One of my favorite Science Fiction Writers, Orson Scott Card who wrote Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, etc. has weighed in on religion as found in the Star Wars universe and found it wanting. The entire article can be found on beliefnet here. Here's an excerpt:
"The overt religion of Revenge of the Sith is a kind of democratic pantheism, but the real religion is for the privileged few, who get to decide what’s best for everybody else and then enforce their own rules, all in the name of “the Force.”
How did a nice Protestant boy like George Lucas come up with an official religion more rigidly hierarchical and doctrinally uniform than Catholicism?
It’s the religion of the people who are Chosen, and you aren’t ready to have a share of the power until we say you are. Quite the opposite of, say, the Quakers or even the Puritans, who eschewed permanent religious hierarchies.
Even the afterlife is reserved for the few, the proud, the Jedi. As we learned at the end of Return of the Jedi, even the most dark-side-serving of ex-Jedi mass murderers can, with a single “good” act like refusing to murder his own son (which even the most evil men generally avoid), earn the right to eternal life as the equal of true saints like Yoda and Obi-Wan.
But not one of the others who died in the war against the evil Sith emperor was similarly granted a life after death—or at least, if they were, they apparently weren’t allowed on camera at the end of Return of the Jedi. Maybe the non-Jedi had to stay in their own segregated section of rock-'n-roll heaven.
No! That’s not fair! The Jedi devote their whole life to the service of others!
But they’re not chosen on the basis of their virtue—for all we know, there are millions of people more virtuous and unselfish than they. And since they alone get to determine what “the good of others” actually consists of (though it does seem to include a lot of killing), how are the Jedi distinguishable from any number of other dictatorial groups that justify their actions by claiming that they do it all for the little guy?
So it might not be such a good thing if the Star Wars films become the first movies to lead to a real-world religion."
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