Life, The Force, and Everything…

A misplaced word today lead me to a long Sametime discussion about religion with The Stormtrooper Cookie Jar. As I was lamenting this fact to we started to discuss religion and then, as things usually do, the topic drifted to Star Wars.

Somewhere during the middle of all this I was thinking about Anakin’s descent into darkness, and it started to draw some very interesting thoughts when looked at from a religious perspective.

One of the biggest things that Nelson and I came up with during our conversation was that the path to The Dark Side seemed to be landscaped with fairly obvious trappings of relativism. This begins to be apparent when we look at what happens with Count Dooku. Obi-Wan and The Emperor are essentially playing the angel and the devil on Anakin’s shoulders, and with Obi-Wan incapacitated Anakin is very easily swayed to do the wrong thing. If he had stayed true to the teachings of the Jedi as his first instincts told him to, he may have been able to change his fate.

It’s OK for him to kill Dooku because “he is dangerous”, however a bit later in the movie he refuses to help Windu when he was faced with the same decision from a different perspective. Anakin should’ve kept in line with the Jedi teachings to eliminate the threat of the Sith and aid Windu instead of turning on him… obviously what was OK for him wasn’t OK for Windu.

The Emperor also builds on this in order to further cement Anakin in the Dark Side and the misguided bastard falls for it hook line and sinker. In the end he actually believes that he can follow the Emperor’s path and have the strength to not turn out like him. He thinks that he can embrace the unholy power of the Dark Side and be satisfied to let it all go once he figures out how to save Amidala.

In the end, Yoda’s words from Episode I ring true… “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” Anakin’s fear of losing Padme leads to his hate of Obi-Wan and the Jedi, and we all know how that turns out in the end. I wonder if that’s why they don’t let priests get married… they don’t want them running around turning each other into crispy quadriplegics.