No doubt the biggest point of contention against Jediism would be critics wanting to dismiss it because of the connection to STAR WARS. Star Wars is a fictional universe, so it’s hard for many people to imagine how something as serious as religion could entertain obvious fiction. This prejudice is often based on a misperception that we’d like to clear up right now.

Enūma Eliš is the Babylonian creation myth. It was recovered by English archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in 1849 in the ruined Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh.

EVERYONE USES FICTION

Consider the band-aid ripped. The Christian and Jewish Bibles both use previously told myths and legends to establish credibility and fuel inspiration to drive change. The sole difference between this and Star Wars is only that people don’t know the bible uses fictional stories. If you haven’t read the Babylonian Creation Myth or the Epic of Gilgamesh’s Flood story, you may not be aware that the bible is based on works of fiction.

This fact is obscured by a dishonest gap between the members of a religion and those who study and teach it. There is a lot of religious scholarship that is never revealed or translated to the pews. And the reason is they believe they are protecting the members from information that could very likely cause the person to stumble in their faith. The truth can be jarring. Yet there is also a deeper mystery hidden between the pages of time where the struggle between Good and Evil is simply an identity shift in which the victors are the ones telling the story.

The authors tell their story using a megaphone called “third person omniscient”. This allows the writers to become the gods of the story, judging the people and cultures within. By virtue of being the gods, the writers can convince the audience that they are right. When questioned, most people believe the God of the bible is infallible and even if he killed babies, that’s okay, because he is God and therefore it must have been necessary. This is one of the fundamental assumptions that makes bible believers tolerate what they otherwise wouldn’t. If a regular person said they were going to kill all of the firstborn they would be judged as evil. But the bible exists in a paradox where God is Good and the Devil is Devil. Once we first establish that God is “our God”, thus establishing ownership and relationship, we can then parade about like what we have decided to do is God’s will. And if the writer says it is then well it must be true because that’s now what history says; or at least a version of history we want to believe and accept, because if it is true then we will be rewarded.

This may be hard to hear for Western religions that take everything in their holy books as literal truth. However, this literal understanding is often assumed on the behalf of the writer. Knowing the intentions of the writing depends on knowing the intentions of the writer. To do this honestly, one must know who they are or the location in time and space that serves as the context and motivation for their writing. Were they at peace? At war? Did they need a god of peace or a “God of War”? There is a reason why the needs of the people, expressed by the writer, become the very thing that the story provides. That’s because the story is a vehicle for the writer to encode a Message that he believes his people need to hear.

Myths and gods are teaching tools. The story is the canvas. Every story is a parable; a lesson. The lesson exists whether you believe the story or not because the story is just the vehicle. Did Jacob have 12 sons because it was God’s will and 12 was simply a coincidence? Or was this aspect of the story meant to echo and resonate with the 12 houses in astrology, the 12 months in a year. Did their miracle-working messiah choose 12 disciples on purpose for the same reason or because he meant for them to rule over the 12 houses of Yisra’el? Does it matter?

Layers of stories can be peeled back to reveal mysteries and ideas that may have needed to hide behind other ideas to escape persecution. There are similarities between Yeshua (Jesus) and other mythological characters. But why? Scholars debate whether or not Moses even existed or if perhaps he existed as an amalgamation of different people. Writers have artistic license when they’re not historians. So one needs to know what the purpose is. And the purpose is the Message.

When the story was about Moses the writer concocted miracles because, as a human, he knew that humans would be impressed and superstitious humans would consider any sort of magic as godlike and therefore evidence that a person was sent by God (or the gods) and therefore, who was any mere mortal not to listen? Humans are so much in waiting of theocratic instruction that people naturally ignore the parts of the story that didn’t fit or that made God seem too human; too corrupt.

Religion offers theocratic instruction like a drug. To be under the influence means that you ignore things. Moses orders the deaths of anyone who doesn’t believe him. That’s genocide, but under the rules of biblical morality where morality is dictated by a character to kill babies, this aspect of the authoritarian theocratic dictatorship is ignored as the audience rushes in to take the side of Moses against everyone else because of course it’s their fault and Moses is just doing what God told him to (except that one time when he hit the rock instead of talking to it).

This same drug causes us to ignore other issues; like the fact they weren’t always monotheistic or the fact that Job and Isaiah both mention Leviathan. That serpent or dragon must have been hard to let go when they were Canaanites telling stories of Ba’al’s victory over the seven-headed sea monster named Lotan (sounds close to Satan) which is the Ugaritic equivalent of the Hebrew word Leviathan. In the Babylonian creation myth, the name was Tiamat. The sea monster Tiamat, the goddess of creation, was killed by her son, Marduk, a storm god. Of course, Marduk is Iskur to the Sumerians and Hadda. From the Levant, Hadad was introduced by the Amorites as the Akkadian god Adad.

The symbol of this god is the thunderbolt, bull, and lion. The thunderbolt should bring us to the Roman Jupiter and the Greek Zeus and, of course, mount Olympus. These connections are rarely made outside of scholarship because the writer of Moses created a legal prohibition against learning about other gods. So even though YHWH, the Hebrew God of Moses, the OT, and therefore Christianity, is a myth, most people simply do not know because they don’t know about the other cultures and their religions that YHWH was built from.

Taking it further, Hadad had another name: Ba’al Zephon and is identified with the Kemetic god Horus. This gets us into the Hyksos and explains part of the story of the Exodus. But another part is the mountain. Just as a myth was told about a flood, there was also a myth told about a mountain on account of a massive volcanic eruption. The numerous associations between many regional gods, collapsing into one, culminating in the fact that the storm god is also a mountain god. The significance is that when you have a volcanic eruption what you have is a pillar of fire by night and a (ash) cloud by day. One, is visible in daylight; the other in darkness. The 10 plagues connect to the volcanic event as does thunder and lightning. The mountains were high places that most humans feared to go up and so it became the home of the gods; heaven… Val Halla. One might say it sounds like a volcano but is there one in recorded history that fits the description? And the answer is yes. Thera. Santorini. This volcanic eruption was so massive that they would have seen it all the way in Egypt. So multiple points of connection between the bible and real events sparked the creation of myths as well as the fact that mythological gods were passed around like trading cards from civilization to civilization. Which god was superior? Whoever won.

Jediism simply isn’t based on ancient myths and legends. It isn’t based on the veneration of some particular ancestor of holy human bloodline justifying precursors to racism and ethnic cleansing. Jediism doesn’t have to defend myths and legends because we never go through the trauma of discovering that the stories we believed as children weren’t real. Nor does Jediism have to maintain fiction as a lie that people believe to be true because we all know that Star Wars is a fictional story.

So what is remarkable is that what seems to be a problem is actually the solution. Jediism is free of fables masquerading as real accounts of history. Therefore, Jediism doesn’t ask anyone to believe in humans who can perform magic or miracles or try to sort them based on the politics of imagined deities. Jediism doesn’t create fictional worlds in which to torture the minds of those who fear death, insisting that if they were to die right now they would be damned to eternal fire and torment. These things are not subtle and not without psychological consequences. Therefore, Jedi do not commit acts of terror or hate in the name of Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker. What’s important for us is not whether the myths and legends are true but whether the lessons behind those stories are true. And these lessons resonate because of the fiction, not in spite of it.