My favorite part of the series was the Anakin development. The animated series shows why everyone revered him but slowly amplified his dark side tendencies.
Animated Anakin is swaggering and charismatic but still temperamental and frustrating.
You feel why he’s The Chosen One and why the Jedi are hesitant to fully believe.
Idolatry isn’t just about what you love, it’s about what you hate. When you organize your life around something you despise, you elevate that idol to a level of counter-worship. Instead of trying to please the idol, you make offerings to harm it.
In a Christian context, idolatry is about elevating anything or anyone beyond their actual value. When you care too much, give too much, obsess too much or fear too much, that’s an object of worship. Or in this case, counter-worship.
You don’t have to consider it at the same level as God for something to be an idol. It just has to take an outsized portion of your resources: time, energy, money, focus, creativity...
There is no such thing as accidental oppression. It doesn’t just materialize out of thin air. Oppression is zero-sum. Some are made to lose so others are able to gain.
This is part of why oppression is so offensive to God. God is infinite and so is His justice. Justice is not zero sum. There is enough for all.
And I’ve seen this principle play out over and over and over again among followers of Jesus.
The name comes from a war story my Dad told me. He was drafted into the Army and served in Vietnam as an Explosives Expert. He has some absolutely horrifying stories, but this one is actually a great illustration.
One day I asked him how he became an explosives expert. As a kid, that seemed like a really cool job. He didn’t explain the process, just told the story.