I know, right? "What's Luke doing now?" "He just achieved enlightenment and ascended to a higher form of existence." "Man, what a loser."

I think this point is an important one. The action of using a lightsaber, as a Sith or as a Jedi, is also a good form of training for your Force powers. As a Sith, hand-to-hand combat is the perfect way to focus your aggression so that you can harness that passion to use the Dark Side. As a Jedi, defending yourself with the lightsaber - especially against attacks you couldn't normally anticipate - requires that you really focus, calm yourself, listen to your feelings, and place absolute trust in the Force to guide you. In each case this is valuable both in general training/meditation and for achieving the correct mindset in battle. A blaster doesn't achieve the same effect.

This is more or less what I thought. Here's the problem. The first part suggests that a hypothetical person who argues that (for example) hate is evil has his or her argument disqualified, not because of the content or merits of the argument itself but because of your assessment of the arguer and his or her life experiences. This attacks the arguer rather than the argument. The second part indicates your suspicion that the other person in your debate is "guilty" of the "ignorance" represented by the coddled millenial etc., which is at best a veiled form of accusation. For a parallel example, saying "I suspect you are an idiot" is not very different from simply saying "you are an idiot." Now, there was much more to your rebuttal than just this ad hominem argument, and for my own part I am sorry for the tone of my initial post in this thread, which was not at all constructive. I should have joined the discussion properly and assumed good faith on everyone's part, which I did not. So for what it's worth I apologise to you (and everyone else here) for my earlier attitude. Now, where were we? Dark space wizards?

Okay; would you like to explain what you did mean by that passage in your post?

Oh, this is interesting. It's always nice to see someone looking into the philosophy behind these things. I wonder if we can - Never mind. Zero to ad hominem in two posts.

For some it might also just be old loyalty. Alderaan seems to be a place where allegiance and honour frequently matter more than common sense. There could be houses that swore to follow Thul before their exile, and consider themselves bound to do so again now that they're back. I could be wrong, but as I recall House Rist are aligned with House Ulgo, and are opposed to both Republic and Empire.

There is something to this, but it's kind of tricky. A fatal disease is an "evil" in the broad philosophical sense - a natural evil, in this case, as opposed to a moral evil. The act of providing a cure to the disease is a good act - a morally good act. The opposite to the natural evil of the disease is not the moral good of curing it, it's the natural good of being in good health. The opposite to the moral good of curing the disease is the moral evil of wilfully spreading it. The nature of the Dark Side is ambiguous; it may be classifiable as a natural evil. Like other natural evils - diseases, earthquakes, hurricanes - it may be impossible to get rid of entirely. However, to wilfully perpetuate the Dark Side (as the Sith do) is morally evil, and to combat the Dark Side's influence is morally good. People falling from the "Light" to the Dark Side are arguably in the grey areas here; extreme duress is usually involved, diminishing their responsibility. However, there seems to be a tipping point where a person commits an act of great and obvious moral evil, fully embracing the Dark Side in the process. You can argue that without evils to combat, there would be no acts of good. Maybe so. However, we don't need moral evil for that. Natural evils will keep us busy enough. If (extremely unlikely) we ever run out of natural evils to struggle against, we will by then have transcended to a state of perfect existence, at which point by definition there is nothing to complain about. The natural order of the physical world and the natural order of the spiritual world are two different things. In the physical world we are finite beings and thus will always encounter natural evils, which must be overcome or we will die. In the spiritual world of the Force, there is immortality. Depends on what you understand "Dark" and "Light" to mean. If I am naming things in the cosmology of a setting I created, I can make "light" a synonym for "good" and "dark" a synonym for "evil" if I so choose. I could also do the opposite. A Jedi simply accepting that death is inevitable is neither defeatist nor fatalistic. It's not defeatist because death isn't a defeat - not when you have empirical evidence for an afterlife. And it's not fatalistic because it doesn't say you shouldn't fight to stay alive right now - it just accepts the objective reality that one day you will die. Gonna suddenly sound pretty great after they hear the Sith pitch.

Yet it's the advocates of the Dark Side in Star Wars who fear death and seek eternal life. The Jedi teach acceptance of one's eventual death as a natural transition. Hence underlining the point: the Dark Side represents the desire to subvert the natural balance of the cosmos.

