimes silly homage to old serials and sci-fi to a dumb ripoff of one of the oldest published book in the western world.

Anyway on to the original subject, I agree that it's silly to say in one movie that the Force is the stuff of an "ancient religion," and then in the so-called prequels to show that the "religion" is the doctrine of an entire society. How you can go from that to near eradication in one generation - well, it's impossible. And while I won't go down that road of saying that "religion" precludes facts or proof, I agree that in this world the two are generally separate. Religion needs Faith, not scientific proof such as measuring thelevels of Force-juice in someone's blood. The use of the word "religion" in the STAR WARS movies is similar to the prequels' use of words like "queen."

Regarding Dan Brown, he didn't even make that stuff up. That stuff was all cribbed from "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail." That stuff was a summary of some stuff made up by a French guy earlier in the century.

[KurganX]

I guess you could say they could have called it "magic" and it would have fit just as well.

By calling it a "religion" I guess they made it seem a little more credible (technologically advanced modern societies usually have abandoned magic, except as fake entertainment, but retain religions).

Just because it's religious in nature and yet "objectively real" doesn't mean it's inappropriate. Doesn't that assume that if it's real, it can't be religion? By that logic any religious movie (like a movie about the life of Christ, or miracle story, or movie about angels, etc) isn't believable, because it presents the supernatural (heck, check any ghost movie too while we're at it) as objectively real, not just something the characters have faith in or speculate about, without actual proof.

For a thousand generations, the Jedi might have kept the secrets of how to use the Force. Maybe it is simply so mysterious that only a few can understand it? Who knows.

But I think many of us assumed that the force was out there, but only the "pure in heart" (or the truly evil) could master it, hence these two "ways" (the Jedi and the bad guys... who later became known as the sith) of wielding it. Perhaps if things were different (many of us thought, in the days before the prequels, around the time ROTJ was coming out) anybody could use the Force, with the proper training.

And yes, the Da Vinci Code was a bunch of pseudo-historical pap just like Holy Blood Holy Grail (which came out in 1982). Actually Pierre Plantard (who started the whole "Priory of Sion" hoax in the late 1950's and 60's) never claimed to be descended from Jesus or Mary Magdalane. He may have been a conman and anti-semitic crank, but he drew the line at blasphemy, and denied it. This was wild speculation by the authors of the "non-fiction" book. The speculation grew by leaps and bounds thanks to the work of other amateur kooks like Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince (who first drew, iirc, the connections to Leonardo da Vinci, which of course no Leonardo scholar takes seriously) and Margaret Starbird (who played up the role of Mary Magdalane and Goddess stuff in early Christianity, plus tidbits like "Princess Sarah" being the child of Jesus and Mary, etc).

Dan Brown's wife Blyth, basically did most of his research for him. She read the above kook books and travel brochures and pamphlets, and emailed the summaries to her husband who spun them into a cookie cutter template for an airport thriller (which explains why the Da Vinci Code is so similar to his previous novel, Angels & Demons).

Brown's biggest mistake was putting a page entitled "FACT" at the start (which was a list of anything BUT facts), and claiming in several early interviews (and strongly implying on his website) that the novel was based on solid research, contained a factual background, and was so compelling that he himself was a believer in the background "history" of the (albeit fiction) novel.

I'm sure George Lucas drew no inspiration from it...

This post has been edited by KurganX: 19 January 2008 - 07:22 PM

[civilian_number_two]

Funny sidebar is that the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail tried to sue Dan Brown for theft of intellectual property. In his defence he said that if what they were writing about was fact, then they couldn't own it. Only if it were made up, or if it could be shown that he had borrowed substantive passages from their work (plagiarism) could the suit hold up. The court sided with the defendant, de facto acknowledging that the fictional crap in HBHG was "true history." So courts can decide what is history and what is not.

