So how does this work? Do the jedi go to people's houses and take their babies if they have enough force potential even if the parents says no? i remember a holonet news article about a mom who got separated from her baby and the jedi found him and took him, she found out they had her baby and she wanted it back, but they refused to give it back.
In that situation, there was an earthquake and the Jedi assumed that the mother was dead. She showed up very much alive six months later. Not your normal Jedi adoption. I'm not sure where the "baby stealing" theory comes from. Every piece of evidence we've seen, including TPM, has indicated that the parents had a choice and would respect a response of "no."
Yep. I think its explicitly said that parents can say no somewhere in the EU. Though I could be wrong.
Baby-stealing is pretty much Anti-Jediism. It's about as real, for example, as [insert ethnicity] doing [insert atrocity]. The Jude Watson books have a politician whose son was refused and ended up going mad because he couldn't control his visions.
jacktherack, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. The Jedi were good people. When we first met them, the Jedi Order was already a great society. But they were amazed how strongly the Force was with younglings. They took it upon themselves to train children as Jedi. They thought they could raise them as well as family. They were wrong.
The implications of TPM notwithstanding, no one directly addressed the baby-stealing thing until Baby Ludi in HNN--which was pre-AotC, and was the work of Pablo and Paul Ens. The story was intended to introduce the beginnings of anti-Jedi sentiment in the OR, but never really got directly followed up.
In general, the Jedi Knight doesn't handle it very well. * You don't get take-backs. Which, in RL adoptions, there have been plenty of challenges. * The Jedi are very intimidating to regular people. * The whole "raised from birth to be a Jedi" thing is easy to cast aspersions on. * The Jedi emphasize the dangers perhaps to a fault.
There's plenty to back up both perspectives on it, but there's no easy "right" answer. Which is why it's actually one of the things I love about the prequel era.
The Jedi Apprentice series touches on this very briefly at points, if I recall correctly. Didn't really get into it the way HNN did, though.
It's strange -- the sources are unclear. Some suggest the Jedi simply would not tolerate Force sensitives outside the order, and consequently families would have no choice. However, that seems to fly in the face of some other sources -- most glaringly, TPM -- where Jedi would refuse to train some potentials.
yeah Jedi don't steal babies. i suspect there are actually a ton of misconceptions about Jedi recruitment practices and motivations that aren't much addressed either IU or IRL.
I'll never forget the exact moment I realized YDR was some next-level ****... Young Dooku: "I wonder, sometimes, if that is what drives us, that first abandonment" Actully, here's the entire line, because it's that good:
I've often wondered if that story was inspired by the Elian Gonzales case, which would've been pretty fresh in people's memory around the time of AOTC's release.
Unless every Jedi was the child of a mother who drowned trying to escape an oppressive government, the comparison doesn't even come close to holding water.
From what I understand: No - because the Jedi require parental consent (though i think Republic Law doesn't) ...and Yes - because they can do some underhanded thing to get consent - like tell a terrified mother in a warzone that her baby would probably be trapped in said battle unless he was given to the jedi, so he could be moved up the piroity lists to evacuate. Or defining parental consent as "the father says ok and the mother isn't around to say no (on a business trip), even though she had made her objections very clear previously."
The Jedi Order contains a minute fraction of all Force sensitives in the galaxy. This is mathematically established directly in canon - the Lost Tribe of the Sith, representing on single planet, contained 'tens of thousands' of Sith, making it larger than the Jedi Order as a whole circa the clone wars. Given this exclusivity there is simply no reason for the Jedi Order to even recruit infants against the will of their parents during the course of normal operations. Now, there is almost certainly a legal circumstance to deal with situations outside the normal. It seems likely that the Jedi Order did possess the legal right to take in any Force sensitive child if they felt it necessary. Considering that a Force sensitive child spontaneously manifesting their powers could represent a danger to themselves and others that only the Jedi were considered reliable to restrain this is not as unreasonable as it sounds. It does, however, mean the Old Republic invested a massive level of trust in the Jedi Order, but this would hardly be the only area where they did that.
this still dousn't explain how they find them? do they go to people's houses take their midichlorian count and then if they are force sensitive ask if they can take their child? i don't think that would be very effective considering the billions of people living on coruscant. how do they find most of them?
