Sith, Jedi, Heresy...Confusion

The excrement squeezed out by George Lucas over the past six years has been gnawing on me all that time. Actually, the special edition versions of the original trilogy had already broken the seal of quality on Lucas's masterpieces, and, long before those obscenities were released, Lucas did, after all, give us the Ewoks.

Has it really been since 1980 that the series could be swallowed by anyone with taste? That's depressing - I wasn't even alive.

But anyway, let's take this whole Sith/Jedi business and examine its bases. I take it that, despite Obi Wan's clusmy anti-Bush (Bush was a Nazi a long time ago, even in far away galaxies, don't you know!) claim that only Sith deal in absolutes (that absolute claim being excepted, I guess), the Jedi seem to require absolute fealty to their principles, and will label anyone who is not a Jedi, but who partakes in the Force, a Sith. So, a well-meaning rebel who doesn't accept the restrictive code of the self-important Jedi is a Sith.

All right.

So, the Force is a natural essence that unites all living things into a biotic whole. Except, well, there are many aspects to this Force, one such being the "Dark Side of the Force." But since the Force is what unites all life, and life is apparently a Good Thing, then the Dark Side is a necessary aspect of the Force - it wouldn't be the Force without it, and without the Dark Side, life would not exist. The Dark Side isn't properly evil, because the Force simply is, irrespective of the uses to which it is put. There is no Good Side or Bad Side, but sides that reflect different aspects of life. The Dark Side contains such things as fear, anger, hate, selfishness, and so on. But surely, if life were not driven by a desire for self-preservation, and fear of what will harm life, and anger at injustice, &c., then life would cease to be. The Dark Side contains things just as vital to life as any other part of the Force; so let's not take "Dark" to mean "evil," because that would be calling the Force itself evil.

And that, even a Jedi can admit, is naughty.

So, the Sith, as I said, are those who do not restrict themselves to the Jedi code. They may not be evil - all that makes them Sith is that they are not Jedi. But they clearly accept more of the Force, that all-powerful thing that the Jedi apparently revere...so, the Sith, then, have a more complete, open-minded, tolerant view of the Force than the narrow-minded, dogmatic Jedi.

The Sith are heretics from the dogmatists of the Jedi Order. So much worse for the Jedi, I say. Did Lucas intend to portray his heroes as such ignorant religious zealots? Or is his storytelling just getting that bad?