Getting back to STAR WARS and the Force, imagine if there were folks actually coming back from the dead, AIDS patients walking out of clinics devoid of symptoms and the blind suddenly able to see, all as a result of the "laying on of hands" of Christian preachers. I think that's what Helena was getting at in her first post. We have stories of similar magic taking place in the ancient past, and we are asked to take them on faith. But what if you could actually see the proof of it, if it were a simple physical reality? Would Christianity be a Religion or would it be a branch of medicine? So too, if Force adepts are levitating tie fighters and flipping around like crazy with laser swords, can we really say that study of the Force is a "religion?" Add the stuff about the blood test, and she's really got a point there.

[Despondent]

But what about natural piloting ability? We (several of us, anyway) saw Obi-wan fly a fighter or a deep-space spacecraft in Eps 2 and/or 3. And as for the one with no prowness, If he's half as good a pilot as his father, he'll do fine.


After all, in Ep 3, Yoda flew an escape pod. Turns out they really accidentally dropped him off in the wrong galaxy. Didn't matter.

This post has been edited by Despondent: 20 January 2008 - 01:55 AM

[civilian_number_two]

I don't know where you're going with those last two paragraphs Despondent, but ok. I'll get into the piloting thing again. In Lucas's sci-fi goofiness, everybody can pilot everything. There is no sci-fi explanation, either, but I like to say that the droid did all the calculation and such, while the pilot only had to operate the joystick. The droid, intentional or not, gave Lucas his out, sorta (unfortunately R2 also got hit during Luke's first flight). But back to the original comment, Lucas allowed everyone to have a basic piloting ability. And remember when they were dogfighting those tie fighters? Luke never even had to ask Han how to work thoe guns. Everybody just knows how to do that stuff in STAR WARS. So ... looking for a Force explanation for any of that is barking up the wrong tree. The Foirce came in there only when Luke needed to hit the exhaust port without the targeting computer.

[njamilla]

Did that officer in the Death Star meeting use the word "religion" literally?

That's the big question, but in the end a futile effort. GL used the Force in whatever manner he wanted without consistency or a deep philosophical grounding. We know the Force is what the Jedi believe, but is it what the universe believes? Unlike Dune where Paul Atriedes becomes a figure head for a religious movement, there has never been any real exp​ression that a religion exists with the Force at its heart. Creating a credible definition of the Force is such an impossible task, that the SW databank doesn't even have an entry for "Force."

People were hopeful for the era of the Jedi knights with the prequels. We waited with bated breath for further explications on the mysteries of the Force and what did we get? Matrix/Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

A person can get extremely enraptured by Shaolin kung fu but when you get into real study, it isn't really about fighting; it's about religious spirituality. Star Wars is the opposite. Lots of fighting, no spirituality. Just the illusion of it. A literary convention for a fantasy universe.

EU writers have tried to make something of the Jedi religion but it all comes out as politics and empty spiritualism. Like doing yoga without knowing what Brahman is. For SW, the Force = magic. And magic has been used as a convention in stories and tales for millenia. It has its place, but you can't make more of it without missing the main point of the original tale. Lucas lamely tries to explain the mechanisms of the Force with the idea of midi-chlorians, but he falls flat on his face.

Regarding 25,000 years of "existence," why should the SW universe be any more enlightened than our civilization? I find it particularly embarassing that the president of the US believes in creationism, as might a simple majority of Americans. It's just unbelieveable, but the reality Americans have to live with and a reality everyone else must suffer.

Dan Brown also pulls a rabbit out of a hat and people believe him. The ideas about Christ's blood being the "grail" has been around for centuries. Brown popularized it, and an ingorant audience entertains the possibility that it might be true. It is the same for those who, because they don't have either a very strong religious background or knowledge, might embrace some religious idea of the Force.

Everyone makes a big deal about the next form of technology: the book, the phone, the TV, computers, cell phones. Supposedly they would make us more intelligent. Unfortunately, the greater reach of these technologies allows retrogrades to further spread their propaganda.

The ability to openly debate ideas is critical to scientific analysis and discovery, but TV stations like Discovery Channel, History Channel, and others have now given a forum for kooks to be viewed on an even forum with serious and established experts. How many times will you see stories about UFOs, Atlantis, and Sasquach?

