Orson Scott Card on Star Wars

Science Fiction and sometime Comic Book writer, Orson Scott Card has some opinions about the Jedi and their religion: Via Bendis.

As a religion, the Force is just the sort of thing you'd expect a liberal-minded teenage kid to invent. There's no God and there are no rules other than a vague insistence on unselfishness and oath-keeping. Power comes from the sum of all life in the universe, and it is manichaean, not Christian and evil is simply another way of using the Force. Only not as nice.

. . .

Revenge of the Sith gives us our first chance to see the Jedi council as anything more than an incredibly boring business conference that we were forced to attend between action scenes. Not as if the Jedi masters discussed ideas - it was still a business meeting, in which they told each other obvious things and then made decisions by a sort of instant consensus that is never achieved in the real world except in really scary dictatorships. Clearly they were modeled after an adolescent view of the Knights of the Round Table.

. . .

The Jedi may claim to be in favor of democracy, but in fact they function as a ruling elite, making their decisions among themselves. They occasionally submit to the authority of the legislature, and they seem to respect the rule of law, though whose law it's hard to say. By and large, however, they decide among themselves what they're going to do and when it's OK to break the law and defy the civilian authority.

They are, in fact, utterly anti-democratic, like a militia that owes nothing to civilian authority. Eventually there's going to be a coup.