"Far more than we have been"- Jedi and the Galactic Alliance

Well, look at Kar Vastor. Untrained regular schmuck, ends up as a super-dangerous badass. No one but a Jedi could have taken him down. That's why you need Jedi. There have to be trained Force users with discipline and self-control. Sure, you run the risk of trained Force users without discipline, but you can defeat them and the untrained Force users without discipline. It's like the difference between having a trained military and relying on an armed populace to keep order -- sure, a military could lead a coup, but it's a necessary institution, and you just have to minimize the chances of something going wrong.

 

The Jedi started their training from somewhere. Sure, it was the sum of many hundreds of years of training, but if some secret sect started from scratch, it it'd have yielded the same thing in time. The point being is that the Force exists, and regardless, some Force users will appear, be it benevolent or malevolent, this Jedi vs Sith nonsense will never end. Proof of this is the fact that the Jedi are but one of the most influential of the Force user sects. We have the Fallansi and those monks. There will be no end.

 

Weren't the Jedi originally scientists studying the Force before they became a religion? And that it took hundreds of years of the combined efforts of the best minds of almost every planet in the Republic to even begin grasping a tiny understanding of the Force?

I somehow doubt a secret society started but one person could manage that.

 

They were not. Go and read the New Essential Chronology. They were mystics/monks from the start.

 

The start of what? The Order or the Republic?

 

The Order could trace its roots first to Typhon where the Force users of Typhon established the Jedi as a society of monastic warriors that obeyed the precepts of harmony, knowledge, serenity and peace. This society was formed after a bloody war against Force users who wanted to wield the Force for personal power.

This society spread itself across the galaxy and the core of their philosophy took form on Ossus, where the notion that the Force had a yin and yang, or rather, light and dark. The Jedi then faced their first test against the Legions of Lattow. This was but the first of many schisms. The Schism that spawned the Sith occurred 7000 years before the Battle of Yavin.

A further case to point would be in fact the Rakata, who could wield the Force before a plague stripped it from them. They used the Force for power. So long as the Force exists, there will be beings who could use the Force and there will be those who choose to wield it over others in their lusts of power.