[Snake Logan]

If you don’t believe in the force and you are surrounded by beings who do not believe in the force, are you affected by the force?

[Despondent]

The Foirce came in there only when Luke needed to hit the exhaust port without the targeting computer.

The Force also allowed Luke to spar with the blast shield on. Personally, I believe it was the same as when Luke honed his newfound laser cannon skills. The force was with him. Don't Martial Arts masters "pray" in some sort of way, before battling?
"The Force" explains a lot, so long as you don't go pulling up the corners to reveal there's nothing there. Isn't that the way you prefer to look at religion? So I suppose I'm wrong there. Fine, we disagree.

I don't know where you're going with those last two paragraphs Despondent, but ok.

The Yoda thing was a joke. Since he's the greatest Jedi ever, he must certainly have the greatest piloting abilities also. Even if he's just spam in a can.

It's implied in SW that Jedis are great pilots. We never see any flight training, and later Leia aids in flying the Falcon so I see your point about everybody can be a pilot. (there's also: But who's going to fly it, kid? You?) If anything, Yoda shows Luke how to get his ox out the ditch.

[Helena]

Getting back to STAR WARS and the Force, imagine if there were folks actually coming back from the dead, AIDS patients walking out of clinics devoid of symptoms and the blind suddenly able to see, all as a result of the "laying on of hands" of Christian preachers. I think that's what Helena was getting at in her first post. We have stories of similar magic taking place in the ancient past, and we are asked to take them on faith. But what if you could actually see the proof of it, if it were a simple physical reality? Would Christianity be a Religion or would it be a branch of medicine? So too, if Force adepts are levitating tie fighters and flipping around like crazy with laser swords, can we really say that study of the Force is a "religion?" Add the stuff about the blood test, and she's really got a point there.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. If all these things actually happened in real life on a regular basis, we wouldn't regard them as religion; we'd just regard them as scientific reality. Just like, say, radio transmissions and photography, both of which seem like magic until you understand the scientific explanation.

It wasn't so bad before the Midichlorians thing. Up till then, it was just about possible to accept - if you don't think about it too hard - that the Force is unpredictable enough to prevent people from ever really understanding how it works, thus causing them to treat it as something quasi-religious. But in the Prequels, it appears that not only is there a simple explanation for Force-sensitivity but that it can be accurately measured and quantified, showing clearly that it has in fact been examined in a scientific manner. It's as if someone in real life described the study of blood types or the immune system as a 'religion'.

[Saberist]

Helena,

Something that's occurred to me a few times in the past: Why do Star Wars characters describe the Force as a 'religion'?

Admiral Motti also says 'sorcerors ways'. Now a Sorceror in the older definition of things is someone who 'talks the spirits' within all things (what an indian might call a shaman) to gain wisdom if not power. In early Christian believe a Sorceror /spoke to demons/ and since demons are a specifically Christian form of damned soul or evil being, they got to own the word Sorceror by decrying the basis of such a person's power. Two birds, one stone. Their power belongs in your ordered view of the universe. Their power (which you cannot immitate) is 'evil' and so therefore must be abandoned. For your ordered view of the universe.

Given he doesn't appear to understand the difference between 'magic' and religion himself, Motti is using the psychology of the fearful to attack someone he is uncomfortable with. Why?

Put another way, what is _Motti's_ religion? Is it technology? If technology doesn't perfectly interface (define or replicate) all that The Force can do, then suddenly Motti's 'religion' is incomplete as an understanding of things.

Ask a Catholic to define what a cult is. He may tell you it's fractional fragment of a purer religion. Like Baptist, Mormon, Protestant, Lutheran and Episcopalian.

We block off what we fear and then use poorly understood terminology to define why we block it off.

