Lit Force Atheists?

BTW, I'm almost positive that the your Avatar's name, Starkeiller, pronounced phonetically means "celebrity wild boar" in German.

(Keiler = wild boar or feral swine in German, and I'm pretty sure that Keiller and Keiler would be pronounced the same way in German.)

 

According to the German Wikipedia, a "Keiler" is "ein männliches Wildschwein", so yeah, I'm a celebrity in the wild boar community. Who knew? But it says "Keiler" could also be an insanely mean-looking mine-flail tank, so I'm gonna go with that.

Blahblah Force blahblah atheists blahblah Sith blahblah Jedi.

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On topic, see?

 

It's been done.

 

I don't think the force promised to rescue everyone from everything. Even God did not promise us that here on earth

 

Though there is a good side and a bad side.

 

I see the Ones as more like Tolkien's Valar. The Celestials are ethereal beings that emerged from the Force, similar to the Ainur being angelic beings created by Eru Illuvatar; the Ones are embodied Celestials as the Valar and Maiar are embodied Ainur that manage Middle Earth.

 

I think Han started off as one. Though I'm not sure what this thoughts were by the end of the OT. But now, that he is married to a Jedi, has Jedi kids, I thing he accepts it.

 

Weren't they, at least originally, an alien race that emerged the same way other races did?

 

The impression I got from Apocalypse and the tale the Killiks wove, was that the Celestials were not material beings, not embodied. While the Ones were Celestials that became embodied. I'd have to pull up the books on my Kindle to give relevant quotes, because I highlighted them.

 

The impression I got from both Apocalypse and the Mortis episodes was that the Celestials/Ones are your basic science fiction hyper-advanced aliens disguised by Star Wars-appropriate Force rhetoric. They seem to be less advanced than the Monolith Makers of 2001.

"The Ones are what the Celestials become" is the quote I recall.

 

Also, this is supposed to be a reference to the Celestials, for whatever it's worth:

 

So what you're saying is the Celestials became Ones to Balance the Force and stop the Celestials who had become Ones and were trying to Balance the Force from causing an imbalance by becoming Ones. Makes sense to me.

 

Well, I'm not going to have time to pull up the relevant passages from Apocalypse until this weekend, but I stand by what I said. As I recall, the Killik murals depicting the Ones also depicted their emergence from the Celestials... and it was them embodying out of the ether.

 

I'd like to quote bits and pieces from the prologue of Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey, wherein the story of the Monolith Builders (actually given a name in that novel: the Firstborn) is recounted. It could very well apply to the Celestials, and indeed describe their transformation into the Ones. My point being, that this is classic science fiction stuff we're dealing here, and we need not import purely fantastical elements and traditional "old-style" deities into the Star Wars mythos to account for the Celestials/Ones.

[Note that emphasis is mine]

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Call them the Firstborn. Though they were not remotely human, they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deeps of space, they felt awe, and wonder -- and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they began to seek for fellowship among the stars.
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In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. [...] And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.
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And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
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[...] They were patient, but they were not yet immortal. There was so much to do in this universe of a hundred billion suns. [...] The tides of civilization ebbed and flowed across the Galaxy. Strange and beautiful and terrible empires rose and fell, and passed on their knowledge to their successors.
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And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving towards new goals. [...] As as soon their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and gemstone. In these, they roamed the Galaxy. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.
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But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light.
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Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves. [...] Now they were Lords of the Galaxy, and could rove at will among the stars, or sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. Though they were freed at last from the tyranny of matter, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea. And their marvelous instruments still continued to function, watching over the experiments started so many ages ago.
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The story the Killiks tell evokes the opposite transformation though. The Celestials are energy beings, and the Ones emerge from them and become embodied. It's much more Ainur--->Valar than it is the Firstborn-->Lords of the Galaxy.

Apocalypse:

Thuruht shivered her antennae. "Celestials are in the Force," she said. "The Ones are what Celestials become."

 

Let's compromise and say it's "Firstborn --> Lords of the Galaxy = Ainur --> Valar".