Could you elaborate on this? Specifically on what elements of "Western morality/religion/dogma" are mixed up with the Jedi and their teachings, and/or on how Lucas "failed" in this?

Your body requires a balance of water and salt to function properly. If you consume equal weights of salt and water every day, you will probably die. Hence, you take an appropriate amount of each to balance the other. The literal definition you've given here is so narrow that it doesn't even seem applicable to the Force (can the Force ever be said to be "upright"?) That depends how you define the "Light Side" and Dark Side. It also involves a normative judgement on the value of "progress" that seems to contradict your claim about supporting differences of opinion. That's still about an appropriate amount of pruning to an appropriate amount of leaving the garden be, not equal amounts. Maybe the garden needs very little care. Maybe it needs a lot. If you just say "I'll spend 50% of my time pruning like crazy and do nothing the other 50% of the time," or cut down half the plants at random and leave the other half untouched, just so that both approaches can be "equal", I suspect it probably won't work out. You also seem to assume that the garden's (Force's, galaxy's) utility "for me", as an "asset", is of greatest importance. The garden's uncontrolled growth may have its own intrinsic value. I may have no right or obligation to impose my own purpose or structure on it. So, Lucas was somehow right about this when he made those films, but simultaneously wrong about the fundamental nature of the balance and the Dark Side itself? And even though there are "thousands of unique perspectives" on the Force, you're singling out the perspectives of Lucas and the Jedi as inherently stupid and wrong? I didn't say picking and choosing. I said "appropriate amounts". Given the original view of the Dark Side, i.e. that it is the imbalance and is a corruption in the Force, an appropriate amount is "zero". Given the view more popular in the expanded universe, that the Dark Side represents some vague constellation of emotions and concepts within the Force related to passion and ambition, the appropriate amount overall may be "a bit", but not when it comes to a Force-sensitive individual forming a healthy relationship with the Force.

There is a difference in that in the real world, people take the afterlife on faith. In Star Wars, someone can actually come back from the better place to tell you how swell it is. I think all that training with the Force and lightsabers essentially is training in self-discipline and to deal with emotions. If you need to lift a rock with the Force, you can either invest more of your passion in the attempt (Dark Side, imposing your will on the Force) or clear your head, centre yourself, and become a vessel for the Force to flow through you (Light Side, a balanced relationship of give and take). When you see Jedi sitting around meditating and moving rocks around, they're effectively training their mental discipline. It's the same with the lightsaber. Jedi and Sith could use blasters if they wanted, but they choose a weapon that makes you depend on the Force. So lightsaber sparring is a way to deepen your connection to the Force, either by channelling your passions for strength and speed, or by opening yourself to the Force and letting it guide your movements. If you're in a formal teacher/student relationship, as the Consular is with Nadia, you might let that stop you.

Bigotry doesn't make sense in the real world, why would it make sense in fiction? For reasons of their own, they consider Sith "purebloods" to be a kind of human.

How many fall, though? I mean, we hear a lot about the ones who do because each one makes for an entire story right there. Star Wars stories often focus on wars lasting decades, but between those wars there are thousands of years of peace. The Jedi we see are a very small number of the total who have ever existed. Their teachings seem to work just fine for the vast majority. What makes you say that? Obi-Wan outright says that he loved Anakin as his brother, and he clearly feels anger and pain over Anakin's betrayal - but he doesn't fall. Who says there's no actual training in how to achieve that self-control? I'd say that's what all the meditation and even most of the lightsaber practice is about. In Anakin's case, the Jedi Council specifically said that there was too much fear in him already, and that he shouldn't be trained. Is it really a failing of their teachings and methods if they were right all along?

I don't think love in itself is the problem. It's the other feelings that can result from such an attachment - the fear, pain and anger when something bad happens to a loved one. With emotional maturity, perspective and discipline, those feelings can be managed. However, it's a big risk to take - because if those same emotions get the better of you, things can get much worse for a Force user than for anyone else. The Jedi may warn against attachments, but they're much more accepting of love than the Sith are, for example. To the Sith, love is a weakness to be purged, as Malgus did.

Wild theory: it's really Satele, but it's not really Marr.