Astronomers Discover Tatooine

What does this look like?

If you are a Star Wars fan it looks like Tatooine, a planet with two suns. But this is real. It's Kepler 16b, discovered by a NASA team using the Kepler space telescope.

Whining About Cartoon Torture

Not content to whine about the well-justified torture of terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, some are now upset about the fictional cartoon torture of fictional alien beings. Seriously. There is actually an article called, "Should your kids be watching cartoon torture?" Consider these amusing quotations from the piece. The author is worried about the Star Wars Clone Wars show.

I have not yet observed much in the way of debate or discussion about the show’s recent use of a ticking time bomb scenario like you see routinely on the Fox series, and whether it’s sending the wrong message to kids.

Why would there be much debate or discussion? And it isn't sending any message. It's fictional entertainment. Most people aren't obsessing over the implications of Star Wars television plots. 

The only being in the galaxy who knows how to stop the worms is an accused war criminal, Poggle, who led his planet Geonosis against the Republic and is now in the Jedi’s custody. Poggle refuses to talk, so Skywalker uses his Jedi powers to choke him. A Jedi mind trick to Skywalker, torture to you and me, and it works – Poggle confesses that if they can freeze the ship, the worms will be stopped.

Ok, so what, you might ask?

The message to kids watching the show, at least to me, is that torture works.

Well, considering that torture can and does sometimes work, that's about as much of a message as demonstrating that the right key opens a locked door. Oh yeah, and did I mention that it's fiction? 

Let's see, what other "messages" might the Clone Wars show be sending? I've noticed that it sends a message that a Jedi with a lightsaber, even a teenager, can wade through a battlefield, fight off hundreds of battle droids, and emerge unscathed -- no matter how much energy weapon fire is targeted at him or her. 

And what about the message that it's ok to slaughter droids in large numbers? These battledroids can communicate, seem to have rudimentary emotions, and show signs of at least limited sentience. Promoting and glorifying their destruction at the hands of Jedi and their allies seems like anti-droidism. Could the show be a form of hate speech directed at droids? Maybe someone should look into it.

And of course the author, apparently a typical leftist,  has a recommendation for what to do if the Clone Wars series fails to conform to his idea of the correct ideological depiction of torture. You guessed it. He wants to invoke the heavy hand of big government.

I hope that the show’s writers and producers, and the people at the Cartoon Network, will more carefully review what they screen to the kids who watch the show. If they don’t, the FCC really needs to raise the question of whether or not the show deserves a rating beyond the TV-PG it gets now.

Hopefully the writers will see this article and add in more torture scenes, just to make this idiot squirm and whine further.

Is the Jedi Religion Atheist?

There are 390,000 people in England & Wales who claim to be followers of the Jedi religion, and another 14,000 in Scotland.  But Britain's Office of National statistics groups them as atheists. Should believers in the Jedi religion, whether fictional, or real life individuals who claim to believe, be classed as atheists?

If you ask Jedi believer if he believes in God, what is his answer? It would probably be: "I believe in the force," or possibly, "no, but I believe in the force." If he says no, then it would seem he is an atheist. But what is the force? Here is the definition from Wookiepedia,

The Force was a metaphysical, binding, and ubiquitous power that held great importance for the Jedi and Sith monastic orders. 

Described by Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi as "an energy field created by all living things," some societies and organizations thought of the Force as a non-corporeal sentient entity that might be capable of intelligent thought, while others simply considered it something that could be manipulated and used as though it were a tool.

In the Star Wars universe, there is actual hard evidence of the existence of the force. Belief in it does not require the same type of faith as does belief in God. So it might be reasonable to call the Jedi & the Sith atheist religious orders, as they have no actual God and merely work with what appears to be a type of natural force -- regardless of its metaphysical nature -- that exists in their universe.

But what about people in our universe who believe in the Jedi religion? Since no hard evidence of the force exists here in our world, people claiming that a fictional force has actual reality appear to be using faith to create their own sort of deity. A religion based on faith in the unseen sounds quite a bit like other religions, even though the force is not a typical deity.  In my opinion they are not atheists and have been wrongly classified. 

Why hasn't more attention been focused on this critical question for our times?