While browsing through the news today, I came across this article entitled “U.K. Job Office Apologizes for Anti-Jedi Discrimination.” Now being a Star Wars fan I, naturally, clicked this article and began to read it. Basically, a man dressed as a Jedi was thrown out of the job center, because he refused to remove his hood. You can read the full article here:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/17/uk-job-office-apologizes-anti-jedi-discrimination/
This is not even the craziest part of the article. The craziest part is that there is an actual link to the International Church of Jediism! Before you scoff at the notion of a church revolving its beliefs around a fictitious movie, I’d like to point out what exactly they believe. On their website (link to website is at the bottom of this blog), they have a link to their doctrine. This is what they would like to promote:
1.) “There is one all powerful force that binds the universe together.”
2.) “There are 2 sides to the force, the dark side and the light side.”
3.) “Good and evil are only axioms of the all powerful and unifying force. The force contains all that is good and all that is bad.”
In retrospect, one must ask how this is any different than any other religion. Many believe in an “all powerful force” that is some kind of deity. Many, if not everyone, believe in the powers of good & evil, and many religions have their views on where good & evil came from. Jediism seems very in tune with many religious beliefs. However, I think that Jediism does more harm for Christianity, and organized religion in general, than it does good.
The members of the Jedi Church know that their belief system stems from a fictitious movie. They will whole-heartedly admit this truth! However, they say their concepts and ideals are “innate truths”, things that their followers have always known to be true. They would say that Star Wars gave them the names and terminology to explain something they’ve known to be true, but did not know how to express it. This is how the Jedi Church explains it:
“The sun existed before it was given a name, and it could be revered as God, however, when the sun finally had a human name, it could be written about and communicated with others. The Jedi religion is like the Sun, it existed before a popular movie gave it a name, and now that it has a name, people all over the world can share their experiences of the Jedi religion, here in the Jedi Church.”
It is true that the sun existed before it was given an official name. Unlike the sun, there was a name for the “one all powerful force that binds the universe together” and that force is named Yahweh. The concept of God is nothing new. Documents have shown that over a span of thousands of years, many intelligent people have postulated the existence of God. Followers of Jediism have always had a name for their “all powerful force.” Their problem was that they did not want to believe in it. They wanted to believe in something different.
Another point that the Jedi Church makes about religion in general is that religious texts are “merely words on paper, with no ability to confirm [their] authenticity.” They also say that, “many religions claim to speak the word of God, but the truth is they are only the written words of prophets or followers of the religion. There is no way to prove or deny that was written was the word of God.”
Their claim that there is no way to prove or deny any religious text is the written word of God is true. A Christian cannot prove with absolute certainty that the Bible is the written word of God. Neither can a Muslim or anyone of a belief system that claims their religious texts are the written word of God. But why do we have to be absolutely certain? The fact is we cannot prove with absolutely certainty that the Bible is the Word of God, but we can prove without a shadow of doubt that it is the Word of God. For example, we have Old Testament and New Testament texts that are hundreds of years a part in terms of when they were written and they are 95% the same. The 5% of errors are mostly minor grammar mishaps, such as punctuation and spelling errors. What does this prove? What this proves is that over hundreds of years, these texts have been translated extremely accurately and that the theme of the message is still the same despite the difference in age. There are also a number of archaeological and historical evidence to support the truth of the Bible (i.e. “House of David” Inscription, Jehoiachin’s Ration Tablets, Ossuaries, Dead Sea Scrolls, Masoretic Texts, the Gnostic Gospels, etc.). We also have philosophical arguments to support the belief in God (i.e. The Kalam Cosmological Argument, The Ontological Argument, The Moral Argument, etc.). We even have science to help support the existence of God (i.e. Irreducibly Complex Machines, the Cosmic Constants, etc.). I say all this to say that though we may not be able to confirm with absolute certainty that the Bible is the authentic Word of God, we can, however, prove without a shadow of doubt that this is the Word of God, because we have plenty of evidence to support our belief.
To conclude, the concepts and beliefs the Jedi Church are activists for are nothing new. These things have been around for centuries. The Jedi Church wants to embrace these concepts and beliefs in a different way, but they have no evidence to support their belief system. They even know that what they believe is false and that their ideas originated from a science-fiction movie! The Jedi Church makes Christianity, and organized religion in general, look like a joke and that religion is nothing more than ideas surrounded by myth, superstition, and fantasy. It will be a sad day when anything can be a religion, even if it has absolutely nothing to support the claims, and with the rise of the Jedi Church, that day may not be too far away.
To read more about the Jedi Church, click the following link: http://www.jedichurch.org/
Living In Grey 
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