{"id":440,"date":"2005-05-18T03:05:00","date_gmt":"2005-05-18T03:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=440"},"modified":"2005-05-18T03:05:00","modified_gmt":"2005-05-18T03:05:00","slug":"440","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=440","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

“Luminous beings are we”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Said Yoda. Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News<\/em> “>points out<\/a> that half of all Americans grew up with the phrase “May the Force be with you,” all part of the “quasi-religious mishmash” that is the Star War<\/em> series. (Registration required; get a password from Bug Me Not<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Did George Lucas tap into audience’s desire for a new religion? In 1999 he told interviewer Bill Moyers that he wanted “to try to awaken a certain kind of spirituality in young people.”<\/p>\n

Weiss writes, “Two of the basic story themes for Western culture are redemption through sacrifice and redemption through violence, said Tyron Inbody, a theology professor at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.<\/p>\n

“Star Wars uses both of those ideas, and adds Eastern motifs about attachment and emotion pulled from Buddhism and Taoism, said Dr. Inbody, who has studied religion in films.”<\/p>\n

What strikes me as “Pagan” about the Force (which could equally well be claimed by other traditions) is its impersonality. Gary Snyder<\/a> once quoted a Northwest tribal saying, “The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife.”<\/p>\n

(Yoda: “As sharp as the edge of a knife the world is.”)<\/p>\n

In a polytheistic system, you may have a relationship with one or more deities and ignore (and be ignored by) others. There is not the problem of how the all-loving creator who supposedly numbers the hairs on your head lets bad things happen to you.<\/p>\n

But now I have invoked Gods and an impersonal Force as well. Which is it? I think it likely, as did some of the ancients, that the Gods too are somehow subject to Fate, or Wyrd or the Force, but in a way that is outside our normal scale of imagining.<\/p>\n

(Thanks to Get Religion<\/a> for the original link.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Luminous beings are we” Said Yoda. Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6xQTg-440","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":955,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=955","url_meta":{"origin":440,"position":0},"title":"An Immigrant’s Story","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 19, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"So here I am at the final joint annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature. The book show is always one of the best parts. It is of the size that is usually measured in \"football fields.\" Naturally books relating to Christianity dominate,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3479,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3479","url_meta":{"origin":440,"position":1},"title":"On Becoming a Killer of Zombies","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 11, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"At the Pop Theology blog, another attempt to figure out the zombie craze, via review of a new collection of essays, Triumph of the Walking Dead. It is based on the AMC series, but goes far beyond it. From a pop theology perspective, the most interesting essays cover morality, meaning(lessness),\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"scholarship\"","block_context":{"text":"scholarship","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=scholarship"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":719,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=719","url_meta":{"origin":440,"position":2},"title":"Wiccan soldier’s plaque to show pentagram","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 14, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"The memorial plaque for Sgt. Patrick Stewart, who died in Afghanistan, will display a Wiccan pentagram.[Nevada] state officials said they had received a legal opinion from the Nevada attorney general's office that concluded federal officials have no authority over state veterans' cemeteries. They now plan to have a contractor construct\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":626,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=626","url_meta":{"origin":440,"position":3},"title":"No marker for Wiccan veteranA\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 3, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"No marker for Wiccan veteranA Wiccan sergeant from the Nevada National Guard was killed in action in Afghanistan. Now his widow runs up against the Veterans Administration's refusal to permit a pentacle marker on the graves of Wiccan veterans, notes the Las Vegas Review-Journal (Link may expire, so I will\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":495,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=495","url_meta":{"origin":440,"position":4},"title":"The Fairy Faith in Nova Scotia","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 22, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries is one of the background books to the Pagan revival, sort of like Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill. Graham Harvey and I included some of the Kipling in The Paganism Reader; perhaps we should have included Evans-Wentz too, although I admit to always\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"fairies\"","block_context":{"text":"fairies","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=fairies"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8982,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8982","url_meta":{"origin":440,"position":5},"title":"Aphrodite Will Not Be Denied (3) \u2014\u00a0and also Hestia.","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 3, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"In a 2003 post titled \"Aphrodite Will Not Be Denied,\" I linked to Muslim clerics' criticism of Lebanese pop star Haifa Wehbe. Another Muslim singer with more complicated ancestry, Deeyah, \"irked the Muslim world\" with her music videos, and I said, \"As I once wrote, 'Aphrodite will not be denied.'\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Aphrodite\"","block_context":{"text":"Aphrodite","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=aphrodite"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}