There And Back Again: A Celestial's Tale

 

Ah, but see, let's imagine for a moment that Clarke is describing the Celestials. By storing knowledge in the structure of space itself, they would transform into manifestations of the Force, because that is what's keeping the structure of space together in the Star Wars universe. By letting go of their machine bodies and making the universe itself their home, the Celestials would be in the Force. And by doing this, they would inevitably transform into the Ones. Just as the Killiks "remember".

 

Except that we have no evidence for that. Going strictly off textual readings, they are beings of the Force. I mean, the Killiks even describe the Ones as beings of the Force just... given form. Even they aren't really material beings. The implication there is still that Mortis wasn't even necessarily on the physical plane. No one saw the monolith but Obi-Wan, Anakin and Ahsoka... and they were supposedly in the same location in space as the fleet when they first saw the monolith.

 

OK. They aren't material beings, Mortis is not on the physical plane (I assume we are both talking about the exterior rhomboid structure, as all that happens in the interior is most assuredly not physical in nature), and they are "beings of the Force given form" (though note that such a description applies to all kinds of creatures in the Star Wars universe, from womp rats to Luke Skywalker and the great Leviathor). And again I ask: how is it that they're anything than what they were supposed to be from the beginning? Why do they have to be something... else? What exactly? And why? How are they any different from the aliens in Carl Sagan's Contact? In fact, as far as superaliens go, Stephen Baxter's Xeelee and the Q from Star Trek would have the Celestials for breakfast.

It happens all the time. An adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's emblematic phrase:

to:​

 

To be fair, use of the Dark Side in the form of voodoo "magic" is already present in SW (TCW):


Dathomir witches are also known to use magic "rituals" and "curses" by tapping into the Force.

 

Why the fear of the mythological in Star Wars, I ask? Mythology is kind of the backbone of the whole she-bang.

GL's intent behind the Ones was always mythological rather than strict sci-fi. Moreover, the sci-fi notion of "sufficiently advanced aliens" is derived from the whole paradigm of angels/gods. What indication is there that the Celestials are simply a technologically advanced alien species rather than a group of ethereal beings that exist primarily as consciousness in the Force that have more akin to the Ainur and Valar, than to beings that are technologically advanced? Clearly, in order for the Ones to be merged into the Celestials Troy Denning has had to somewhat alter what may have been his initial intention for the Celestials/Architects. The biggest info dump we have ever had for these beings is in Apocalypse, and it very much implies a more mythological background than it does Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi. Star Wars has never been that in the first place.

 

Though it didn't make it into the Essential Guide to Warfare, there was supposed to have been an ancient war between the Celestials and the Rakata.

 

There is no difference between "ethereal beings that exist primarily as consciousness in the Force" and "sufficiently advanced aliens". At the very least, the two are definitely not mutually exclusive. I didn't say that they are not "ethereal beings that exist primarily as consciousness in the Force", merely that "ethereal beings that exist primarily as consciousness in the Force" MUST come from someplace, and that all official sources say the Celestials are sufficiently advanced aliens, so that is where they must have come from. Ergo, the Celestials are "sufficiently advanced aliens that are ethereal and exist primarily as consciousness in the Force".

I simply demand of all fiction to make some sort of sense within the rules it has established, and in the vast majority of all fiction, to sidestep the answers by saying that "mythology" or "magic" doesn't have to make sense is nothing but an excuse for sloppy writing.

Star Wars has spaceships and round planets, stars made of gas, gravity, etc. -- everything appears to be much as it is in reality. For me to accept something completely irrational, it would have to be a flat earth universe where satellites are gigantic fruits and the stars are lamps hung on the tapestry of the sky -- such as Tolkien's universe, yes, a fundamentally irrational universe where the Roman Catholic god presides over some bizzaro version of Anglo-Saxon mythology, and the Earth is flat. The fact that Star Wars respects the very basics of reality forces me to interpret it in terms that make some sort of sense in reality.