I mean, it demonstrably exists in their universe. It follows consistent, easily testable rules (the Prequels even tell us that it functions through some kind of micro-organisms in the blood!) As far as they're concerned it's scientific fact, not a religious belief. Sure, they may not understand exactly what it is or where it comes from, but that's true of a whole lot of things in real life (gravity, for example) and we don't regard them as articles of religious faith.

Ahhh yes, /faith/. That by which the refusal to expect much is 'a good thang'. Again, religions first attraction to the dispossed and disenfranchised levels of society lies in humility. Because humility needs nothing to be nothing. If we're all worthless, then we all have something in common which someone who is not does not own. Of course once you have the ear of the people as a mass, even those at a near starvation poverty level, you also have a voice by which to demand more 'as their representative'. And so begins selective elitism all over again.

Yet because you can only hold this role _so long as they remain humble_, you must never solve the problem of leveraging humility into power as a function of the shephard and the sheep. For even that level of 'proof' would essentially be one of mission-accomplished finality to your raison' detre.

Such is how the bureacracy of religion becomes wealthy beyond any need. While those in their care transition their sense of self to the fixtures of a Church as a displaced sense of real wealth and an internalized sense of 'humilty' as what makes them worthy of being worthless.

Real magic comes from coming together to solve a problem without /needing/ the ornamentation or regimentation of a structure or form of living that you instead choose individually in finding your own life when the need is finished.

Come to that, shouldn't a society as advanced as the Republic know everything there is to be known about the Force? You'd think that in 25,000 years, they'd have got a little further than "it's a mysterious energy field".

Not necessarily. Have you read _The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant_? Short Form: Leper in our life gets the Christian treatment of exile-within as a get thee behind me type revulsion of the strange. He then does the Connecticut Yankee schtick after rescuing a little girl from certain doom and biting on a razor bladed 'apple'.

He then ends up in a world where magic is a given such that even the common man can do (a potter repairs a shattered vessel by running his hands over it, Covenant then 'shatters' his daughter and he can't fix that) certain things as a function of strictly allocated roles and abilities (a writer's trick of speciation as old as time).

Yet what makes Covenant important is that, even as a rapist instead of a leper, he is also The White Gold Wielder. A person whose platinum ring gives him the ability to enhance or suppress the underlying 'magic' on whose basis the 'physics' of a science that we would call magic works.

Which is a simple enough analog to draw with a technical universe given that we know how gravity works (though we may or may not be able to synthesize it in some lab). But we haven't a clue why the particles and waves and constants 'align' as they do to create the exp​ression of it.

To take things even simpler: A young kid asks 'Why is the sky blue'? And instead of saying 'It just is.' you explain diffraction of light through an atmospheric fluid. And then the kid asks 'But why?' And you explain what photos are and the difference between particles and waves as a function of how mass comes together to form atoms vs. energy. And the kids says 'But why?' and /sooner or later/ you reach the end of your high school understanding of why as what a particular index of diffraction is _blue_. Or why light shatters but doesn't break. Or why your eyes developed to detect that color. Because you cannot describe what makes reality real.

Is the kid wiser in looking for a deeper understanding or are you just stupid in not being able to explain all the levels of the obvious one? In point of truth, the question is the answer.

With this as an operating hypothesis, The Force can be seen as a way of making the ways of things work or integrate differently to a 'just is' level of an altered reality. So that a Jedi can match -what- appears to be existing forces that ARE understood (anybody with a miniaturized repulsor lift 'projector' could theoretically levitate objects) but which are in fact the expressed form of an alteration to an underlying fabric of altered reality instead (R2 could not detect 'The Force' when Luke lifted him on Dagobah, even though presumably there are sensors for detecting changes in gravity fields).

Now, imagine that /wanting/ that 'just is' understanding of the macro to the supramacro reality, helps your mind form the path to getting there. Whether as proof or real need this mental template is what gives you the ability to 'do magic'. Because within your mind is the ability to find the link. And the asked question is the indication that your mind has itself begun to build it.

Yeah, I guess I'm just overthinking things again...

