Revenge of the Mormon.

Ok, Orson Scott Card is one of my all time favorite authors and I absolutely love Enders Game, and Speaker for the Dead, but after re-reading his Jedi diatribe I have come to the conclusion that it is an absolute crock of shit. That it is nothing but an agenda driven piece putting Christianity in juxtaposition to the Jedi and using some kind of religion yard stick to show how the Jedi is a religion that has flaws, and is lacking in many areas. If that is not the pot calling the kettle black then we need to throw that cliché away and never use it again.

In the article he is critiquing the Jedi as a religion and berating it for its shortcomings. First of all Orson, the Jedi are fictional characters in a MOVIE. Secondly, it is a MOVIE!

I am not defending the movie, or its worth, or if the movie is good or not, but rather the fact that a movie that should be enjoyed, or not, based on if you like the movie, or not, is being used a yet another chest thumping, pulpit pounding means to an end.

While I agree that anyone in ‘real life’ that proclaims to be a Jedi has a screw loose, I at the same time don’t see it as being much more in left field than saying that there is a Sky Daddy looking down on us and trying to make things come out the best for us, but he is constantly being subverted by a fiendish fire dwelling creature that exists as nothing more than Sky Daddy’s foil, but then Sky Daddy’s son killed himself to save us all…the end.

Orson: “As a religion, the Force is just the sort of thing you’d expect a liberal-minded teenage kid to invent.”

Come now Orson, you should really try to hide your politics more subtlety and again we are dealing with a series of movies that were aimed at kids. We both can very easily agree that Lucas was not trying to create an airtight religion that would stand up to intense doctrinal scrutiny, but rather trying to make a movie that he thought people would be entertained by.

Orson: “It’s a terrible thing, I suppose, for a writer to invent a religion and then discover that he and all his friends are on the wrong side of it.”

You in all your creative power could not write something that would be different than your own perspective? Come on.

Orson: “Not as if the Jedi masters discussed ideas — it was still a business meeting, in which they told each other obvious things and then made decisions by a sort of instant consensus that is never achieved in the real world except in really scary dictatorships.”

Umm. It is NOT the real world Orson and the first side to lauch the 'hitler' charge is almost always wrong.

Orson: “Clearly they were modeled after an adolescent view of the Knights of the Round Table.”

You must really despise Lucas. You have knocked his ideas as childish twice already. He must be crying all the way to the bank.

Orson: “And even though they train like crazy to learn to master their power, none of their discussions as a council are devoted to considering what is right and wrong. They simply know the rules and, except for those being tempted by the Dark Side, they never question them.”

Do you often come to conclusions that are based outside of your Christian beliefs? Have you recently decided that your Christian rule book is wrong in par,t or whole? How you look past your beliefs in which you are bound into the same type of closed ended system and lash out at another system of belief that was MADE UP FOR A MOVIE is simply dumb founding.

Orson: “So instead of looking at the storyline of Episode III as a conflict between good and evil, you could read it as a conflict between the entrenched aristocracy trying to preserve their monopoly on power, and an ambitious upstart, who is determined to break that monopoly and take control for himself.”

You could as well overlay that with what the Christian church has done for thousands of years. Crush any thought that contradicted or subverted the authority of the Church. Again here the irony of someone so deeply entrenched in a religion that does this very thing is cosmic.

Orson: “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.”

First of all this is a Vast over simplification or what actually occurred. Do you not believe in redemption?

I love your books Orson, but this article falls flat, and is an obvious piece of opportunistic mudslinging.

P.S.

As even further evidence that Orson is grinding some kind of personal, religious, agenda axe here I give you his diatribe on Attack of the Clones.

These are the only two movies that he has written about on a religious web site