Point One: Sorry, I Don’t Trust ‘Em
I don’t serve the Force. As far as I’m concerned, none of the pantheons have a deity that can be fully trusted. There’s always something in it for them. Even the God of Abraham (a deity I have decided to serve on my own terms) has some shady incidents. Meddling, that’s all they ever seem to do. Where the Norse seem to have less to do with humans, it is perhaps here and in the Native American traditions that we find the better understanding of how I see a Jedi’s relationship to “the Force”. Which takes us to-
Point Two: The Force Is My Ally
For respectable priests/priestess of any belief system, you’ll find that instead of merely following the flow of what their deity asks, they ask the deity to do things for them. They say “hey, I’m going to do this, but it would be nice to have your support.” A mystic class (which is what I’ll refer to it as) recognize that what happens here on earth affects divinity, and that the divine can be a powerful tool to aide them. As long as concerns them, it’s generally taken that they will step in and assist on your terms. At the very least, it gives them something to do. Whether you consider “the Force” to be divine in nature, or just pure energy (like me), it’s a tool available to you anywhere you are.
Point Three: Sorry Not Serving You
So this is what it comes down to- I don’t believe I should be guided by something that is so removed from what really matters in the world around us, and only serves their own interests, should guide me. So what IS a good guide?
Point Four: See that code over there? It’s called the Jedi Code.
The Jedi Code I use (written at the front of this book) is an ethical model for me to rely on if I ever feel like I cannot make a difficult decision. It is something that I can rely on, where I cannot rely on the judgement of something I, as a human, cannot fully trust. While it gives you an idea of what my whole life is about, it also provides me (the Jedi) direction for me when I lack it. The code itself is the only thing that I can trust, because it was built with the greatest intent of building a stronger community through values which were thought up by the logic of many from my own era. Things I can get behind, and I hope that future Jedi will also be able to get behind. The Divine didn’t write it, people that are in the real world and have to live with humanity did. I mean take-
Point Five: If You’re Not Part of It, Officially, How Can You Possibly Make An Informed Decision?
Let me clarify what this means. If you are actively in a (legal) investigation, we're you have all the available resources at your disposal, then you absolutely can take a detached stance and judge a situation. Of course, how you respond is completely dependent upon the laws set up for you to respond with. Being in a legal situation requires you to have a very specific format of understanding of the laws for your culture. Which is to say that if you are a lawyer in the United States, you can preside over US affairs, but not over Iraqi affairs (barring very special circumstances). The two cultures are vastly different. So let’s take these two particular cultures and consider- would you want Iraq legislation being imposed on America? Or vice-versa? I would hope that the answer is no. I would also hope that the reasoning behind it is because you as an individual would recognize that the cultures are so different from one another, that by having one impose their legislation over the other, it misses the entirety of the culture’s moral values and imposes the values of yourself on them.
This ties in perfectly, because the divine can be seen in much of the same fashion. They are so far removed from the world, that they may or may not truly know what is actually good for us (let alone the argument that it could just be purely a figment of our imaginations created by old societies that don't even understand the problems we undergo in this day and age) Kind of like another person’s parent disciplining your own over something you don’t see as all that important just seems like a bad idea to you. The Code, however, was written to take into account a specific purpose: building morals and values in an individual to bring the world to greater harmony through the use of Human Action, rather than Divine Action. To us, it the sentience factor which makes our decisions so much more valuable to the human journey. Why else would some of the most valued philosophers and theologies preach free will? Or more importantly, why else would we as human beings value free will if we wanted everything to be left up to a divine being “taking the wheel”?
Just some things to consider next time you want to accept the word of a spirit guide.