No, I would say that you are afraid to ask what _you_ want from the question as the answer and hence it seems trivial or silly because it's been a long time since you looked for an underlying reality.

If religion has a hook it is that it attempts to have a framed answer within an architecture called church. Spiritual Philosophy doesn't require it. It assumes that you know what the answer is internally, and thus it is understanding the question that is essential to breaking past the blockage to accepting it.

In this case, seeming 'humility' as a form of peer pressure and social training would have you defer the importance of your question as a shield to what others might judge you for having asked. Or perhaps as a protection to the inner identity which you wish to remain discretely your own. Yet still the question must be important to you or you would not have posted it.

So, dig deep, what is the real question you are asking?

Is it proof? Is it disproof? Is it magic? Is it religion? As soon as you frame a definition for what you want it to be, you may lose the childs directedness in demanding connection with the underlying reality of what just is. But in knowing what the reason for your question is by understanding the outline of the frame of that definition, you may be able to make a door instead of a wall to that connection anyway.

Instince or Intellect. The Path as a way of ways is still the same.


Saberist

This post has been edited by Saberist: 20 January 2008 - 06:33 PM

[Saberist]

But what about natural piloting ability? We (several of us, anyway) saw Obi-wan fly a fighter or a deep-space spacecraft in Eps 2 and/or 3. And as for the one with no prowness, If he's half as good a pilot as his father, he'll do fine.

After all, in Ep 3, Yoda flew an escape pod. Turns out they really accidentally dropped him off in the wrong galaxy. Didn't matter.

Piloting ability is a lot easier than most give credit for. A level of expectation really that you will no longer think 'rule driven' in 2D like a rat in a maze but in 3D with a quicker time interval between action and reaction but also a lot more open-skies space to maneuver in.

Particularly with AFLCS or Automated Flight Control Systems which are almost a prerequisite to flying at 'jet speeds' (note, we rarely see anything faster than 400-600mph in the SWU, even the original X-Wing fighter flight to the Death Star in ANH is shown as being a short hyperjump, as much as any acceleration to a rate able to circumnavigate a gas giant in only a few minutes...).

You point the nose and the spaceframe follows under automatic stabilization of counter forces. Largely because (in a real world) there would be no lift effect and minimal control force drag modifications to stable state vectors in space.

Point Being: If Luke knows he can/needs to go to a certain point A before the chance to go to point A happens then he can already be planning for that movement or at least initiating it more quickly. Than someone who has to wait for the opportunity to present itself. And that 'faster mind, faster hands, right the first time' sense is what differentiates piloting an aircraft from driving a car.

That said, the real problem is that if you are going to fire X projectiles at an object Y and expect them to make a radical 90` change of course, you cannot be using a 'rocket' but must rather have some expectation of guidance. As indeed the term 'torpedo' implies.

Is The Force pushing the Proton Torpedoes down some hole? Such requires that Luke to want to create an alteration to reality (as their flight path, after leaving the ship which he controls through the AFLCS) rather than a perception of one.

To me, that indicates that he is indeed 'special' in being able to fly -and- 'be magic'.

Or that using The Force to control the thought process equivalent in a guidance system is possible.

Because it's supposed to be dramatically clear from Red Leader's misses that either the torpedoes don't have what it takes to make the turn. Or that their guidance is making a mistake in commanding the terminal maneuver to go down the hole.

To use an anlogy: Is it Tiger or is it physics which makes golf 'fun again'? If Mr. Woods makes the physics happen by seeing things differently from you and me then that's one thing. If Mr. Woods _bends the rules_ so that physics become soft lawed to a shifted constant of his steadystate will, then that's entirely another.

The difference with Star Wars is that there is no amount of gravity which is going to make those PTs go down the hole without some alteration of existing trajectory behavior into a reformed potentative one.

And if Luke is just manually timing the point at which the PTs own guidance system manually locks on and snaps down, then he is simply seeing potential. Whereas if he is PUSHING or COMMANDING that sudden maneuver... Then it's 'magic' indeed.


Saberist.